- Professor Levine, thank you very
much for joining us.
- Thank you for having me.
- 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 schoolchildren 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?
- 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 to 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 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 10 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.
I mean, 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 at comparative terms.
Just looking at a black
household and say, you know,
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.
- In fact, that's what I was
going to ask you.
All of the other indicators
and metrics that you measured
feed in to that
income disparity?
- 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.
- 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?
- I think for many
years, frankly,
as you point out, there's 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 policymaking 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 that
are 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
referred 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 at Madison
have talked for years about
the state pursuing the low
road approach to economic
development. Will 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 the folks
call the high road strategy,
which means raising people's
wages and creating
better jobs.
- 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?
Absolutely.
I mean, I refer to a lot
of these trends in the study as
having been a stealth
depression in black Milwaukee,
something that was sort of
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 anti-discrimination
strategies and rethink economic
development, so it promotes
greater economic equality
between racial groups.
- We leave it there.
Professor Mark Levine, thanks
very much and thanks for your
work.
- Thank you very much for having
me. Much appreciate it.