Today my friend who is a University researcher sent me, at my request, a map of unemployment for my M.A.P.S. collection, Maps of Segregation, Poverty, Criminalization of African Americans and the Catholic Churches in North Central Milwaukee. Not to anyone’s surprise the areas in Milwaukee, North Central Milwaukee that is the most segregated, poorest and most criminalized also has the highest unemployment rate. This is the predominately African-American neighborhoods where 17 Catholic Churches have now been reduced to three. Institutional Racism runs rampant in North Central Milwaukee.

The Mayor and police chief focus on this area for policing. They do this not in the name of ‘racism’ or segregation but what they call “data driven policing.” This phrase is a code word for the “New Jim Crow, Mass incarceration in the age of color blindness.’’ Rather than attack the root cause of crime, poor education, unemployment, racism, poor schools, they attack the symptoms, the crime rates and the more crime in the neighborhood the more policing they do which means more arrests, more imprisonment and putting more people back in the same neighborhood now stigmatized and finding it more difficult to avoid crime and thus more policing and more arrest. The vicious circle goes on and on.

We can tract other indicators of cause of crime, like poor schools and we would find similar results. Nowadays, instead of plantations for slaves we have neighbors for blacks. Racism in Milwaukee is sadly alive and well, except now we seldom call it that or recognize it for what it is.

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