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            Milwaukee is a beautiful and ugly city. It has the potential to be full of life, but it is too busy dying. Artists tired of the pompous art scene in more cosmopolitan cities consider Milwaukee an unpretentious landscape that boasts an innovative art community. If you want to access that community, go to the East Side, downtown, or increasingly Bay View. But do not go to the North Side.

            Milwaukee was ranked the 3rd most segregated city in the United States a few years ago. The North Side is home to African Americans, on the South Side resides the Hispanic population, the East Side has pockets of Caucasian artistic (or trendy) folks within the primarily African American neighborhoods. Bay View always has been white lower class, though now is becoming trendy with young cool kinds, just like a pocket named Riverwest in the old ‘non-artist’ part of the East Side.

            The new communities emerging in these pockets compose a large opposite white-flight housing rearrangement in Milwaukee. Downtown Milwaukee over the last few years has become the site of construction, renovating old Milwaukee warehouses into condos and apartments for young twenty-somethings and empty-nesters. Their condos tear down the “concrete jungle” that my friends and I used to romp around in high school, and more ambitious kids “deface” with their public art. Its good for the city though; Milwaukee can bring in more revenue when white suburbanites move back into the city. Their money can go towards providing black, white, Latino, Hmong kids a canvas to aint on so they do not need those decrepit warehouse walls to spray their paint. After all, spray paint is bad and unlawful. Kids that involve themselves in that culture are just setting themselves up for prison. Or are they creating a culture worthy of reflection and honor?

            Gangbangers and drug dealers stream out of Milwaukee’s narrow streets practically paved with broken Old English bottles. An inner-city dweller learns to put a tough shield up to ward off insults or potential threats (or just let those that inevitably are slung your way slide off your back). Kids in these streets hang onto their honor for dear life. It’s the one thing they own and operate.

            Kids can increase their respect and honor either by making money, forcing respect (through violent acts), or excelling in inner-city arts. Networks of b-boys (breakdancers), emcees, poets, and graffiti artists are alive in Milwaukee, and many of the people involved are inspired to grow their artistic community.

            This artistic release could provide a non-violent release for kids whose surroundings do not motivate them to go to college. Does Milwaukee only need to make money to support its youth and invigorate communities to build a strong core that does not tolerate violence? My experience in Milwaukee was shaded by this Milwaukee. It lived three blocks on any side of me, but I lived in a big, beautiful house on a wide street with neighbors like the Lutheran bishop, a city alderman, a doctor, teachers. I grew up the way a child should—free to play: I played soccer, took bike trips in the countryside, figure-skated. I knew the other Milwaukee was just on the other side of Sherman Park, three houses down the street from my home. Traces of it resided in the crevices of the wrangled tree where my sister, her best friend, and I stored the broken pieces of liquor bottles we found laying around the park—our bounty.

             Do not forget, I am white, very different than black in Milwaukee. I went to a school with all of the kids that lived across Sherman Park, but after the 6th grade we knew we were different. I would go on to take honors classes, and they would settle for remedial classes. My parents, teachers, friends, my entire life expected me to go to college and become something. Much of the black student population I attended school with grew up with expectations of joining the work force. They had the same schooling opportunities as I did, though the social expectations placed on white and black students in Milwaukee bred us to follow different paths.

Now in possession of the wealth of experiences abroad, critical thinking skills, knowledge, and mentors that St. Olaf offers its already privileged students, I feel guilty. I know that life was not fair for us in Milwaukee, so I created this major and my senior project to address that inequity. How and who in society teaches us our particular goals?

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel