Photo Credit: Tom Jenz
James E, Causey, the noted Milwaukee journalist, comes across as a force with his linebacker physique, dreadlocks, designer shades and an African pattern shirt of many colors. But his vocal delivery is slow and low key, almost mesmerizing as he converses with me at an outdoor coffee shop in his inner city neighborhood.
Now 52, Causey grew up in Milwaukee’s central city, the zip code 53206 zone known for high rates of poverty, crime and controversy. Politifact once wrote, “For politicians and policymakers, the area has become a five-digit shorthand for dysfunction and decay.” In fact, this area has almost all Black residents. He has lived in his parents first home on 39th and Capitol in the 53216 ZIP code for more than 40 years.
The area also has its share of emotional stories about pain and struggle and loss, but also about hope, community and healing. Causey knows the territory, and he’s been writing about it for his 30 years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. At present, he is also a senior fellow at the University of Southern California and a past fellow at Harvard University. His reputation is national. We talked for over an hour.
You had some success at an early age.
I went to John Marshall High School and did their journalism and broadcast program. Most of my friends wanted to be deejays. I wanted to be a reporter for a newspaper. I’ve only had three jobs in my life. As a teenage busboy at Sizzlers Steakhouse, freelancing in high school at the Milwaukee Community Journal, and then at the Milwaukee Journal where I’ve been since I was 15, but full time since 1991.
As I understand, you’ve never lived anywhere except the inner city neighborhood where you spent your boyhood.
My parents are from small towns in Mississippi, my mom one of the oldest of 14 children of a Baptist preacher. My father was an only child. The story goes that my father had the pick of the girls in my mom’s family and he chose her. After my father got back from serving in Korea, he needed to escape Southern prejudice, and he came to Milwaukee as part of the mass migration north for good paying jobs. A few years later, my parents got married. They rented a duplex on 39th and Capitol, then later bought that house. My dad was a welder at Safeway Steel Products. I am an only child. My parents taught me the value of hard work and responsibility. Unfortunately, they both died of cancer a few years ago. Tragic. The loss has been hard on me. I still live in that duplex with my wife and 17-year-old daughter.
I’m interested in the state of reporting in our country. You’ve talked about what you call the ‘helicopter method,’ reporters doing stories on communities they scarcely know. They drop in, get a quick fix on the news incident, and then they leave. In my Central City Stories series, I’ve tried to get to know the Black culture of the segregated neighborhoods, tell stories of residents and street leaders by spending time with them.
I get that. I’m a people person. Stories are told through people.
Character is action, the premise of all good storytellers.
Instead, some journalists fall into the trap of writing stories based on statistics and generalizations.
I know. For instance, ‘A Gallup poll shows that 74% of people say they are not racist.’ That type of thing.
Right. Reporters might be working on stories in a community they aren’t comfortable with. The Milwaukee Journal gave me the opportunity to tell the human stories.
Mentoring Boys
Causey gave me an example. Summer of 2018. For nearly three months, he visited an inner city neighborhood garden on Ninth and Ring. He mentored boys who had experienced violence, broken families and the influence of street gangs. He involved himself in the garden’s We Got This program, founded by Andre Lee Ellis. It gave boys basic discipline and guidance and $20 for four hours of hard work every Saturday morning. Causey’s reporting resulted in his award-winning Fellowship project, “Cultivating a Community,” which concentrated on this important community garden.
Says Causey: I think if residents are used to seeing you around, they begin to open up and trust you to tell their honest stories. I want to tell stories that help people. I am also an editorial writer and a columnist, and I want to offer solutions to current issues
From the inner city Black residents I’ve gotten to know, there is a general mistrust of the mainstream media. They think the only time the media pays attention to their community is if a crime’s been committed, or there’s been a bad accident, or a big protest. In my observation, many of these reporters and camera operators are white.
I keep stressing the importance of African Americans in media. Ironically, now we’ve become the darlings because of Black Lives Matter, but I think we’re more valuable than just using us when there’s news about a Black crisis. As a Black journalist covering all kinds of stories, I’ve never felt I need to get an OK to go into a white establishment and interview whites. On the contrary, many times white journalists feel they need an okay to talk to Blacks. I guess it comes down to being a good journalist, asking questions until you get the answers you’re seeking.
Not only that, but I’ve been told by several journalists and photographers that they are afraid to venture into the central city. You once said, “Milwaukee has this perception problem. People are afraid of our city. They think it’s crime-ridden, out of control, with shootings and stabbings and beatings all the time.”
Segregation is not necessarily bad, but it’s bad if you take the resources out of one area and leave it as a ghetto. The suburbs are segregated and small towns are segregated with mostly white people living in those communities. But nobody looks at Mequon, Whitefish Bay and Sturtevant as segregated even though Black people seldom live there. The problem of segregation occurs when you take the resources, jobs and best schools from an area. Segregated Blacks typically have the worst schools, food deserts, poor police relationships. When you have a people who are isolated and can’t see a way out, that’s when it becomes a problem. But I love living with Black people, my people. If you took away the resources from whites or Hispanics, they would have the same issues, bad schools, liquor stores, lack of good food, crime.
And you also take away hope and a future. You might be a young Black male without a father and you rely on your friends. To make money for your family, you might go underground, sell drugs, steal cars, carry a gun.
We talk about the controversy of guns, taking guns off the street. The irony is they have more guns in the suburbs, small towns and the country than the inner city. However, you have a handful of Black criminals who prey on people who look just like them, and then guns become a problem.
I think there are 390 million legal guns in this country. Who knows how many illegal guns. And lately, thousands more citizens are becoming new gun owners to protect themselves.
I never said I don’t like guns. I own five guns myself. The goal is to stop guns from being the primary source of taking things or threatening people. In other words, ‘I don’t know how to argue so I get mad and shoot you,’ that type of behavior.
Let’s talk racism. Much of the media approach to racism is intellectual, academic experts and book authors writing in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, appearing on NPR, PBS and the east coast networks, the readers and listeners predominantly white.
Don’t forget the Milwaukee Journal where most of our subscribers are white.
Some whites in the suburbs and even in Madison occasionally ask me, “What should we do to solve this problem of racism?” I believe that to begin the healing process, whites who want to help have to engage people of color. It’s admirable to contribute to non-profits, but the goal should be to understand the Black inner city culture, which is totally different than the rural or suburban cultures.
There are programs out there. The YMCA offers a class called Unlearning Racism, and I took the class. In the end, I think it isn’t up to Black people to do anything. We’re exhausted talking about what racism has done to our lives. It’s really up to white people to not want to be racist anymore. That goes beyond slogans, yard signs, and carrying banners. It requires hard conversations with relatives and friends who the white guy knows are racist, that you speak up in support of minorities. But I do have some hope that in the future our young people will be more inclusive, less judgmental. I will say that things are better than they were last generation or the generation before. But it’s slow. In my lifetime, I doubt I’ll not run into racism.
And consider fear. Racism is based on fear, the fear of being around someone who is not like themselves. Skin colors, ethnic groups.
That’s when the whites have to break out of their groups and get to know people not in their circles. If you look at your friends, and they all have same color skin as you and the same economic lifestyle, that is a problem. I believe that everybody should not look like you. It starts with something as simple as having coffee with someone who doesn’t look like you, the understanding that we come from different backgrounds, different upbringings, different schools, even different cultures. As far as the inner city Black culture, I just wish we could wrap our Black and Brown youth with love. Instead, the mature teenager looks like a threat, and that stems from how we were raised and shaped.
I remember having lunch with the white police detective who got Jeffrey Dahmer to confess to his horrific crimes against Black kids. He said to me, “I’ve been a detective for a long time, even taught law at UWM, but when I close my eyes and think of what a criminal is, I think of someone who looks like you, James.” Shit, I was wearing a suit and bowtie. I told him, “That’s a problem with you, not me.” He said he knew that Black people didn’t commit all the crimes, but he was conditioned to think they did. I now believe that the media, print, TV, social media and even movies play a big role in all this prejudice.
And what about the sexist Black rap music?
Yes, those lyrics often degrade our women and promote violence, trash the police. I guess that music sells. But I miss conscious rap music, TV shows and other music with uplifting stories about the Black culture and Black family life. That’s why I do what I do, show that this pop culture isn’t all of us. We’re descendants from kings and queens and we must never forget that.
