The Grim Present of Milwaukee Blacks

[Genx87]

4.6 rank of 16th in US.

http://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm

That is still full employment.

 

[werepossum]

What scares the shit out of me is that so-called supposedly educated people cannot even use simple words such as "there" or "they're" properly. I've seen it like 50 times today alone. If people cannot even construct basic english sentences, then what hope is there that they will see solutions to complex problems? Absolutely none.

Seriously? This is a very casual place, and personally I overlook such errors except in thread titles and call-out posts. This is an extremely mild problem with a good post; learn to cope, dude.

And to the OP, I think historically bad high school dropout rates there are part of the problem. And I think the only way they pushed up the graduation rates, was by lowering the standards and putting more pressure on the parents through legal means to keep them in school, even though they might be borderline failing every class when they supposedly "graduate" from high school.

http://educationnext.org/graduation-rates-higher-at-milwaukee-voucher-schools/

The failure of our education system coupled with massive illegal immigration and the loss of manufacturing is the trifecta of failure for poor people, especially poor black people.

Even after living in Georgia for the vast majority of my life, I've never felt more uncomfortable being a black man with a white partner than being in Milwaukee. Walking down Oakland near UW-M I couldn't believe how many black people wanted to give me shit for being with a white girl. Unfathomable.

I remember walking down there near the Gyro shop (awesome place btw!) and the first thing anyone ever said to me wasn't "Afternoon", or even "hey", it was "Oh! Look here at this uptown awesome dude with a white bitch!"

Friggin' hate Milwaukee. Pretty much permanent bad taste in my mouth.

Man, that's messed up. What's the point of equality if you circumscribe your own freedom?

 

[glenn1]

4.6 rank of 16th in US.

http://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm

Once you get down to the level of Milwaukee the picture changes considerably. Looking at the same article about what states trail Wisconsin for black unemployment I'm unsure that simply chalking it up to "de-industrialization" is a workable hypothesis.

After Wisconsin, the states with the highest black unemployment rates in 2014 were Nevada (16.1%) and Michigan (15.8%), followed by the District of Columbia (15.7%), the study found.

 

[Fern]

With less than 50% of black males working, it is quite obvious that this train has been derailed horribly. I look at these stats and it quite frankly scares the shit out of me. Worse still, I don't believe their are any solutions. Corporate America exported their jobs over the past three decades and now we are all fighting over the scraps of our once titanic manufacturing economy.

See the demographics section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee#Demographics

Looks like all the white people left Milwaukee (except for those who had a job).

Fact is that sometimes you need to move, to follow the jobs; economic changes require it. Hanging around waiting for a job to drop into your lap is usually a poor plan.

(I remember visiting Houston TX back in the late 70's. Detroit auto makers had fallen on hard times and approx 100,000 people had left the city. OTOH the oil business in Houston was booming and about 100,000 new arrivals had shown up for jobs. Coincidence?)

Fern

 

[werepossum]

See the demographics section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee#Demographics

Looks like all the white people left Milwaukee (except for those who had a job).

Fact is that sometimes you need to move, to follow the jobs; economic changes require it. Hanging around waiting for a job to drop into your lap is usually a poor plan.

(I remember visiting Houston TX back in the late 70's. Detroit auto makers had fallen on hard times and approx 100,000 people had left the city. OTOH the oil business in Houston was booming and about 100,000 new arrivals had shown up for jobs. Coincidence?)

Fern

But the lower one is on the socioeconomic ladder, the less one can afford to follow the jobs with no kind of guarantee. In the seminal studies of British working poor in the late 1800s/early 1900s, one thing researchers found very odd was how seldom people moved to better neighborhoods once they had work that would allow such a move, thus denying their children homes that were healthier in every way. (When a poor family could expect to lose between 1/4 and 3/4 of children born, this was a major thing indeed.) The explanation was always the same: their neighbors were the people who would help them if they fell on hard times. Good incomes can evaporate in a flash due to sickness, death, economic change, even an employer's whim; where then would they be in a strange new neighborhood? Today our safety net largely nullifies that need, but it also negates the absolute need to move when the work dries up. With no safety net, poor people would be forced to travel to find work since especially in hard times charity was slim and most people were too proud to take it. Today, a poor person might travel across the country for the promise of a job, but most won't travel across the country for the hope of a job since they could just as easily be unemployed at the new location with the same government safety net but no interpersonal safety net. As blacks are still on average poorer, stands to reason that they will be more loathe to travel across the country in search of work. Thus as Detroit fails, it is likely to get more black simply for socioeconomic reasons.

EDIT: Just look at Sandra Bland. She moved across the country for a job, yet when she was in dire need, she knew no one at the new city and everyone at the old city had apparently written her off and refused to answer her calls.

 

[cycledoc]

This governor cur something like $350,000,000 from the University system and is gifting it to the hedge fund owners of the Bucks, billionaires, for an arena. Meanwhile schooling and training for poorer citizens languishes. It's the new American way.