Here & Now

Marc Levine on the State of Black Milwaukee

Frederica Freyberg:

No metropolitan area today ranks as consistently poorly across the board on indicators of black community well-being as does Milwaukee. That quote from a new study from the Center for Economic Development out of UW-Milwaukee, which compared Black communities in the nation’s 50 largest metro areas. This report comes at a time, according to its authors, of national reckoning about racial injustice, when data can drive change. Founding Director of the Center and Professor Emeritus Marc Levine joined us late this week from Milwaukee. Professor Levine, thank you very much for joining us.

Marc Levine:

Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, so every metric you looked at saw Milwaukee really at the bottom of the pack for Black people’s well-being, including these: still the nation’s most segregated city. Black poverty the highest among 50 metros. Worst racial disparity of worker earnings. Most black school children in hyper-segregated schools. And third nationally for prison incarceration rates for Black men. You say that Milwaukee, “represents the archetype of modern day metropolitan racial apartheid and inequality.” And yet why do we need yet another study telling us this?

Marc Levine:

I think the utility of doing a study like this is to get the full scope of the extent of racial inequality in Milwaukee, and indeed across the country, the benchmark where we stand. To see also whether things have gotten better in certain areas. So what this study did was not only benchmark Milwaukee against the largest 50 metropolitan areas in the country on a whole series of indicators, as you mentioned, of racial inequality, but also to see how things have evolved on many of those indicators over the past 40 and 50 years, wherever we could get the data to look at that. And I think the most distressing and the devastating part of the study was not only to see how consistently across the board Milwaukee ranked toward the bottom, either last or next to last on a slew of indicators and in the bottom ten on virtually all of them, but on how many of those indicators things are demonstrably worse than they were 30, 40 and 50 years ago. I’ll just give one example. There are so many but to me this is a key one. Household income, sort of a key metric on the well-being of the community. Black household income, median income, that is, from the middle of the distribution, for Black households in Milwaukee has fallen by 30% when we adjust for inflation over the last 40 years, since 1979. That’s the largest decrease in the country. But more to the point, just looking at it without even looking in comparative terms, just looking at a Black household and say you’re 30% poorer than you were 40 years ago and you weren’t all that rich 40 years ago. That, to me, is an extraordinary statement and I think a lot of these other indicators feed off of, unfortunately, that bad result.

Frederica Freyberg:

In fact, that’s what I was going to ask you. All of the other indicators and metrics that you measured feed into that income disparity.

Marc Levine:

I think so. I think that’s the key issue that we’ve got the most impoverished African-American community in the country and it’s a community that has become increasingly impoverished. It, I think, had somewhat of an improvement in the 1990s with the great economic boom during that era. The recession of 2010 wiped all that out. And, sadly, since the recession, real household income has continued to decline for Blacks in Milwaukee and the data that’s in this study is before the COVID depression. So imagine how bad things are starting to look now in 2020.

Frederica Freyberg:

It’s devastating, as you say. But what is your kind of clarion call to policymakers, indeed Wisconsin really as a whole, as to what should be done.

Marc Levine:

I think for many years, frankly, as you point out, there have been study after study. My center, other centers have done many studies on these issues. But there has been — folks might deny it, but there has been a kind of denial about this in policy-making circles. Either saying, well, the numbers aren’t that bad or things are getting better or every place is having these difficulties. There’s nothing unique about here. In fact, there are things unique about Milwaukee in the depth of these problems. And so I think, I hope now that we’re beyond that denial, that policymakers understand that we need to change things, I think the mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement has certainly brought those issues to the forefront and I think we need to think very clearly about, I think I refer to it in the study, a phrase that I borrowed called “rewriting the racial rules of the community.” Those institutional arrangements, those public policies that continue to promote racial injustice in the community. And that goes beyond simply things that we can all point to: ending discrimination in housing, ending discrimination in employment, improving, obviously, police practices. But even the larger picture of rethinking how we do economic development. My friends at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy in Madison have talked for years about the state pursuing the low road approach to economic development. That low road approach means low wages. It means not particularly helpful policies for workers to organize for better wages. And then you see Black earnings at the bottom of the scale, as they are today, and that translates then into low incomes and translates into high poverty rates. So I think we need to rethink that low road as well in the general economic development sense and pursue what folks call the “high road strategy,” which means raising people’s wages and creating better jobs.

Frederica Freyberg:

With less than a minute left here, as you say, with this Black Lives Matter mobilization, is now the right time to rewrite a bold set of these inclusionary rules? Is the time now?

Marc Levine:

Absolutely. I refer to a lot of these trends in the study as having been a stealth depression in Black Milwaukee. Something that was always there, but it was stealth. We didn’t talk about it. I think it’s pretty clear even without this study, but I think this study makes it crystal clear, that we’re now clearly in an unstealth depression. It’s front and center. We see what’s out there. And I think, yes, we need to embark upon bold desegregation strategies, bold antidiscrimination strategies and rethink economic development so it promotes greater economic equality between racial groups.

Frederica Freyberg:

We leave it there. Professor Marc Levine, thanks very much and thanks for your work.

Marc Levine:

Thank you very much for having me. Much appreciate it.