Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
Our Future Is in Good Hands
The last six weeks have been a blur. It’s like my time is marked getting the coffee maker going in the morning and then I sit at my desk, a step repeated constantly like a version of Groundhog Day. I’ve had two financial audits, planning for The Hues 17th Anniversary Celebration — an ad is on the cover of this newspaper — and this graduation issue going on simultaneously. I prefer to work on one major project at a time. Four has been overwhelming and I find myself mumbling prayers at all times of the day, praying that I don’t make too many rookie mistakes at the same time.
I really enjoy putting together this Graduation Issue together. It’s intense. It’s like putting together 2-3 issues of The Hues at one time. The starting line, so to speak, is the end of the third quarter when we can get a pretty firm idea which graduating seniors of color in Dane County are graduating with a 3.0 GPA or greater. And then I make visits to MMSD high schools and Middleton High, 3-5 apiece to work with some incredibly committed staff to identify the students, have them complete a form and take their photo. We have to dodge around AP tests, senior end-of-the-year activities like prom and Senior Skip Day and trips to Great America and specially designed conferences.
And at the same time, college graduations and celebrations come up pretty quick. At the start of May, different UW-Madison DDEEA Programs have their graduation celebrations and there are the All-City American Indian Alaskan Native and African Association of Madison celebrations of their communities’ graduates. And setting up interviews with the college graduates — and photo taking — has to be worked in with exams, final papers, family visits and other activities. And somehow it all gets done.
Doing this issue is like an immersion program into the state of our young people. For instance, in The Hues Row of Excellence, I noticed that overall there were fewer outside activities that the students were involved in. But then I realized that the COVID-19 pandemic came like a hurricane tearing their high school careers in half.
I sometimes wonder if the COVID-19 pandemic, in a strange way, will be a common experience that will bind this generation of students together, a common challenge that they survived and succeeded in, much like my father’s generations’ experience in World War II, a four-year experience that defined a generation.
I can’t help but admire the college students who are featured in this issue. All of them have had to deal with barriers and micro-aggressions that they have overcome in reaching and surpassing their collegiate goals. I can remember way back when I started writing about college graduations and was an instructor in the UW PEOPLE Program’s summer middle-school program that a majority of the students were confined to a relatively narrow band of careers — with notable exceptions.
Now when I look at their life ambitions, they are tremendously diverse, like they have become unchained to do what that inner voice tells them to do, what their passion dictates that they do and not what a perceived social expectation dictates that they do. They are diffusing into every human endeavor that the world has to offer. And it is awesome to watch this happen over time. The arc of justice, while not always obvious and timely, is always moving forwards, sometimes in ways not perceived.
There are forces in our society — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? — that are trying desperately to turn back the hands of justice. They are trying to keep people ignorant to the truth and to rig the political system so that they can hold power as a minority. Just check out the Wisconsin legislature.
I talked with some of the organizers of The Black Pwr Coalition who staged the recent marches on the UW-Madison campus. I found them to be incredibly talented and intelligent people who nonetheless are made to feel by social forces on campus that they are imposters, that they don’t deserve to be on campus and are somehow inferior students. That really pissed me off, pardon the expression.
I grew up in the Milwaukee area in the 1950s and 1960s. Milwaukee was named one of the top cities in the U.S. to raise Black families. Black folks worked well-paying factory jobs and contributed their fair share of taxes to the Wisconsin state treasury that paid for the expansion of UW-Madison and yet their children weren’t attending UW-Madison in proportion to the taxes they paid. Welfare — and B lack mothers’ reliance on it — didn’t become a problem until the 1970s when Milwaukee’s manufacturing base began to disappear and the path to white collar jobs was blacked for Black folks.
The Black community helped build UW-Madison and didn’t get the proportional benefit. In essence, they subsidized the enrollment of other groups of people. Even now, while Black students make up two percent of UW-Madison’s student population, they make up 6.8 percent of Wisconsin’s population. They are still subsidizing the attendance of students from other ethnic groups.
Black student belong at UW-Madison — they own it as much as any other group — and not made to feel like imposters. UW-Madison is a wonderfully intellectually stimulating university. I owe it my intellectual life. It owes it to Black students to be that kind of place for them, unfettered by the barriers and micro-aggressions of race. Wonderfully, UW-Madison challenged me to be all that I could be. It needs to live up to its own potential for Black students.