I was half way through Julius Lester’s heart wrenching book, ‘To Be A Slave,’ last week, when I received an email with the recent study by UW-Milwaukee researcher Marc Levine on the status of African Americans in Milwaukee.
In some respects, I was glad for the temporary reprieve from the book because Lester’s painful collection of African ‘slave’ narratives was an excruciatingly painful experience.
Adding to my morbid mindset was the fact that the week before I finished a book entitled ‘Don’t Call Them Slaves.’
Both books detailed the long-term agenda of slave owners and White Supremacists to create a permanent inferiority complex in African Americans, while entrenching a system of apartheid as the foundation of the American culture.
Five minutes into reading Levine’s eye-opening report seemed to crystalize that reality, establishing a multi-centennial yoke of oppression dating back to the arrival of ‘African captives’ in America on August 20, 1619.
If Levine’s report is a template for how far Black Americans have traveled outside the shadow of slavery since the 13th amendment, we either need a new set of shoes, or pray for rain.
In other words, America’s evil past and that peculiar institution has been replaced by a system of apartheid that has kept our tribe in a state of neo-slavery.
Levine’s report–The State of Black Milwaukee in National Perspective: Racial Inequality in the Nation’s 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas’–paints a pejorative and daunting portrait of Black life under apartheid described as somebody named Jim Crow.
And for you who say I use the term ‘apartheid’ inappropriately or excessively, this time I took it directly out of Levine’s report, which identified Milwaukee as the worse of the worse of the nation’s 50 largest cities.
Sadly, that’s not a surprise to all who have pleaded with politicians and pastors, philanthropists and pimps for decades to intercede, to put into place remedies to equalize the playing field. For the most part, we have been spitting into a strong wind.
Levine’s study looks at how African Americans in the nation’s 50 largest cities fare in the areas of housing, poverty and ‘intergenerational economic mobility.’
He also looks at employment, income, mass incarceration, health care outcomes, educational attainment and racial composition of private sector economic decision makers.
In just about every indicator, Milwaukee ranked dead (no pun intended) last, or near the bottom.
Noted Levine: “Our particular emphasis is on Milwaukee, which we argue represents the archetype of modern day metropolitan racial apartheid and inequality.”
He continued: “And our findings are devastating: on virtually all key measures of Black community well-being, Milwaukee ranks at or near the bottom when ranked against other large metropolitan areas.”
Moreover, “when we examine historical trends in some key areas, the results are equally grim: Black Milwaukee is generally worse off today than it was 40 or 50 years ago.”
Can you spell apartheid? Or should the question be, ‘how far have we really advanced under the cloud Massa Jim Crow?
Among the report’s most alarming findings:
- Desegregation has remained an allusive goal, if ever it actually was, in Milwaukee, with the city remaining the most segregated city in the United States.
That status is enhanced by the low percentage of African Americans living in Milwaukee area suburbs, identified in the report as the nation’s lowest rate of Black suburbanization.
- Black household income has declined by “an astonishing 30% since 1979. “Adjusted for metro area cost of living differences, Milwaukee has the lowest Black median household income of any of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas.
“The income of the median Black household in Milwaukee is only 42% of a White (non-Hispanic) household, the biggest racial disparity in the country,” the report proclaimed.
It’s a small surprise, therefore, that the Black poverty rate in Milwaukee—33.4%—is the highest among the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, and almost five times the White rate.
* Milwaukee’s Black community is exceptionally impoverished. Black median household income in Milwaukee, adjusted for inflation, has declined by an astonishing 30% since 1979.
- A Black child born in the 1970s and early 1980s would have an income that was about 11% lower than his counterpart living in Baltimore, and over 40% less than his counterpart born in Boston.
Moreover, the report continued, the ability of low-income Black Milwaukee youth to climb the economic ladder is among the most truncated in the country
“The racial gap in the ability of low-income youth to climb the economic ladder is wider in Milwaukee than all but three other metro areas (Pittsburgh, New York and Chicago).
A child born into a low-income Black household in Milwaukee has estimated young adult income 80% lower than his/her white counterpart.”
- The poverty and unemployment rate directly contribute to Milwaukee having the second-lowest Black homeownership rate among the nation’s largest metropolitan areas (27.2%). Only Minneapolis’ is lower.
- Only two-thirds of Black males between the ages of 25-54 (prime working-age adults) were employed in Milwaukee in 2016-18, the third lowest rate among large metros.
“The Black-white gap in male employment rates in Milwaukee is the second largest in the country (only Buffalo’s is higher).”
- While education clearly matters for Black males in securing employment –a Black college graduate in Milwaukee is almost four times as likely as a Black high school dropout to be employed—race also strongly affects the labor market.
A White high school dropout is over twice as likely to be employed in Milwaukee as a Black dropout; and white high school dropouts post a higher employment rate than Black high school graduates in Milwaukee.
- The median annual earnings for Black male and female workers in Milwaukee, even adjusted to consider Milwaukee’s relatively low cost of living, nonetheless are still among the lowest for African Americans in the nation’s large metros. I
in addition, the median African American male worker in Milwaukee makes only 59.7% of a White worker’s earnings, the worst racial disparity in the U.S. Only 17.4% of Black males, and only 14.6% of Black females in Milwaukee make more than $40,000 a year (compared to 46.3% of white males).
- Black Milwaukeeans are severely underrepresented in management occupations in Milwaukee in proportion to their weight in the labor force.
African Americans hold management jobs at only two-fifths of their presence in overall employment in Milwaukee, the lowest ratio in the country. The rate for African Americans in top-executive positions in Milwaukee is even lower.
- A majority of Milwaukee’s school system is hypersegregated. Black students in metro Milwaukee are as likely to attend an intensely segregated school-–a school in which enrollment is over 90% minorities as they were in 1965.
Over 72% of Black Milwaukee schoolchildren attend hypersegregated schools, the highest rate in the country, and significantly higher than the percentage 30 years ago.
“Moreover, 35% of Milwaukee’s Black schoolchildren today attend so-called “apartheid schools” (schools with over 90% minority enrollment).
- Milwaukee registers the third-highest rate of Black incarceration in state prisons among the 50 largest metro areas in the US (measured by Black incarceration rates in the central county of the metro area).
The Black prison incarceration rate in Milwaukee is 10-times the White rate.
- In Milwaukee, Black infant mortality rates, teen pregnancy rates, and low birthweight babies’ rates rank among the worst for Black communities in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas.
“Moreover, when we examine historical trends in some key areas, the results are equally grim: Black Milwaukee is generally worse off today than it was 40 or 50 years ago,” Levine revealed.
“Real household income for Black Milwaukeeans has declined by 30 over the past four decades; the Black poverty rate is higher than it was in 1970 (though lower than its peak in 1990); Black male employment rates have plummeted since 1970 (though had improved, at least through 2018, since the Great Recession). “
The Black incarceration rate in Milwaukee is over two and a half times as high as it was 25 years ago and 10 times higher than the White rate (though it is down from its peak in 2003), he said.
The region’s schools are as segregated as they were 50 years ago (and significantly more than 30 years ago), and residential racial segregation is higher in Milwaukee than any of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas (though slightly lower than it measured 40 years ago).
Hispanic households have fallen by 2.3 percent during that same period).
In 1979, annual income in the median Black household in Milwaukee was 58.3% of a median white household; by 2018, that figure had fallen to only 42.0%.
Even more striking is how this racial income gap has grown much wider in Milwaukee than in the nation as a whole.
In 1979, the ratio of Black to White household income was about the same in Milwaukee as in the U.S. (58.3% in Milwaukee versus 57.8% in the U.S.).
Today, while Black median household income is only 42% of White income in Milwaukee, it is 60.9% of White income nationally (although the Black percentage has declined nationally as well since 1999, but by less than Milwaukee), the report noted.
What is most alarming about the report is that it was it was conducted before the pandemic shut down America, which means our plight has probably worsened since spring.
More outrageous is that none of the powers that be, particularly political entities, will pay heed to these findings any more than they did to reports showing Milwaukee leading the nation in seven negative social indicators.
A couple of months ago, I posed the question of whether the Democratic Convention goers—or the party itself– would address the myriad of problems facing its most loyal voters during their four-day love fest.
Even though it was an abbreviated convention, not a word was said about the Black poverty, housing or incarceration rates.
There was plenty of symbolic gestures about ‘Black Lives Mattering,’ but nothing of substance to prove we do; no platform to equalize the playing field, or to criminalize systemic racism.
Instead, I expect politicians and the valets of white knights to tell me to be quiet—again—and to stop hanging our dirty laundry out in public before the election. They will blame the sense of hopelessness and loss of faith of many Black voters on me because I consistently draw attention to these nasty white drawers being hung on lines for the world to see.
Well, you can’t wash away apartheid with symbolic slogans and if they are tired of me speaking truth to power, maybe they should buy a new washing machine instead of trying to clean our dirty drawers with political rhetoric.
Hotep.
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