Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Abstract

This article analyzes how the spatial metaphor of 53206, a zip code within the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, connects with crises in the legitimacy of policing and politicians’ claims to care about Black lives. It examines how, in the context of deepening racialized poverty, ongoing mobilizations against police violence, and increasing rates of violent crime, liberal and conservative rhetoric about 53206 largely obscures the roles that decades of deindustrialization and labor assaults, metropolitan racial and wealth segregation, and public school and welfare restructuring play in producing racial and class inequality to instead emphasize racializing tropes about ‘Black-on-Black crime,’ broken homes, and uncaring Black communities. Situating the examination within critical analysis of urban poverty, geographic scholarship on the racialization of space, and critical criminology, the authors consider the salience of the term territorial stigmatization as a means to understand how historical and contemporary processes of racialized capitalism shape Milwaukee’s urban and social divides. They argue that discursive constructions of 53206 and the rhetorical posture of saving Black lives deployed by elected officials have had the effect of entrenching policing power while further rendering neighborhoods like Milwaukee’s Northside as already dead and dying.