Lake Effect essayist Avi Lank sees some unusual parallels between his own career and what Milwaukee is currently working through as a community:
In 1974, when I was hired as a reporter by the old Milwaukee Sentinel, I was working at a newspaper in Binghamton, N.Y. Just a few weeks earlier, another Binghamton reporter had been hired by the Sentinel. That really upset me because I thought that reporter had stolen the job I wanted. Turns out he was a Wisconsin native and UW graduate. When I learned that, the sting of his being hired before me lessened. I was a native of upstate New York who had never been in Milwaukee prior to coming to the Sentinel. I could see how the differences in our background may have tipped the scale. And since then, he has become a trusted friend and colleague.
When I arrived at the Sentinel, I learned that the reporter I had been hired to replace had been Jewish, just as I am. There were only two or three other Jews in the newsroom. After a few weeks at the paper, I got some of my first feedback. Editors told me I was being “too Eastern” in my approach to news gathering. The term was not further defined, but I took it to mean I was being too brash and aggressive. A few weeks after that, a prominent rabbi in Milwaukee died under strange circumstances. I was assigned the story, which included interviewing the man’s unfortunate widow.
The editors who hired, critiqued and assigned my stories are all decent, broad-minded, honorable people. I was able to work well and mostly happily with them for decades. They always easily accommodated my religious requirements – even as I am sure they were happy to have a volunteer for the Christmas shifts. But it has since occurred to me that each of these occurrences – being hired to replace another Jewish reporter, being told I was being too aggressive in my news gathering and being assigned to cover the death of a rabbi – might mean they were pigeonholing me by my ethnicity. I say might because there is no way of knowing.
If they were doing such stereotyping, it was subconscious. And in the universe of slights, these happenings of more than 40 years ago are minor, especially as compared with the challenges facing African-Americans and Muslims in the US today. While I have an ethnically specific name, that I am a Jew is not the first thing people notice about me. I am not looked at suspiciously when I enter a store. And I can’t remember the last time the police pulled over my car. Still, I got to thinking about all of this following the recent disturbances in Milwaukee after the police shot a young black man.
I do not know the conscious and unconscious forces at work in the minds of all those involved. But examining whether the same type of ethnic stereotypes that appeared to be behind some of my formative experiences at the old Sentinel also are present in Milwaukee today is important. That I can even think I was being stereotyped or hired as part of a quota system is as dangerous to the fabric of society as if I actually were. To make progress as a society, as a nation and as human beings, it is incumbent upon each of us to search deeply inside and then to acknowledge and work on erasing such unconscious biases.
Essayist Avi Lank is a former reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel and later the Journal Sentinel. He’s also coauthor of the recent book, The Man Who Painted the Universe.
