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  • Lessons from the Heartland. A Turbulent Half-Century. Public Education in an Iconic American City by Barbara J. Miner
  • Juan J. Colomina
Barbara J. Miner. Lessons from the Heartland. A Turbulent Half-Century. Public Education in an Iconic American City. New York: The New Press, 2013. 305 + xiv pp.

Even though for a long time governments and different interests kept the degree of exclusion from the public, everybody knows about the terrible history of segregation of this country and how the struggle for civil and educational rights developed. A lot of blood was spilled, and a lot of injustices were committed. After all the state and federal improvements and rhetoric that we are not a racist nation (anymore) or that our society has changed, can we be confident in our contemporary society when we speak about the dynamics of politics, race, and education? Yes, we can. But there is a long list of things that have to be addressed before we freely claim this.

Barbara J. Miner’s Lessons from the Heartland points out some of these issues. Although her book focuses on the process of desegregation in Milwaukee District Public Schools, Miner’s view (as a journalist, but also as a subject of historical interaction) offers both a profound analysis of some of the most particularly touching events of Wisconsin’s political reprisals against social movements (especially against African American and Latino populations), and also a fresh approach to some of the most astonishing components of the politics of abandonment and inaction promoted by the different politically conservative elements of the city and the state that easily mirror the spirit of the nation as a whole.

Miner is not only a reporter of the facts. She is involved in most of the parts of the process of desegregation. As a mother living in urban Milwaukee, she took as a plausible option to educate her own children in the Public School System. As one of Milwaukee’s most influential neighbors, as a journalist and editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, she has been advocating for sustainability and success of the public educational system since the schools began desegregating in the 1950’s.

The book has a broad scope: the process of segregation, desegregation, and resegregation occurred in Milwaukee during the period between the 1950’s and the beginning of the 21st century. Miner rigorously examines all the obstacles to achievement of low-income students of color, from the riots of 1957 against the integration of African American in the Public Educational System to the social movements against the so called Walker’s bill in 2011. In an interesting way, she makes comparisons between these historical actions in public education and particular events in sports and/or Milwaukee’s social life. But she also establishes some correlations between the way that African American and Latino populations [End Page 105] have arrived, grown, and lived in Milwaukee’s urban spaces and how they have been demographically distributed in the city’s spaces where they labor and live. One of the most important and statistically relevant aspects of Miner’s book is the reverse relation that it constructs between the racial displacement of the lower economically urban area of the city and the process of industrialization of the city. Even though Milwaukee suffered a huge process of deindustrialization in the 1980’s, the city increased the unemployment of African Americans of the central urban areas of Wisconsin.

The conscious attention on all of these facts is very important since they have been crucial to the educational policy-making of Wisconsin and Milwaukee. Miner’s view highlights the complicity of authorities and certain communities with the denigrating abuse of communities of color, including the corruption of policemen and the racial supremacist inclinations of judges. All this history is not pleasant, and it is often forgotten when speaking about the construction of current American society. But Miner is not afraid of mea culpa and taking responsibility for the reasons why these communities were and continue to be disenfranchised, particularly in Wisconsin but also more extensively in contemporary America.

To summarize, Miner has written a very clever book. The facts here explained from a...

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