Kane Watch: What Could He Do?

While Eugene Kane is smelling the flowers and completely ignoring the elephant about to trample them, Jessica McBride attempts to identify some of the realities behind Milwaukee's inner-city violence.

In all fairness, I get where Kane is coming from. He wants his readers to know more about the good side of a part of the city that so regularly, though not un-deservedly, gets a bad rap. Although it's a great story about what good an inner-city Boys & Girls Club can do, why is his first full column following the McClain beating so focused on his excitement over this club and not on his outrage over yet another senseless act of black-on-black crime. Is he so occupied with painting a pretty picture that he passes up on tackling what's really the issue that has so many people concerned?

That's where Kane troubles me. I envy the fact that he has earned enough of a reputation to be granted a venue in a large city-paper. I'm impressed that he has as many readers, love him or hate him, as he does. And it would seem to me that he is as much a voice of Milwaukee's African-Americans (at least to Journal-Sentinel readers) as he may claim Mark Belling is the voice of Milwaukee's right-wing zealots.* And what's the first thing he has to say about it in his column? I'll paraphrase:

"Yeah. That's a real shame about that beating. Hey! Did you see our shiny community center!?!?"

Kane may talk about the elephant in passing, but basically ignores the fact that it's heading straight for the community he so strongly loves and defends. Again, I have no doubt that the club does great things for the community, and another dozen like it in the area may someday greatly reduce the crime and overall blight, but the reality is that it's simply a band-aid on a big cut. It often serves as a proctor for parental involvement. The reasons for this lack of involvement are many and unfortunate, among them poverty, undereducation, drugs, alcohol and the, as McBride puts it,

"...the complete disintegration of the family
structure. Don't assume these kids even have parents around. It's common
knowledge that many are fatherless. But we've got a generation growing up
without mothers too, the orphans or near orphans of the crack epidemic of the
late 1980s. Some are virtually homeless. Many are being raised by
grandmothers."

McBride provides a further description of this disintegration:

"[She] mentored an African American youth from
Milwaukee for more than four years. Father, a drug dealer in Chicago who never
knew him. Mother, murdered by her boyfriend. Being raised by his grandmother.
Witnessed a murder getting off the bus. Had several friends who were murdered.
Only one of his friends was being raised by his father - and only one was being
raised by his mother. One mother was off doing drugs. Another had died of AIDS.
And so on. The kid I mentored was the son of a teenage mother who was the child
of a teenage mother who was the child of a teenage mother..."

What McBride's doing here is actually looking at the problem. She's citing examples of some of the very ugly issues in the community. And she acknowledges that it's often difficult to discuss these topics for fear of being called racist.

Not true? If such a popular and revered African-American entertainer as Bill Cosby can't voice some of the very same concerns as McBride without being accused of being a sell-out to his race, how is anyone ever supposed to tackle the issue?

Now McBride doesn't really offer any hard and fast solutions to the problem, but if we're unwilling to first recognize the cause of problems in a realistic manner then we can't even begin to attempt permanently solving them. I say "realistic manner" because, in this case, we can only afford to accept racism as the sole cause for so long. Just as ugly as saying all the problems are caused because most of the people are black is the unwillingness to accept honest criticism without returning accusations of being racist, an Uncle Tom, or a sell-out. At some point we must be willing to open our eyes to all of the issues and respond to them appropriately.

A man who beats his wife may donate half his money to charity, but his philathropy, noble as it may be, will forever be tarnished by his abuse. Likewise, a community center may be wonderful thing, but right now the community is plagued with a problem far outweighing the good the center may bring. What we need now is for the voices of black Milwaukee to come forward and take an active role not in just identifying and resolving the problems, but in actually accepting they exist.

I hope Mr. Kane may eventually try to do that. He has the voice to do so.

*Imagine if Kane and Belling truly were the sole voices of liberal-blacks and conservative-whites in Milwaukee. Scary.