The Journey Home
When Shawn Dove of the Open Society Campaign for Black Male Achievement invited me to attend the campaign’s Mid-Western Regional Gathering in Milwaukee recently, I hesitated, not because of my lack of support for the campaign but because of the memories I wanted to leave behind. Nonetheless, the opportunity to spend a day of discussion with the grassroots organizers, intellectuals, and philanthropic partners fighting to improve the lives of black men and boys proved too tantalizing to pass up.
As a black boy growing up in Milwaukee, I became familiar with rigid racial divisions and discrimination at an early age. Although strong family values and community ties created an ideal environment to raise a family in Milwaukee, beneath the surface of idyllic surroundings, black folks were generally relegated to the margins of the city’s political establishment, lived in highly segregated neighborhoods and generally faced numerous barriers to fully realizing the American dream.
Over 20 years ago, before hip hop became a cultural commodity, and long before anyone coined the phrase "school-to-prison pipeline," my mother packed our family’s belongings and we moved to California to escape Milwaukee’s peculiar brand of racial discrimination. Despite my feelings about the past, I accepted Shawn’s offer. I decided it was time to return to my hometown after years of absence.
The night before the conference, I checked into my hotel in downtown Milwaukee and called a longtime friend who lived there to catch up. We talked about our childhood and old friends but what I wanted to learn about the most was how the city had changed since I left. What I learned shocked me. Instead of making great progress, the African-American community seemed to be facing a number of obstacles, and maybe by some socio-economic indicators, even worse than when I left.
My friend told me about a recent study, The Crisis Deepens: Black Male Joblessness in Milwaukee [download PDF], by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development, which put the joblessness rate for black men in Milwaukee over 50 percent in 2009. The black male jobless rate in Milwaukee is now over double what it was in 1970. Moreover, the same study concluded that Milwaukee had the second worst black male joblessness rate among large metropolitan areas across the country in 2009.
What shocked me even more was what I saw on the evening news that night. Apparently, African-American students at a University of Wisconsin campus were victims of a hate crime—the doors of their dorm rooms had been plastered with racial epithets—the same ones that I heard all too often as a boy when I crossed the city’s rigidly drawn neighborhood boundaries. I felt that I had walked into the past.
The next day, what I learned during the conference surprised me. I listened to experts from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity demonstrate through compelling research how lack of opportunity is clearly still connected to the persistent problem of racial segregation in America’s major cities. Yet, I was inspired as I learned about the work of civic leaders, researchers, and advocates who have dedicated their lives to improving the chances of success for black men and boys in the Midwest.
By the end of the day, my interaction in a small group workshop with conference participants influenced me the most. At first, the group was clearly divided with adults sitting on one side of the room and youth on the other. The generational divide was apparent. There was a difference in perspective about how black men and young adults should assume responsibility for their futures.
However, as we shared our experiences, I began to see that the differences only existed because some of us had not taken enough time before to listen. The act of sharing of perspectives and even disagreeing was empowering because it forced us to forge a common understanding of what it would take to solve some of the persistent challenges in African-American communities.
I left that day reminded that while there were still many challenges facing black men and boys in Milwaukee, and other cities in America, we were truly resilient and up to the task of forging a destiny full of hope. I was glad that I made the journey back home.
Source: The Open Society Foundation
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