When I was in high school, my family moved to a town approximately 10 minutes away from the Wisconsin border. I called it my father’s “Norman Rockwell phase” because of the lack of racial diversity in much of the area. I was aware of a pretty large city just about an hour north, which was home to a historic Black community and many recent Chicago transplants who moved north to escape some of the urban poverty and blight in the major city. However, Milwaukee in many ways mirrored Chicago (or was worse) when assessing neighborhood segregation, incarceration rates, home foreclosures, underperforming schools and a Black community that was in many ways forgotten by the state and the country as a whole.
Therefore, the recent uprisings in Milwaukee did not come as a shock to me, when people took to the streets to protest their frustrations. To recap, 23-year-old Sylville Smith was shot approximately 20 seconds after a traffic stop. Yet another Black man killed this summer by the police. Officers indicate that the “suspect” had a firearm, but here is the rub. Just like Ohio (Tamir Rice had a toy gun) and Louisiana (Alton Sterling may or may not have had a gun in his pocket), Wisconsin is an open carry state. That means it is permissible by state law to carry a firearm. So why is fleeing from the police and/or carrying a firearm punishable by death?
Watching the events unfold in Milwaukee made me think of my first week in graduate school, when I told a senior scholar I wanted to study and write about cities. Why? Because cities are ideal places to study race, inequality, history, housing, segregation, transportation (or lack thereof) and environmental issues such as asthma, lead poisoning, water quality and malnutrition. His response to me was swift and blunt: “Cities are dead.”
I can only conjecture that his response had to do with the fact that whites and the middle class had largely fled cities in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the middle class now want their cities back, which breeds much of the frustration we currently witness. Cities such as Milwaukee have been slowly starved by state legislatures and governors. And if the beliefs and behavior of Republican Governor Scott Walker is a microcosm of how cities have been treated across the country over the past few decades, the uprisings and “unrest” we currently witness in Milwaukee goes much deeper than the needless killing of Smith.
If we care about cities, all cities, we must look at the events in Milwaukee and see ourselves in the pain and frustration of the people who have been neglected, hyper policed, underserved and ultimately let down by the state and federal governments. The images of a burning gas station seem to be the images on which most media outlets have decided to fix their gaze. I ask that we turn our point of view to the people who are literally crying out for help. If we cannot see ourselves in the residents of Milwaukee, we are not looking closely enough or not looking at all.
Christina Greer, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Fordham University and the author of “Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream.” You can find her on Twitter @Dr_CMGreer.