MILWAUKEE, WI — If you look at the data surrounding the Brew City, it is hard to believe Milwaukee is making any progress to move the needle at all on racial equity. The city has the highest Black-White segregation and the highest rate of incarceration of Black males in the country. The state of Wisconsin, anchored by the city of Milwaukee, has the worst Black-White achievement gap in the country as evidenced by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, a truth that has persisted for over 15 years.
As of 2017, the Milwaukee metro area also ranked worst in the nation for Black-White unemployment gaps. According to Dr. David Pate, chair and associate professor in the Helen Bader School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee, it is also a city in which hordes of Black men over 30 have never held a traditional job.
“We talk about the capacity of boys and men of color to bounce back without fully acknowledging the hits they’ve taken,” Pate said.
For the conveners of the 8th Annual International Colloquium on Black Males in Education, these factors made Milwaukee a perfect lab in which to examine the barriers facing educational attainment for Black boys across the globe.
“This is the place that people should be paying attention to,” said Colloquium Chair and University of Wisconsin—Madison Vilas Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, and Director of the Wisconsin’s Equity & Inclusion Laboratory, Dr. Jerlando F.L. Jackson. “Not only because these are important matters, but because this is also the place that has created outstanding programs and initiatives to combat these issues.”
For its part, the community has recently rallied around this data to try to solve the problems plaguing the city’s Black population. To date, much of the effort has come by way of grassroots advocacy. Carl Wesley, a native Milwaukeean who serves as president and CEO of the Center for Self-Sufficiency, called Wisconsin “a place filled with so much history, hardship and promise,” and said there is a rising “unwavering commitment to ensuring Black males receive full and unfettered access to the American dream.”
In choosing Milwaukee as a host city, the colloquium’s leadership hoped to bring an evidence-based framework to the way the work is executed in the community, in hopes that collecting data in a way that focuses on impact can help practitioners to scale their solutions.
