Replacements
By David Steffen
There was a 1980s midwest rock band (with Paul Westerberg) called The Replacements. There is also the football film, “The Replacements” with Keanu Reeves. How about hormone replacement? Hair replacement? As a matter of fact, my 10 year old Jetta has lots of replacement parts. It can all be a little confusing these days, given everything we’re hearing in the media. But let me back up.
My friends (and some of the regular readers of the Lighthouse Peddler) know that I was a midwest boy, growing up in Wisconsin. I began singing and playing guitar at age 10, and over the next ten years found myself playing gigs in all sorts of places. During those years, the musicians I worked with, or the band I was a part of changed. Sometimes it was just a name change, other days it was some of the players coming and going.
Memorable venues from those days included predictable places like large halls at churches and schools, as well as bars, taverns and clubs. We regularly played the Italian Village restaurant in Milwaukee, a restaurant that was transformed at 8:00pm to become a dance club and bar called the “Ivy A-Go-Go”. There were numerous gigs at CYO dances inside various Roman Catholic school halls, YMCAs, college mixers and so on. I’ve never forgotten playing the Brat Stop in Kenosha—that’s brat as in “bratwurst”; or the dance/concert at the Naval Training Center at Great Lakes, Illinois, where we opened for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. We played at one club whose owner placed a permanent screen of chicken wire across the width of the stage, and from floor to ceiling. Although it didn’t happen to us, I learned from the club’s manager that members of the audience would sometimes throw their drinks or empty beer bottles at the stage if they didn’t like the band.
While not an absolute, one of the common threads for our gigs was that the vast majority of our audiences were white, sometimes with a recognizable (but not significant) mix of brown.
The South Side of Milwaukee included Bay View, which was not a separate town but rather a collection of neighborhoods near Lake Michigan. Smaller still were enclaves within Bay View, and we all knew who lived where based on European lineage and language. There were no demarcation lines, and none were needed. I could stand on my front porch and tell you that this area is where the “German” families settled, and from that vantage point tell you where the other ethnic groups settled. Pointing northeast, I’d tell you that “the Italian families lived ‘over there,’ about 6 blocks away.” Pointing west, I’d explain that “the Polish families lived over there”, and so on. Whatever Milwaukee had become during the 20th century, Bay View, at least, was representative of the “melting pot.”
Local churches conducted Sunday services in English, and many of them offered at least one weekly service in a language other than English. As late as the 1970s my church continued to offer a service in German, sandwiched between the two English services.
Insulating many on the south side of Milwaukee was the Menomonee River, which created a large, natural valley—almost one-mile wide—with only a series of mile-long viaducts connecting the city's north and south sides at four spots: 6th Street, 16th Street, 27th Street and 35th Street. Like many cities, there was a Black and non-Black divide, and the Menomonee River Valley became an obstacle, a barrier to any idea of open housing.
At Bay View High School on Milwaukee’s south side (where I went to school), there were no Black students until one teen, who lived on the north side, was enrolled, requiring Joanne to make the daily commute from the city’s heavily Black north side. Some may remember hearing about the city being clearly segregated, and the racial tensions of the time were more than a little bump in the road. As riots came to Milwaukee, activists like the late Father James Groppi became nationally known and activism was growing. As the Wisconsin Historical Society recounts:
“Riots broke out in Milwaukee in 1967, and four people were killed. Something had to change. Father Groppi and Vel Phillips led protestors and civil rights workers for two hundred nights of marching. Vel was on the Milwaukee City Council. She was trying to get a Fair Housing Law passed so African Americans could live wherever they wanted to live. Night after night, the group marched from the Inner Core and crossed the 16th Street Viaduct, and every night their march ended in South Milwaukee. Angry white men and women lined the streets. They swore at the marchers and threw rocks and bottles at them.”
I was working for WUWM, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s radio station in the summer of 1967, and I remember being stopped by national guard troops while attempting to drive through the city's downtown, gathering news for the radio station. Times were tense, and chalk it up (maybe) to my youthful naivety, but speaking only for me, I finally began to understand the depth of bias in my hometown.
When I was a young teenager, I had a conversation with my mother about extended family. My maternal grandparents divorced before I was born, so it was years before I started to put the pieces together. When I asked my mother if my maternal grandmother was still alive, she replied with a simple “yes”. She later explained that my grandmother lived in Keshena, Wisconsin, “on the res”. In short, whether by marriage or by blood, a part of my family’s heritage is tied to a native American tribe. The Menomonee. And that was that.
This all brings me back to the current great right-wing racist trope, that today’s immigrants are replacing “real Americans”. There seems to be a complete denial of “American History” from the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 through the next 400 years. Native Americans were all impacted by European expansion into North America. Treaties were made and broken, with regularity. Whole tribes were moved from ancestral lands to “somewhere else”. Subsequent emigres to the United States were Irish, English, German, Italian, Dutch and many others, as well as Chinese and, of course, African slaves. At some point each of those groups became a pariah here, some of that manifested as “simple” racism, and some other prior established groups, were targeted with legislation. And let’s remember that a fair starting point for bias can be found in the United States Constitution’s Three-fifths Compromise (Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3), which declared that slaves were only 3/5 of a person, not human but the property of White slave owners. And that wasn’t changed until after the Civil War.
These days the right-wing bludgeon is “Replacement Theory” which promotes the false idea that immigrants are being “brought in” to the United States to increase the Democratic Party’s voting block.
And here we are in America in 2022. It has become obvious that a difference of race and/or ethnicity is now accompanied by a difference of core beliefs. Beliefs are one thing, facts are something else. Almost 80 years ago, Bernard Baruch offered this: “People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to accept a corollary to Baruch: comedian Ron White’s assertion that “You can’t fix stupid.”
We can disagree about almost anything, but what has changed is an inability to accept facts, and Replacement Theory is not a fact. It is all about dividing America, not bringing us together. And that has to change.
