I was stumbling around on Twitter a few months ago, when I saw a tweet from one of my favorite local follows, Mia Shea.
Mia’s tweet was a question that shook me to my 414 core: "Is Milwaukee a community of haters?"
Now, this wasn’t the first time I’ve heard that sentiment. Friends who’ve left the city for greener pastures talk about it all the time: the way some of us put each other down. Or can’t, and won’t, celebrate each others’ wins. My own family has talked about it, about our own family. But I’ve never heard it posed as such a clear, definitive question. Are we a bunch of haters?
The question started for Mia when she moved back to the city a few years after college and was looking for recommendations on Reddit.
"I had posted something on Reddit and I think I was just getting some interesting, like, mixed responses that felt like very gatekeeping," she recalls.
Mia says people were being unusually aggressive in withholding information. It got her thinking.
"It begs the question like on a broader level, is it a social media thing? Or is it truly just like the people that live here?"
I decided to look into that question for Bubbler Talk. I looked into online spaces first. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, even TikTok. Honestly, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. Comment sections gone wild. Not a good intention to be found from here to the Mississippi. Fact is, our online ecosystem is filled with hate from everywhere. Milwaukee didn’t feel special.
But the second part of her question: "Or is it truly just the people that live here?"
Lets talk about geopsychology
Brian Ohm is a professor emeritus at UW-Madison. He’s done outreach with communities across the state for close to three decades.
"Every Wisconsin community has its own personality, all shaped by the history, the natural features of the community and the people that live there," he says.
It's called geopsychology. It’s the idea that places have distinct personalities or DNA. Brian says there are a few key indicators that make up a place’s DNA.
"The physical characteristics of a community, the physical spatial layout of the city, and the socio economic aspect, and the culture of a place and how the immigrant population brought in their traditions and customs and shaped communities."
On average, geopsychology studies say, Milwaukee is more hospitable than much of the country. But, Brian says there’s another indicator worth considering in Milwaukee’s DNA.
"Trauma will shape a place."Brian Ohm
"Trauma will shape a place," he says. "Trauma can take many different forms. Chicago is very much shaped by the Chicago fire. Social movements and things like racial tensions that communities face. And the Milwaukee metropolitan region is one of the most segregated regions in the U.S. and that creates a level of tension, and is a difficult issue to deal with, and is certainly part of the personality of a place."
Cities are shaped by their history of police violence, underfunded schools and redlining that creates poverty in communities of color. This is also Milwaukee’s history, or part of our DNA. It can make us predisposed to feeling slighted.
I started asking around: do other people feel like the city is full of haters?
"Duh," was Danita's Graham's response. "And I’m saying that like, that’s the short version because you cannot have a total community without some haters. I don’t think in totality Milwaukee is full of haters, but there are some haters within the community."
Danita is a social worker, therapist, consultant and so many things. She thinks the reason why some people are haters is because trauma creates ripple effects that take root in the way we think about ourselves. She calls it an impoverished or scarcity mindset. And Danita says that mindset is contagious.
"That incredibly impacts the next generation or surrounding generations of that person," she says. "For instance if you have a grandmother that maybe was slighted in all kinds of ways, seeing the world through a negative lens, maybe had a negative partner or relationship, didn’t go too well and is single, maybe some habits, maybe some health things, all of these compound and maybe she’s not too kind. Maybe she doesn’t have too many positive things to say about achievements that you’ve made or doesn’t show up."
Knowing this matters. It matters because stepping out of hater-nation, as she calls it, starts with self-awareness and a want to do different—do better. And for people she knows, it can take years to do things differently, or to make different decisions.
To recap so far: Yes, Milwaukee has some haters. But it’s as unavoidable living here as drinking lead in our water. We can do better, it just takes time. And tools.
Milwaukee can heal
Gabe Charles is the board president of the Peace Learning Center of Milwaukee. She says, it's easier to be a hater when you don't feel good about yourself.
"Another way to define hater is you yuck people’s yum, right?" Gabe says. "You want to make them feel bad about themselves so you feel better about yourself. You don’t want to feel intimidated by people so you bring them down. You don’t want to feel like someone’s better than you so you bring them down. And of course if you’re not secure in who you are as a person, that’s such a natural response, especially if you haven’t been taught to operate in other ways."
At the Peace Learning Center, or PLC, Gabe and her facilitators share other ways to respond — ways to check in with yourself before taking action. She calls these “peace tools” and “peace building strategies.” The center primarily works with students, but the curriculum can be adapted for all different groups.
There is a reason why the PLC starts with kids, and it has a lot to do with what young people are getting, and not getting
"What they’re getting is just to be told not to do something," Gabe says. "But what they’re not getting is, 'How can I feel OK about the things that go wrong in my life? How can I go up to someone who hurt my feelings and try to resolve that?' How can I be self aware and learn when I hurt someone’s feelings, be OK, resolve that in myself and be able to say I’m sorry?'"
"If the culture directly or indirectly drives division or drives competition, it’s not so much of who we are, but that we’re a function of the place in which we reside."Walter Lanier
How do we start to identify emotions? And not just identify them, but talk about them in a meaningful, productive way. We could all use those tools. When I asked Gabe if I could see what this actually looked like, she sent me to sit in on a workshop with some local fifth graders.
When I got to the center in Riverwest, there was a group of about 20 kids sitting, huddled around two facilitators and a white board. The board had words on it, tools the students had been learning all day, things like box breathing, getting outside for a short walk, the three C’s: communication, cooperation and compromise. And using “I” messages to express hurt and then giving a full apology.
Two students stand up in front of the class. The first student uses an "I" message to share how something the other student did made them feel. I feel [blank] when [blank.] And then they seek resolution, I want [blank.]
"I feel bad when you said I have no friends and no family," one student says to another. "I want you to say sorry."
The second student listens, ideally without getting defensive, and uses the rephrase technique to show they’ve listened.
"Are you saying that you feel sad when I said you have no friends and no family?" the second student says.
"Yes," the first student responds.
And finally, the last part of this exercise is a full apology. Taking accountability for their actions and committing to do better.
"I’m sorry that I said you have no friends and no family. Next time, I’ll think about my actions and words before I do them," the second student says, to a round of applause from the group.
Chelsea Munch is one of the facilitators of these roleplaying sessions. Chelsea doesn’t see Milwaukee as a community of haters. Like Mia, maybe online we are, but not in person. What she sees is people who might be in pain. I heard something similar when I asked someone else if we’re a community of haters.
Not haters, hurters
"I said it’s a community of hurters," says Walter Lanier.
Walter is a pastor in Milwaukee and longtime community activist and lawyer.
"My point there was that there’s a lot of pain in the city and there’s pain...from a deindustrialized city, a segregated city, a city with a long history of racist and oppressive structures and we’re a function of the culture," he says. "So if the culture directly or indirectly drives division or drives competition that it’s not so much of who we are, but that we’re a function of the place in which we reside.
Simply put, people are products of their environment. And depending on race, socio-economic background, family history, any of us could be at risk of being a hater
And this hate doesn’t stop with us. It permeates to our family units and the blocks and neighborhoods we live in, ultimately to the city we call home. Walter says healing from our hurts means getting uncomfortable. Like with the PLC, addressing conflict head on, something even he admits he’s not great at. And if we do find a way to level up from a culture of hate, he thinks we could become a community of builders.
"We have a ton of geniuses here, but we’re so divided here because of the culture of the city…And if we can improve the culture of the city for all people and create places in the city to lament, to share, to get the hurt off their chest and they heal, then there are opportunities for them to reconcile and become whole and their best selves," Walter says. "Then after that we can become our best community….then we have the potential to be great. I really believe that."
From a community of haters to healed. I like that. It’s easy to point to the community as being, I don’t know, an environment ripe for creating haters. But we’ve also got to own our stories. The ways we’ve wanted to see people fail. Or cringed at their successes. We have to recognize, and change, those patterns if we’re going to see their wins as all of our wins.
When I talked to Danita Graham, the therapist and counselor, she told me about how big of a hater she used to be — everything bothered her. Her family, her relationships, her job. But what she was doing was projecting her own hurt.
"One day, I realized I was the biggest hater in my life and I wanted to do something different," she says. "So I committed myself to becoming self-aware, self-loving, self-committed and allowing that to guide me in how I navigated the outer world, the community...Above all else, first love yourself."
So is Milwaukee a community of haters? Maybe hurters is more like it. But we have the soil, the people and the tools to do better.
Online, well, I guess I’ll just say good luck!
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