🌊 The Media Spins the Inner City

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A significant share of media coverage of inner cities focuses on a few topics, including racism, discrimination, and police brutality.

But while conducting interviews in Chicago, Flint, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, it became clear that such coverage doesn’t represent the conversation many people are actually having. Today’s installment covers that conversation.

60 years ago, Milwaukee – like Detroit, Baltimore, and many other cities – was a magnet for immigrants and black Americans looking for a better life. They came by the hundreds of thousands to work in the factories and breweries of Wisconsin’s largest city. But then the jobs left and the inner city decayed. First came poverty, then social ills and violence. Today, Milwaukee has the nation’s 13th-highest homicide rate.

Yet our numerous conversations in the city made clear that many conclusions people drew from that history are not shared by the media.

“How do we get into a house or a family and tell them to be a family again? How do I go in your house and say, ‘You need to be a mother. You’re not mothering your child?’”

These are the questions Tynetta Jackson has to ask as an activist in Milwaukee’s inner city.

Jackson could spend hours listing the problems of the inner city and the conditions responsible: Insufficient and poorly allocated police funding, insufficient and poorly allocated school funding, “ghost guns,” a lack of good working-class jobs. Yet in the hours we spent together, what kept coming up was family: When families don’t act like families, the inner city suffers.

We met Jackson at a park in the center of one of Milwaukee’s most blighted areas. 

“The reason I chose this area is because I grew up a few blocks over,” Jackson explained. “We first moved just to live in Milwaukee. We moved here in the 80s…it was the city to raise a family,” she recalled. “It was just…everything was beautiful. No litter. People still had their values and morals.”

She gestured at empty beer cans nearby: “You just see all kind of changes.”

Then she gestured at the street: “You see where they put those speed bumps. Kids was getting killed…It's sad to see that kids can't have innocence anymore.”

She then gestured at the large, beautiful, empty park we were in: “[Kids] can't come in the park and play.” 

Moments later, gunshots rang out in the distance.

Jackson traced the inner city’s decline to the loss of manufacturing jobs.

“Hundreds of people were losing their jobs. So what do they do? They resort to ‘I'm gonna get it anyway I can’ so they resort to taking from their neighbors, and the neighbors are in the same situation that you're in, you know, they're making it paycheck to paycheck.”

“And here's the other decline: Single-parent homes. A parent has to work two jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table. So who's watching the children? Who's watching their children if the mother is out there having to work two jobs?”

Jackson said that fathers are rarely around the family in these neighborhoods. Sometimes, they choose not to be; often, though, Jackson said women “don't see the importance of their father and the mentorship of a man in a child's life.” So they keep the husband away. Sometimes rightfully so; other times unfairly.

Jackson raised her son as a single mom but said she was “fortunate.”

“My parents helped me, so I worked a job full-time, I went to school full-time, and had a part-time job. I was blessed to have parents that said, ‘I want you to have it.’”

“You can see the difference if you talk to young women today. You could tell a woman that had their father in their life. When you hold a conversation with them and a woman that didn't grow up with a father in their life, young boys, too, you can see the difference in how they interact with each other, the respect level. You know if your father was in your life, you wouldn't do or say certain things.”

Nearby, a kid was playing outside his house with several adults sitting on the porch. We went over and started a conversation with a man who looked to be maybe 40 and a man who was a bit older. The younger man – with face tattoos, a durag, and gold grills – stood silently while the older one spoke.

“All our parents that raised us – gone. So we’re raising our kids, and our kids is raising kids. They’re not adults yet to be raising kids. They’re kids raising kids. That’s basically what this generation is coming up with. Everybody is kids raising kids.”

“They got 16, 15, and 14s out now raising these kids. By the time they reach 20 or 25, their kids just turning 10, 12, you know, and what can you tell a kid if you ain't have morals of yourself from your own family?”

He then said that Covid stimulus and welfare payments have disincentivized people from working. As this went on, the man in the durag stood silently. Then there was a question about why there are so few jobs in the community. He spoke up: “I’ll take this.”

“People have a lack of labor skills,” he said. “I’m a welder by trade….in the communities, you don’t have carpenters, you don’t have enough welders…There's programs out there for them but everybody don't have an education. People are not exposed to it.”

He said he became a welder while living in Jacksonville, Florida.

“There's a lot of blue collar people down there,” he said. “I learned the trade because I realized that in order to make great money and make a living for yourself, you've got to have a real good skill. A good skill set, because as they say, ‘Skills pay the bills.’”

“The youth, they need blue collar skills. They need to get exposure to that more than free stuff because when they get exposed to trades, that can change the whole dynamics in the community.”

He – with his face tattoos and gold grills – went on to say that he had done community work in Chicago, helping people stay out of trouble, learn trades, and get educated.

“If we don't have any blue collar skills,” he said, “that's the decline of a people.”

In every inner city we’ve visited, we’ve heard people say things like we documented in today’s installment. Yet we rarely see such conversations documented in the media. Why do you think that is?

Editor’s Note

Thanks to those of you who wrote in about Thursday’s story on Ed Hennings, including a reader named Wells, who wrote, “This is what is perfect for your followers. This is why we follow.”

We’ll be back in a couple days.

-Max and Max

RocaNews co-founders