WTMJ 2021: Milwaukee’s Racial Divide and the Road Ahead

MILWAUKEE — Milwaukee, like many cities across the United States, is under scrutiny and the pulbic’s microscope for its racial inequities and divide.

A new report by the Wisconsin Office of Children’s Mental Health found that there are still alarming racial disparities in regards to youths in the justice system.

In that report, two big stats stuck out:

Wisconsin being second in the nation for having the highest black to white disparity rate, or one measure of a socioeconomic gap, dividing the rate of the lowest neighbourhood income group by the rate of the highest neighbourhood income group. The other that black youths are 15 times more likely to be sent to a youth correctional facility.

Tracy Dent of Milwaukee’s Coaltion Against Hate and Community Forward was a guest on WTMJ 2021, and he says the first step is putting racial bias aside and “getting to know one another.”

“”We’re all the same,” Dent says. “We all want to have good jobs and live a good life.”

Dent adds that television and news often leads to these biases, and that both white and black communities need to be media-literate.

“What they see on TV, that’s the mindset of what white people see. They see that [black people] are violent, they’re annimals, they’re this and they’re that and we’re not,” Dent says.