At Easter time 2007 I wrote an online essay The Sweet Waters of Discrimination in Milwaukee. I talked about a “structured, systematic form” of discrimination “that is so prevalent that it is hard for us living in it to see and feel it.” With the essay I did a series of positive suggestions to city and county leaders about specific ways to change this systematic discrimination. One way was a police training program started in Memphis ,Tennessee when a high number of persons with mental illnesses were being killed by police officers. The program trained police how to deal with persons with mental illnesses and reduced deaths. The police chief at the time wanted all of her police officers to have this training.

This year after a number of killings by police officers by persons with mental illnesses I tried to find out how many of the present police officers were being trained. I could not find out until the other day when an article in the newspaper pointed out that after 7 years of the program only 20% of the police were trained in this program. The present police chief has taken a “data driven” position to reducing crime in segregated neighborhoods which means he goes by computer program’s data where to place the police and to track suspects. Simply. police presence in the most segregated area has increased as crime has increased and incarceration of young adult African Americans has increased with poverty and unemployment.

Today, after Church, we met with another Church to discuss ways to combat for which North Central Milwaukee, the most segregated neighborhood in the most segregated city in the USA is the focal point. (See M.A.P.S. Maps of Segregation, Poverty, Criminalization of African Americans in North Central Milwaukee.)

Another spark to recent awareness of the incarceration of African American males is the book The New Jim Crowe, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The book eloquently talks about this serious form of racism in this country and everyone wants to talk about the book and the problem. We were talking about what to do with our new awareness and the main thing was to have more talks and discussions on the subject. More talk with direct nonviolent action will lead to more talk and less action until a new topic of discussion rises to the surface.

In talking about this subject everyone is so careful not to use the word ‘racism’. But as the book points out this is exactly what it is. The old Jim Crowe laws were overt and direct. The new Jim Crowe laws, like ‘War on Crime’, are more subtle but end up in the same place, discrimination against African Americans.

When I was a child I was horrified by the overt racism of the time. Now that I am adult I am horrified by the subtle institutional racism of the time.

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