There is something seriously wrong here.  The latest NAACP report on the state of Black Milwaukee is a yawner.  Same old stuff.  Same old disparities.  Maybe a little worse but, hey, it is what it is.  What’s happened  is that we have gotten used to having leprosy.

Yes, that’s just what’s happened in our lovely city.  We are years beyond caring about the disfigurement, the isolation, and the pain.  It’s enough, isn’t it, that we still have missionaries willing to visit the leper colony and minister to the people we don’t want to see on Main Street.  Keep us safe from contagion but still do the right thing.

The NAACP report includes interesting little facts like:

• African American students in MPS have a graduation rate of around 40%.
• Wisconsin’s African American incarceration rate is 11 times greater than whites.
• Half of African American males of working age (16-65) are unemployed.

More info here in Eugene Kane’s column in the Milwakee Journal Sentinel, “Latest snapshot of black Milwaukee makes the heart sink,” at http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/124547149.html

This isn’t the first time the NAACP has issued a state of Black Milwaukee report.  The first one I saw was in 1987; we used some of the findings to include in a demographic analysis of poverty in Milwaukee completed for the Social Development Commission.  We thought the news that African American male unemployment was 25.9% and the poverty rate was 29.0% would just stop traffic on Wisconsin Avenue.  When policymakers got that information, we thought (wearing our little candy striper uniforms with the “I may look 16 but I’m still really naive” sashes) they will for sure deal with the obvious racism, disparity, and injustice of it all.

Maybe it’s like the frog in the boiling water.  You know, you put a live frog in boiling water and he freaks out….but…..you put a live frog in cold water and gradually turn up the heat and he just floats into a state of being fully cooked.

I guess my question is this — HOW DID THIS GET TO BE OK?   How did we get so comfortable with tens of thousands of young African American men not having a prayer of a decent economic, social or family life?  Who’s mad about this?  Who’s grieving?

There is occasionally a great, impressive community ‘raring up’ of indignation and outrage about a pressing issue.  United Way’s anti-teen pregnancy campaign, especially the latest iteration that goes directly to the heart of the awful phenomenon of young girls getting suckered into sex with older men is an example of a group that decided, “This is completely f**ked up and we’re going to change it.”  Of course, United Way wouldn’t talk like that.  But I am.

This situation with African American males is a DISASTER and it has implications that reach into the next many generations.  We see that frog bobbing around in the simmering water — that’s us.  That’s what complacency has brought us.  We’ve been warned.  We can never say this took us by surprise.

One of the great blessings of my professional life is that it started out in a frying pan.  I didn’t have a slow ramp-up where everyone at my job spent time training me and helping me get my bearings by giving me insignificant work I couldn’t mess up.  I started at the Social Development Commission and on the first day I was told to write a proposal for Tom Wynn. 

Not the Tom Wynn you see in this picture.  This picture (which I labeled Tom Wynn Nice) sure does look like him.  Because he was handsome and he had a smile that could quiet down a very noisy room.  The Tom Wynn I met on Day One at the Social Development Commission was the head of the National Association of Black Veterans and IVOCC (Interested Veterans of the Central City) and right from the jump, he was mad.  Mad that what he’d asked for was help getting a proposal done and what he got was me.  And mad at me because he assumed (rightly) that I was an ivory tower white girl who was against the Vietnam War and didn’t know anything about Black people.

That’s where our relationship started.  But it got better.  Over the years I did a lot of work for Tom Wynn, wrote a lot of proposals, did research on bad discharges and lack of access to services.  He would be polite and friendly, courtly even, until he sensed resistence or lack of high priority, and then he would let me have it.  And that’s where I learned a) to listen to an angry Black man without running away; and b) hold my own when I knew I was right.

Tom Wynn never really trusted me but he came to trust my skills – I guess that means he respected me.  I certainly respected him.  He was the first person I knew who lived his commitment to a cause every second of every day.  He carried the problems of Black veterans on his back and for a long time did it almost all alone.  He was fierce, that man.  Fierce and insistent and undeterred.

At his retirement party in 2004, when everyone knew that he was dying, people lined up in front of the chair where he was sitting – to shake his hand and have a few words.  When it was my turn, he gave me one of his Africa pins and we both at the same time, said “Thank you.” And he shot me one of those smiles.  Like in the picture.

So — when I drive by 35th and Wisconsin Avenue, I look up at the brand new beautiful 52-unit Thomas H. Wynn, Sr., Veterans Manor for homeless veterans, and I think – what a good, wonderful thing that is.  What a really fine salute to Mr. Wynn.  And I think how lucky I was to have him as my drill instructor.

I don’t know why but all day I’ve been thinking about Jane.  Two memories collide — the pungent, overpowering body odor wafting down the hallway that announced her arrival minutes before she appeared in my office and the matter of fact way she cinched up the tablecloth she would often wear as a skirt as she began to expound on some critical southside neighborhood issue.  When she came to Coordinating Council meetings at SDC, the other members would scoot down to the end of the long table and start lighting matches.  It was awful to witness.  She seemed not to notice, but she had to. 

She sat with pride, in her tablecloth, in her halo of foul smell, representing her neighborhood because, you see, she was elected to be an SDC Area Council member. She was there to do her job and she almost never missed a meeting.  She walked into meetings, the dirt in streaks on her bare legs, wearing slippers sometimes, sometimes shoes, an old sweater or maybe a filthy parka, her grey unwashed hair straight and pulled behind her ears. She never, ever bathed.

She was so ill.  She wanted help, but then she didn’t want help.  Mostly, she wanted to talk – about why she couldn’t stay in her house.  How it was dangerous to stay there.  How she had gone to college and was trained to be a scientist.  About her parents and how much she missed them.  About how people shunned her, how they were rude and cruel. 

One day she came to SDC asking for help getting to County Hospital.  She told a story about the bus driver not letting her get on the bus.  My boss called a cab and I rode down the elevator with Jane – all the while trying to pretend that trying not to pass out from the smell and talking to a woman wearing a tablecloth with nothing underneath were everyday things.

I never said, “Jane! You need clothes.  You need to take a bath.  You need to see a doctor. It isn’t healthy to live like this.”  I never said that because, I think, I was trying to be respectful of Jane.  I thought Jane was entitled to be treated like everyone else.  And in my mind, at that time, that meant pretending that her condition was normal. 

But was that respect or just my fear?  That if I pushed her to accept my help then I would then have to help her.  Myself.  Not my agency.  Not the case manager down the hall.  Me.

Looking back, I think I was hiding behind that notion of respect.  Because it was safer for me.  But it was a fiction.  A complete entry into unreality — where my practice of respect somehow prevented me from actually figuring out how to help her and let me give up on the idea of helping her almost instantly for fear of insulting her.  Totally nuts.

I’d like to think that if I ran into Jane today, I wouldn’t be afraid of how ill she was, how impossible it seemed to help her.  But I’m not so sure.    It’s hard to know.  Very hard.