But there is no disputing the despair of a black community
America’s most segregated city
canada goose coats on sale MILWAUKEE On weekday afternoons, Gaulien “Gee” Smith, a prominent Milwaukee barber and businessman, walks out of the Gee’s Clippers shop on North Doctor Martin Luther King Dr., steps into his shiny new limited edition pickup truck, and begins the 20 minute drive to a parallel universe. canada goose coats on sale
canada goose clearance sale click to see caption Gaulien “Gee” Smith, owner of Gee Clippers on Milwaukee north side, straddles both sides of his segregated city, sending two of his children to schools canada goose clearance in white neighbourhoods. Canada Goose Outlet (Darren Hauck / For the Toronto Star) canada goose clearance sale
Canada Goose Jackets He heads north. Past vacant lots and vacant storefronts. Past the boundary of the city’s north side, where almost all of his customers and almost everybody else is black. He crosses into the suburb universeinsync of Glendale. The stares begin. Canada Goose Jackets
Glendale is home to an Apple Store and a Brooks Brothers and a Swarovski. And white people. A whole lot of white people. Smith, a charismatic 45 year old black man with a salt and pepper goatee, doesn’t need the probing eyes as a reminder.
Canada Goose Parka The white people are why he’s there in the first place. Canada Goose Parka
Smith makes the trip across the invisible race border to pick up two of canada goose coats on sale his sons, one from a private school and one from an elite public school. He chose the schools, in part, for their whiteness.
“I refused to ever send my child to an all black school,” he said. He has spent his whole life in Milwaukee, the most segregated place in America.
A city divided
Segregation. The word conjures images of the Deep South, a Jim Crow past of snarling police dogs and whites only toilets. In fact, it is a national problem that has long outlasted the era of openly racist law. government passed the anti discrimination Fair Housing Act. It persists under the country’s first black president. It persists in buy canada goose jacket cheap a place barely farther south than Toronto.
canada goose “It feels like sometimes, in some ways, when you come to Milwaukee, you went back in time 60 years,” said Ansaar Gandy, 29, a black bartender and demolition canada goose clearance sale worker. canada goose
canada goose factory sale Milwaukee itself is deeply divided, its road overpasses serving as racial barriers. canada goose outlet But the most startling divide is between the city and its Canada Goose Parka suburbs. canada goose factory sale
canada goose store Milwaukee, population 600,000, is poor, strongly Democratic and 40 per cent black. Its suburbs and exurbs, slightly more populous than the city and known as the “WOW counties,” are wealthy, strongly Republican and white. Exceptionally white: canada goose coats 96 canada goose per cent white and 1 per cent canada goose store black in Washington County, 95 per cent white and 2 per cent black in Ozaukee County, 94 per cent white and 1 per cent black in Waukesha County. canada goose store
Canada Goose sale “I’ve never seen anything like it in any other city. Where you can go under a bridge or canada goose black friday sale cross a freeway and it’s just completely segregated,” said Sal Blando, 24, a white Waukesha resident and a friend of Gandy. They met at the chic Middle Eastern restaurant where Gandy works, one of Milwaukee’s most diverse hangouts. “I think it’s just ingrained in us, from the time we’re born, that you’ve just gotta stick with your group of people. Which is absolutely the most ridiculous thing ever.” Canada Goose sale
They don’t even share their shared joys. One Sunday this fall, an all white crowd jammed into Matty’s, a sports bar in Blando’s Waukesha city of New Berlin, to cheer on the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. Twenty five minutes away, at the sleek Skybox sports bar Gee Smith opened in Milwaukee next to Gee’s, the Packers crowd was entirely black.
canadian goose jacket The city has pockets of diversity, notably in the hip Riverwest district. But there are so few white visitors to the north side that a white woman approaching a house is liable to be mistaken for a social worker. Black visitors to the WOW counties are often met with conspicuous suspicion. canadian goose jacket
“It’s just where we live. It’s sad,” Smith said, resigned, in a booth at the bar. “I don’t have to deal with it as much because of where I work. I’m around African Americans 98 per cent of the time.”
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This is common. Researchers from the Brookings Institution and elsewhere have deemed the Milwaukee region the single most segregated metropolitan area in the country. Other academics quibble with the precise rankings. But there is no disputing the despair of a black community surrounded on all sides by inaccessible white riches.
buy canada goose jacket cheap The disparities are vast. The Milwaukee region, said Prof. Marc Levine, director of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Canada Goose Jackets Center for Economic Development, has America’s biggest gap between black and white employment rates, second biggest gap between black and white poverty rates, and one of the biggest gaps between black and white incarceration rates. buy canada goose jacket cheap
Segregation is a symptom of these problems. More cheap Canada Goose importantly, segregation is one of the reasons Canada Goose sale why the problems exist.
Canada Goose Online The separation of whites and blacks isn’t just a moral shame. It makes black lives worse in tangible ways. The isolation of Milwaukee’s African Americans in impoverished all black neighbourhoods stunts their earning prospects in a region where the suburbs are generating all of the job growth. It forces black children who don’t have prosperous parents like Smith into troubled schools. In a city with 145 homicides last year Toronto, with a population four times larger, had 56 it heightens their risk of early death. And it lets suburban politicians safely ignore their interests. Canada Goose Online
“Segregation is definitely part of this witches’ brew of racial inequality in Milwaukee,” Levine said. “And I’d say it’s both a cause and an effect.”
uk canada goose outlet For a while, Milwaukee followed roughly the same racial trajectory as other cities in the Rust Belt. Europeans established ethnic enclaves. Blacks arrived from the South. Racist landlords, lenders, realtors and neighbourhood pacts confined them to particular urban areas. The manufacturing sector collapsed. Black poverty and crime spiked. Whites moved to the suburbs, taking tax revenue with them. uk canada goose outlet
cheap canada goose uk The difference is what happened next. In cities like Baltimore and Chicago, some affluent and middle income blacks eventually made their way to the suburbs themselves. Milwaukee’s black community, which arrived later and accumulated less wealth, stayed put. cheap canada goose uk
Or, maybe, got shut out.
John Henson signed a $44 million contract with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks in early October. Two weeks later, he tried to buy a Rolex.
Henson, a skinny 6 foot 11 black man, drove to a store in the suburb of Whitefish Bay. Before he could enter, a white employee locked the door, Canada Goose online called 911, and hid in a back room. Henson’s immense wealth could not shield him from Milwaukee’s black experience.
Canada Goose online Black people are no longer kept out of the Milwaukee suburbs by formalized racism. Some say they simply don’t want to live in the suburbs. canada goose deals But much of the reason, say Gandy, Smith and others, is that they are made to feel so unwelcome when they go Canada Goose online.