![]() I would eventually learn that whenever I wanted to enter the doors of the lives of non-book characters, such as my very real neighbors in Milwaukee, I would need to be invited in.Īs someone who has had multiple opportunities to be a non-black Black history tour guide, I often thought about whether I have been invited or whether I am breaking and entering. It would be but an entirely different – and more profound – thing to enter the lives of living people. ![]() Instead, what I had been doing was more akin to breaking and entering, cracking open the pages of Alexie and Baldwin and demanding to be legitimized. The books, though, were not mirrors but doors into their worlds. When I would read non-white authors like Sherman Alexie or James Baldwin and learn from their stories of being from the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene reservation or from Harlem, New York, I confess I probably thought I could truly understand the pathos of their lives.Īs an idealistic student of literature, I wanted to live vicariously through these authors, to let their pages be a mirror for my own developing self-image. I had also recently come out as gay and was finally away from home and free to explore my authentic self, so I felt I could authentically commiserate with authors like Oscar Wilde and Alice Walker (although her gender and sexuality was something I could read about but never embody). All I knew that first day in Milwaukee is that I looked different from mostly everyone at the Capitol Court Target.Īs I began grad school and was introduced to a new word but familiar concept – Otherness – I determined that a primary literary focus would be on stories about individuals navigating spaces which had not been created for them. It would actually be years until I even learned about it. Needless to say, neither of us had a clue about Milwaukee’s segregation history. ![]() They were afraid of, you know, gangs and such. My parents had leveraged my Japanese heritage to get me placed in Ingraham High School on the north side (which was the only school that offered the language) instead of Garfield High School on the south side, whose population was predominantly black, Latinx, and Asian. We were both familiar with Seattle’s segregation issues, and not necessarily in ways of which I am proud. My Japanese father (married to my Italian mother from Connecticut) and I didn’t think much of this observation other than to note it. It only took a few moments to realize that we were the only non-black customers. I needed a few items for my new apartment on Marquette University’s campus, where I would begin graduate school. The first day I arrived in Milwaukee in the summer of 1994, after a two-thousand-mile drive from my hometown of Seattle with my father, we looked up the nearest Target in the phone book and headed to what used to be called Capitol Court. I have been thinking about my identity as a non-black resident in the most segregated city in the country for a long time.
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