“They’re kind of the low-lifes, in my mind. Because they aren’t trying.” Barbara Thekan a white resident of suburban Waukesha describing Milwaukeeans

MILWAUKEE—On weekday afternoons, Gaulien “Gee” Smith, a prominent Milwaukee barber and businessman, walks out of the Gee’s Clippers shop on North Doctor Martin Luther King Dr., steps into his shiny new limited-edition pickup truck, and begins the 20-minute drive to a parallel universe.

He heads north. Past vacant lots and vacant storefronts. Past the boundary of the city’s north side, where almost all of his customers and almost everybody else is black. He crosses into the suburb of Glendale. The stares begin.

Glendale is home to an Apple Store and a Brooks Brothers and a Swarovski. And white people. A whole lot of white people. Smith, a charismatic 45-year-old black man with a salt-and-pepper goatee, doesn’t need the probing eyes as a reminder.

The white people are why he’s there in the first place.

Smith makes the trip across the invisible race border to pick up two of his sons, one from a private school and one from an elite public school. He chose the schools, in part, for their whiteness.

“I refused to ever send my child to an all-black school,” he said. “Because I know this is not a black world.”

He has considerable authority on the subject. He has spent his whole life in Milwaukee, the most segregated place in America.

A city divided

Segregation. The word conjures images of the Deep South, a Jim Crow past of snarling police dogs and whites-only toilets. In fact, it is a national problem that has long outlasted the era of openly racist law. It persists, five decades after the U.S. government passed the anti-discrimination Fair Housing Act. It persists under the country’s first black president. It persists in a place barely farther south than Toronto.

“It feels like sometimes, in some ways, when you come to Milwaukee, you went back in time 60 years,” said Ansaar Gandy, 29, a black bartender and demolition worker.

Milwaukee itself is deeply divided, its road overpasses serving as racial barriers. But the most startling divide is between the city and its suburbs.

Milwaukee, population 600,000, is poor, strongly Democratic and 40 per cent black. Its suburbs and exurbs, slightly more populous than the city and known as the “WOW counties,” are wealthy, strongly Republican and white. Exceptionally white: 96 per cent white and 1 per cent black in Washington County, 95 per cent white and 2 per cent black in Ozaukee County, 94 per cent white and 1 per cent black in Waukesha County.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in any other city. Where you can go under a bridge or cross a freeway and it’s just — completely segregated,” said Sal Blando, 24, a white Waukesha resident and a friend of Gandy. They met at the chic Middle Eastern restaurant where Gandy works, one of Milwaukee’s most diverse hangouts. “I think it’s just ingrained in us, from the time we’re born, that you’ve just gotta stick with your group of people. Which is absolutely the most ridiculous thing ever.”

They don’t even share their shared joys. One Sunday this fall, an all-white crowd jammed into Matty’s, a sports bar in Blando’s Waukesha city of New Berlin, to cheer on the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. Twenty-five minutes away, at the sleek Skybox sports bar Gee Smith opened in Milwaukee next to Gee’s, the Packers crowd was entirely black.

The city has pockets of diversity, notably in the hip Riverwest district. But there are so few white visitors to the north side that a white woman approaching a house is liable to be mistaken for a social worker. Black visitors to the WOW counties are often met with conspicuous suspicion.

“It’s just where we live. It’s sad,” Smith said, resigned, in a booth at the bar. “I don’t have to deal with it as much because of where I work. I’m around African-Americans 98 per cent of the time.”

Riches out of reach

This is common. Researchers from the Brookings Institution and elsewhere have deemed the Milwaukee region the single most segregated metropolitan area in the country. Other academics quibble with the precise rankings. But there is no disputing the despair of a black community surrounded on all sides by inaccessible white riches.

The disparities are vast. The Milwaukee region, said Prof. Marc Levine, director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development, has America’s biggest gap between black and white employment rates, second-biggest gap between black and white poverty rates, and one of the biggest gaps between black and white incarceration rates.

Segregation is a symptom of these problems. More importantly, segregation is one of the reasons why the problems exist.

The separation of whites and blacks isn’t just a moral shame. It makes black lives worse in tangible ways. The isolation of Milwaukee’s African-Americans in impoverished all-black neighbourhoods stunts their earning prospects in a region where the suburbs are generating all of the job growth. It forces black children who don’t have prosperous parents like Smith into troubled schools. In a city with 145 homicides last year — Toronto, with a population four times larger, had 56 — it heightens their risk of early death. And it lets suburban politicians safely ignore their interests.

“Segregation is definitely part of this witches’ brew of racial inequality in Milwaukee,” Levine said. “And I’d say it’s both a cause and an effect.”

For a while, Milwaukee followed roughly the same racial trajectory as other cities in the Rust Belt. Europeans established ethnic enclaves. Blacks arrived from the South. Racist landlords, lenders, realtors and neighbourhood pacts confined them to particular urban areas. The manufacturing sector collapsed. Black poverty and crime spiked. Whites moved to the suburbs, taking tax revenue with them.

The difference is what happened next. In cities like Baltimore and Chicago, some affluent and middle-income blacks eventually made their way to the suburbs themselves. Milwaukee’s black community, which arrived later and accumulated less wealth, stayed put.

Or, maybe, got shut out.

John Henson signed a $44-million contract with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks in early October. Two weeks later, he tried to buy a Rolex.

Henson, a skinny 6-foot-11 black man, drove to a store in the suburb of Whitefish Bay. Before he could enter, a white employee locked the door, called 911, and hid in a back room. Henson’s immense wealth could not shield him from Milwaukee’s black experience.

Black people are no longer kept out of the Milwaukee suburbs by formalized racism. Some say they simply don’t want to live in the suburbs. But much of the reason, say Gandy, Smith and others, is that they are made to feel so unwelcome when they go.

By retail workers, by the police, by homeowners. Speaking to a white reporter, some suburban whites casually described Milwaukee as it is sometimes depicted on the region’s popular conservative radio shows: a cesspool of depravity and dependency. It was as if the people of Oakville and Aurora were explaining that the people of Toronto were lawless degenerates.

Bill Schimmels, a lifelong Waukesha resident who works in engineering, was picking up his partner at a suburban mall that offers Ethan Allen furniture and artisan gelato. Asked what he thought of Milwaukeeans, Schimmels, 64, didn’t hesitate: “fat, dumb and happy,” he said, “ignorant” moochers “just not smart enough” to understand that the Democratic politicians are buying them off with “freebies.”

“They’re kind of the low-lifes, in my mind. Because they aren’t trying,” his partner, Barbara Thekan, 68, added pleasantly.

The unhelpful governor

Even Milwaukee’s hardest-striving black people find it difficult to improve their circumstances. Segregation is partly about personal hostility, but it is largely about public policy. Intentionally or not, the transportation and housing policies of the state and the suburbs double as racial fortifications.

Wisconsin is run by Gov. Scott Walker, the union-busting conservative Republican. His support base is the Milwaukee suburbs he used to represent as a state legislator. For more than 20 years, he has fought proposals that would make it easier for city residents to get out there.

Walker and other suburban politicians have fended off proposals for an urban-suburban light rail line. They have eliminated or shortened regional bus routes, by one estimate cutting off access to “at least 40,000 jobs” over six years. Last year, it took a lawsuit from a black advocacy group for Walker to agree to set aside $14 million, in a $1.7-billion highway renovation project, to fund three new bus routes to suburban job centres. Temporarily.

Black people, even middle-income black people, can’t just move close to the jobs. For one, they often can’t get mortgages they should qualify for. Milwaukee, Levine said, still has one of the country’s widest racial gaps in loan-denial rates. Well-off blacks are turned down about as often as very-low-income whites.

Black renters face even greater obstacles. Proposals for affordable suburban housing have drawn vitriol from white homeowners. Even when it’s pretty housing.

New Berlin is a tidy city of 40,000. Between an empty swath of “AVAILABLE BUILDING LAND” and a neighbourhood of cookie-cutter houses with two-car garages, there is a new brown-brick lowrise complex that looks like a condo at a ski resort.

It cost the city’s white mayor his political career.

The mayor, Jack Chiovatero, came out in support of a proposal for the rental development in 2010. He soon found his car windows shot out, a sign reading “n----- lover” on his lawn, and a deluge of angry voice mails. “Our city is filled with prejudice and bigoted people,” he lamented in a leaked email. He apologized, then flip-flopped to oppose the project; New Berlin voters still tried to recall him from office, then defeated him in the next election. The complex — which ended up being filled mostly by white people — was approved only after President Barack Obama’s Justice Department sued the city for discrimination.

Obama, criticized by some black leaders for devoting insufficient political capital to black improvement, is making a late push to fight segregation. His administration announced last year that local officials would be required to study housing patterns for racial bias, announce the results and set goals for improvement. In extreme cases, segregated cities can be denied federal grants.

A major step. But Obama will leave office next January with Rust Belt segregation almost as deeply entrenched as when he took office. And there is only so much even an activist federal government can do when so much of the problem is shaped by the policies of resistant state and local governments.

Eradicating Milwaukee’s segregation will require politicians to fix virtually everything: the schools, the economy, the courts. Even the driving laws.

With so little transit, a car is often a necessity for a suburban job. So, therefore, is a licence. In Wisconsin, any unpaid driving fine or fee can result in a two-year licence suspension — more than twice as long as the suspension for a drunk-driving conviction.

Tens of thousands of black Milwaukee residents are being denied the opportunity to make a legal living because they’re short $100 or less. An astonishing one in two black men in Milwaukee County, which includes the city and its inner suburbs, has a suspended licence today.

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“It’s crazy,” said Nichole Yunk Todd, director of policy and research for Wisconsin Community Services, which helps drivers get reinstated. “I understand why we all need to have current registration. I get that. But is that really worth putting this family out on the street because they can’t go to work?”

Black sheriff, white policies

Many suburban whites have little appetite for leniency. For anything. Walker, who pushed as a legislator for longer prison sentences, has never once pardoned a criminal as governor. David Clarke, a black man elected sheriff of Milwaukee County on the strength of his right-wing white support, has been described as a “black Rush Limbaugh with a badge.” In October, Clarke declared that police brutality does not exist in America. Then he said the Black Lives Matter movement would soon “join forces with ISIS” to destroy the country.

Not a black world, even with a black sheriff, even with a black president. So Milwaukee’s blacks adjust to the world they have.

Gee Smith holds up his clothes, in a conspicuous no-thief-here gesture, when he shops at suburban malls. He is excessively nice to white people at suburban gas stations, “to just make them feel really comfortable.” And he ignores those Glendale stares. Forty-five years into his life in Milwaukee, he said, he is long since used to them.

Diverging numbers

88%

White employment rate, metropolitan Milwaukee (2012):

58%

Black employment rate

8%

White poverty rate, metropolitan Milwaukee (2012)

39%

Black poverty rate

1.6%

White residents living in extreme-poverty neighbourhoods (2010)

32.9%

Black residents living in extreme-poverty neighbourhoods

0.9%

White adult-male incarceration rate, Wisconsin (2010)

11.9%

Black adult-male incarceration rate

$62,100

Median white household income, metropolitan Milwaukee (2012):,

$26,036

Median black household income

24.2%

Average poverty rate of a school attended by white Milwaukee student (2009-2010)

78.1%

Average poverty rate of a school attended by black Milwaukee student