Map of Segregation in Milwaukee.
North Central Area in black,
is more than 80 % Black
Yesterday was the birthday of my nine year granddaughter. She is a delight to be with and make this old grandfather proud. She is the youngest in our immediate Graf family and retains her wonderful imagination. Today would have been the 41st birthday of my deceased son, Peter, a creative artist who suffered too much and died too young. Peter was the creative person in our immediate family and had a natural knack for music, art, drawing and creative writing. Peter suffered from an illness society cannot accept and deal with, a brain disease or mental illness.
Friends of ours have a very creative young son who presently is suffering from a severe mental illness. They have taken him from hospital to hospital and treatment centers, only to find him being rejected. One of the tragedies of this illness is that persons with it do not realize they need health treatment. Yet they need to agree to treatment to get it, and if they do not because they are not of their illness, they are allowed to get sicker and sicker. My friends have tried everything short of a forced commitment, which is difficult for a parent to do with an adult child and rarely works. What does a parent to do?
Between stigmatizing and ignoring persons our society has figure out how to marginalize persons and messages, even ones that represent their values and beliefs. Environments are created that foster the problem and when people act out as they are expected the stigma and marginalization are deepened.
A very good example of this happening in the city of Milwaukee is in North Central Milwaukee. Over the years this area has been neglected and made poorer and when persons act out to stigma and marginalization they are even further ignored and criminalized.
With the help of friend we are working on a M.A.P.S (Milwaukee Area Poverty and Segregation) project is meant to show how the area most neglected by institutions like the Catholic church, has become the poorest and most segregated area in Milwaukee and thus one where persons in prisons come from and are released, often to come back again to the prison system. North Central Milwaukee by being ignored and marginalized is now becoming a prison itself, a self fulfilled prophecy that needs to be broken. We must break the cycle of stigma and marginalization.
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