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Building Bridges, Not Walls

Becky Steimle
DSHA classes, dialogues, and forums seek to create understanding and effect change. 
“We ask and seek answers to significant issues,” reads the line on the Divine Savior Holy Angels High School website. “How can we build bridges at DSHA, in our city and in the U.S. during divided times?” It’s a heavy question in 2018 America, and real solutions seem very elusive.
 
Yet at DSHA, it’s a question being addressed in a variety of ways, as part of DSHA’s “Building Bridges Not Walls” year-long focus on Catholic social teaching and its applications in today’s world.
 
In Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography class, during Dasher Dialogues, in an interreligious discussion open to the community, a Civil Rights Pilgrimage this May, and through a wealth of additional activities throughout this academic year and beyond, students and others are grappling with difficult questions about racism, its effects and possible solutions. They are invited into deliberate platforms for intentional conversations that may not happen organically. And they are tasked with engaging with cultures different than their own to seek commonality.
 
FAITH CALLS US TO SEEK JUSTICE
Vicar General Father Tim Kitzke posed the question to the student body at the start of the academic year: What can each student, faculty member and staff person do to make their everyday life reflect the most basic tenets of the Catholic faith?
 
What does justice and fairness for all really mean?
 
Believing in equality means we must stand up for equality, says Father Tim. “It’s all about what we can do to make the world a better place.”
 
The Building Bridges focus challenges students and others to reflect. “Each of us – students and the total school community – need to ask ourselves some very real questions,” says Ellen Bartel, DSHA president. “In addition to ‘Am I fair in all I do?’ it must be, ‘Am I actively part of the solution?’
 
“We know that if we are not part of the solution to racism and inequality, we are part of the problem. We’re communicating to our students that it’s up to each of us to not only realize what is right, but to speak up for what is right, and to do what is right. And that you can never stop.”
 
At DSHA, living the spirit of social justice entails the knowledge that achieving justice begins with education and awareness. It is rooted in the mission to “make known the goodness and kindness of Jesus Christ” and to “accept the gospel call to live lives that make a difference.”
 
BIGOTRY STILL EXISTS
"The first thing that hits you about the map she holds are the sheer numbers," says senior Joan Ehrlich.
 
Hundreds of little symbols pepper the U.S. map that Ehrlich’s study group pulled from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website. The students located it this fall as part of their research for “The Geography of Civil Rights” study section in their AP Human Geography class.
 
The small black X’s, red circles, and green triangles look innocent enough, but all stand for hate and division. One symbol – the little black swastika – needs no explanation. There’s one in most states, and many states have several. Another – a red musical note symbolizes a place where would-be composers and musicians can record hate music they write.
 
The list of groups is lengthy: Ku Klux Klan, anti-Muslim, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, anti-immigrant, holocaust denial, black separatists, hate music groups, white supremacists.
 
"Targeted hatred is indeed all around us," says Social Studies faculty member Chris Weiss, DSHA ’70.
 
Her Human Geography course focused on the country’s history of segregation and exclusion. The emphasis on this topic was recommended by the National Council for Geographic Education and culminated in November when presentations were posted in the first floor hallway.
 
In addition to the study of present-day hate groups, students researched the systematic exclusion of black athletes in American baseball, the Civil Rights uprising that took place right here in Milwaukee 50 years ago, and the commonplace lynching of black Americans over a 100-year period – something that still occurred as recently as the 1950s.
 
Weiss’s students discussed the shock they felt and said it was followed by continued dismay, anger and frustration with regard to the depth and magnitude of the inhumanity they saw. All students say the lesson has changed them forever.
 
RACISM IS TAUGHT
Senior Maeve Devine says one of her biggest take-aways is that racism is taught.
 
“We got photographs from the race riots in the late ‘60s, and you see these teenagers – our age – carrying signs with words of real hate. You realize they had to learn that from their parents or others around them, and that it’s handed down from one generation to another. I didn’t know this all existed in Milwaukee. You think of places like Washington, D.C. and Selma as where civil rights protests took place, but it also happened right here.”
 
Devine says it would be nice to think the discrimination experienced at that time is ancient history, but she knows better. “In 2017, Milwaukee was still the most segregated city in America. And in the
United States today, we still see division and racism right in front of us in places like Charlottesville with the neo-Nazi group that marched last summer.”
 
Devine and her collaborative team members, senior Hadley Champe and juniors Emma Kaczynski and Margaret Kurth, say they feel a polarized, harsh national climate brings out the worst in people whose racism or hatred is simmering just below the surface. “That’s the problem,” she says. “The more it appears acceptable, the more it bubbles up and comes out. People who have hated others in secret begin to feel they can now express it.”
 
“WE MUST SPEAK UP”
Weiss says the effect of this lesson on her students has been dramatic. “They simply had no idea of the depth of hate of some of these groups or that it’s going on right now, here in our country, including right here in southeastern Wisconsin.” Students say they realize that intolerance must be met with resistance. “Students have said they hear people say we should bury the past,” says Weiss. “It’s said that people need to ‘get over it.’ The truth is we have to learn from it. That’s how we can really change things.”
 
“You have to speak up,” says Devine. “If someone tells a racist joke, you can’t sit there and act like it’s ok. Say, ‘That’s not funny. That joke is not cool.’ Be that person who says it. When you speak up, you empower other people who may previously have been afraid to speak up themselves. Soon more people will challenge the haters.”
 
A SAFE PLACE TO TALK
“The first day of school,” recalls Emma Kaczynski ‘18, “all we did was talk about our summer reading. It really seemed to make everyone think pretty hard. Everyone has different stories about things that have happened in their lives."
 
Small Great Things, a book by Jodi Picoult, examined racism in America and was read by all DSHA students, faculty and staff over the summer. It set the tone for a year of reflection and discussion. “It made for a safe place to talk,” says Kaczynski.
 
Weiss hopes a school year full of deliberate dialogue germinates, then takes root in the bigger world students will soon enter. “If just a handful of students could change the conversation, there’s a lot of power in that to change perceptions and the future. If you’re helping other people think about what they say and do, then this makes a difference,” says Weiss.
 
A commitment to justice takes courage, especially in today’s tumultuous world, says Weiss.
 
“But I often paraphrase Maya Angelou to my students. ‘When you know better, you have to do better.’”
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    • Jaylin Rivas, DSHA '20, and Viviana Sanchez, DSHA '21, perform at the Our Lady of Guadalpue Mass on December 12.

    • Dr. Lara Geronime poses with a group of seniors following the Small Great Things book discussion on the first day of school in August.

    • Seniors Grace Kaupp and Cookie Topp, along with health and fitness faculty Brian Calhoun, lead a panel during the November Dasher Dialogue.

    • Emma Kacczynski, DSHA '19, and Hadley Champe, DSHA '18, present their AP Human Geography project entitled, "The Civil Rights Movement in Milwaukee: The 1960's."

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