I stayed down and Greg slowly crept toward the window after those shots. What was happening during that pause? Was someone bleeding or dying near my home? A few minutes later, the sirens wailed in the distance. I could have checked the news the next morning to find out what happened, but I suppose I don’t want to know if I heard the gunshots that ended the life of another person. I don’t have the strength for that today.
Last month, I did an interview with PBS for a special about Sherman Park, three years after the shooting of Sylville Smith. I was asked what’s changed here in the past three years and how I feel about the Sherman Park now. These are hard questions to answer, especially after this weekend.
Sherman Park is like this: it’s a study in contrasts. It’s like every great neighborhood you’ve been to—people are out mowing their yards, kids are riding bikes, neighbors call out hellos from their front porch, the smell of summer barbecue is in the air. Sherman Park is also like no other place you’ve been—around Milwaukee, anyway. It’s the living together and coming together that most other Milwaukee neighborhoods and suburbs lack. Residents have worked hard to preserve the diversity, the homes, and the culture of community. This is the neighborhood that, decade after decade, is breaking Milwaukee’s practice of pushing out black and brown people. The neighbors of Sherman Park are looking out for each other because we’re in this together. We care about the neighborhood enough to enter into the mess.
Sherman Park is like this: you can double lock your doors and your home can be broken into and robbed. You can forget to lock your doors for the weekend, even find that you left the front door wide open, and everything is still there. You can be meditating on your front porch, mid-strum on kumbaya chorus and feeling one with humanity, but when somebody pulls up to throw all their car’s trash in your front lawn, your carefully curated zen is replaced with latent primal rage. You can be out on a beautiful night with your kids, celebrating your youngest who just learned how to rollerblade but you reach the corner, you see that there’s been a double homicide. You can have a hard day and sit miserably stewing on your front porch and minutes later be enjoying the balm of conversation with a person walking by. You can be robbed for the third time—the day before a photo shoot with the Journal Sentinel—and your neighbors will help you set your crumpled door back on its hinges and invite you for burgers in their backyard. Hypothetically, of course.
(And the burgers will taste delicious, by the way, because Sherman Park knows how to grill.)
This has been a hard season for me and many others. There’s been multiple shootings within blocks of my home. My children and my neighbor’s children have seen the police, the investigators, the ominous yellow caution tape at the crime scene. My kids had all the questions about what happened, as children do. My friend had a blood stain in front of her house that wouldn’t wash away and asked for advice on how to remove it. An unleashed dog killed my neighbor’s therapy dog. I came home to find yellow triangles marking bullets from a shooting in front of my garage.
It’s easy to become cynical and it’s the route I take sometimes to remove myself from the problems. Cynicism allows me to tell myself that nothing will change and there’s nothing I can do to make things better. It takes courage and community to come up with good ideas and step into the mess. I need that courage today. I need to remind myself why I live in Sherman Park and I can’t do that alone—I need someone to help me remember, so I reached out to my friend who lives down the street. She’s working through her own grief—her family friend was shot and killed this summer. Although we met to talk about some hard things, I was reluctant to lay out my own angst because I know she’s got her own to work through. (Maybe this is why people get therapists? So that they don’t have to stress out their emotionally healthy friends?) But I’m glad I called her. If this neighborhood has taught me anything, it’s that I need people to remind me why we moved here and why we stay. If you live in Sherman Park, you will need your neighbors to listen to you rant in ways you can’t with people who don’t live here. It’s like when you complain about your brother with another member of your family but if someone else chimes in and complains about him too, they better back off because—hey, that’s my brother.
I know people wonder why we moved here in the first place and why we stay. I also think they wonder if I think I’m better than they are based on my geography. The answer is no—I don’t. But I will say that Sherman Park has made me a better kind of me. I would not read about, think about and write about the things that I do unless I lived in Sherman Park because I constantly have to wrestle through and engage with complex issues. It can be exhausting, but it’s made me a fuller human being. I’ve learned that Sherman Park will dismantle you and put you back together and, through all the breaking and rearranging, you will find yourself a more whole, complete person. A person who gets deeply angry about the right things—things that actually matter—like justice, dignity, life, equality and community. That’s the kind of person I want to be and maybe this is the context that will make those things true in me.
But it feels a little drastic. I wish I could learn those things living on, say, the coast of Honolulu.
But back to the breakfast with my friend. She reminded me that there is hope for Sherman Park. She says that if I no longer feel hope for this neighborhood, then it’s probably time to go. But if I stay, I should write the whole story—even the things that I struggle to put words to—and leave room for the redemption part of the story.
Sigh.
I just don’t see redemption coming to Milwaukee today. Brooklyn, MJ, Dontre, Archie, Sandra, Za'Layia and Tay didn’t get a chance to see the redemption of Milwaukee's story either. Redemption is slow to unfold and we don't have patience for it today. Neither does the person who lays dying in the street.
We, as a city, don’t even know what redemption looks like and we won’t, unless we leave the circles of people who look, think, vote like we do and hear another story. And we won’t ever hear their story unless we actually believe it affects us. I’m telling you Milwaukee—it affects us. As the largest city in Wisconsin, we cannot and will not be taken seriously unless we figure out how to connect, live together and hear each other. Why would black and brown executives, leaders, entrepreneurs and NBA players want to live here when they have heard what it’s like? Why would they want to be here if things stay the same?
What do I mean by redemption? I suspect there’s people who think it’s just racial diversity. Perhaps you feel like you’re winning if your company, neighborhood, or kid’s school is diverse. But if it lacks black and brown people in leadership roles who share their ideas and have them taken seriously, you don’t have redemption. If you celebrate Juneteeth or read books to your kids about Martin Luther King, but don’t wrestle with why and how Milwaukee remains so segregated, you don’t have redemption. If you celebrated the 50th anniversary of Milwaukee’s Fair Housing march, but forget that the same people who threw urine at the protestors, wore swastikas and chanted “we want slaves” still live, work and are decision-makers in Milwaukee, you don’t have redemption: what you have is good feelings but you’re still preserving the roots of inequality by avoiding the questions.
Perhaps we all need to be dismantled and deeply angry about things that actually matter—like justice, dignity, life, equality and community--about little kids who hit the floor to avoid bullets and innocent people who get killed at a park or in their own homes. Perhaps you need to show up to support the efforts of people who are doing good work in Milwaukee. Perhaps you need to seek meaningful connections with people who aren’t like you. Perhaps you need to empower people to speak about things that make you uncomfortable where you’ve cut them off in the past. I don’t know what it looks like for you, but it’d be beneficial to figure it out.
And I will do the same.
