Black Milwaukee and the Queerness of Social Life

Abstract

An ethnography rooted in the Midwest and the lived experience of Black Milwaukeeans, Black Milwaukee and the Queerness of Social Life contends that understanding Blackness in the Midwest is integral to any conception of race in the U.S. nation-state because outside of the South, the largest percentage of Black people live in the Midwest. This project maintains that the story of African American life indicates the inherent queerness of Blackness. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, they demonstrate that the advent of urban renewal and deindustrialization in the Midwest and throughout the Rust Belt imperiled the lives of Black Milwaukeeans because they did not have the skills training necessary to participate in the active labor force with the U.S. shift to a service-based economy, an often- missing component in analyses of Black Midwestern life. The lives and experiential knowledges of the author’s mother and grandmother are central to their accounting of Black life in the city, which traces the intimacies of deindustrialization, their mother’s coming of age during Reagan era discourses on the Black home as a site of pathology, and their birth in the early nineties as Black income inequality and residential segregation was entrenched, and mass incarceration of African American men in Wisconsin surged. In the 1960s, U.S. federal policymakers scapegoated and pathologized Black women and the Black home, contending that African Americans were unable to meet the heteronormative demands of the state that would mark them as fully participatory citizens of white U.S. democratic practice. This project uses Milwaukee to demonstrate that this “failure” to achieve heteronormativity indicates the inherent queerness of Black life because of the ability to find joy and meaning in everyday acts of living within the Black home. Despite how Black life has been jeopardized by segregation, urban renewal, deindustrialization, and antiblack violence, African Americans within and outside of the city have still managed to make rich interior lives for themselves that are not predicated on the proximity to the abjection of living in the city and within the U.S. body politic but rather refuses that abjection.