Downtown Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Transformations in the Heartland: Life and Race in Oshkosh 

Simon Krejsa

March 18, 2010 

Oshkosh is a city in East-Central Wisconsin, celebrated on websites as "Oshkosh on the Water" with pictures of lakes Winnebago and Butte des Morts, a college-town that is home to the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and its 11–12 thousand students. The city is most famous or best known for the EAA, the Experimental Aircraft Association, whose week-long "fly-in" each summer attracts 200,000 to 300,000 enthusiasts and other attendees, many of them from other nations. In bars and stores and restaurants, I've heard Australian, English, Irish, German, and French accents. I moved to Oshkosh in June of 2005 and also lived there for a few years during the 1970s and 80s. 

According to a 2008 estimate, as reported in City-Data.com, the population is now 63,679. In 2000, according to the census, Oshkosh was 91.8% "White non-Hispanic," 1.7% Hispanic," 2.4% "other Asian," 1% two or more races, 0.8% American Indian, 0.5% other race, and 2.2% Black.  

City-data.com is rife with comments describing and comparing cities and giving advice to people who plan to relocate. In dozens of comments, Oshkosh is compared to Appleton, almost always unfavorably. Appleton, a city of 70,305 some 20 miles north of Oshkosh, is cleaner, newer, "nicer," a far better downtown, a large mall for dining and shopping, more restaurants, stores, sources of entertainment. By contrast, Oshkosh is older, dirtier, more blue-collar, more "riff-raff," more "ghetto." By "ghetto," the commentator is referring not to Blacks but to a "central city" with "tons of dilapidated houses."

Though almost as large as Appleton and home to the state's third largest university population, Oshkosh doesn't have a mall. And the downtown is so small and old that an entire block on main street, lined with old stores and an ex-bank that opened in 1927, was closed to traffic for five days in April of 2008 to film a robbery scene for Public Enemies, a depression-era movie starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger. The largest new building in the downtown area, and in some ways the most impressive architecturally, is the jail, euphemistically called "the City of Oshkosh Safety Building." 

"Racism" and Diversity

And, of course, diversity and race are also discussed. Questions are asked. Is Oshkosh "racist"? Is it "welcoming" to and "safe" for Blacks and other minorities? Predictably, many commentators decry the "lack of diversity" in Oshkosh and the "racism" of its White population. Everyone agrees on the "lack of diversity" but some dispute the charges of intense and pervasive "racism." 

No one comments on how non-Whites, especially Blacks, have made the city less safe for Whites. No mention of gangs and crime and Black-on-White violence. Given the zeitgeist, explicit concern for the interests of Whites as a group in relation to Blacks and other minorities is ipso facto "racist" to everyone but a small minority of race realists and "White nationalists." Did anyone say there is too much "diversity," or that Oshkosh is a worse place to live because it has roughly twice as many Blacks as Appleton? If so, their remarks were either blocked or summarily deleted. But not this comment by a Black female and ex-student at UW-Oshkosh.  

Please keep away from Oshkosh. It's just full of rednecks who think Black folks are the devil. I was shot at my first week there while going to college just because of my skin tone. Most people in Oshkosh have missing teeth and try to recite the Bible to you as soon as you walk in a restaurant or store. (city-data.com, 5-21-2009.)

Someone replied: "This person is obviously mentally unstable."  

Perhaps she heard the engine of a car "backfire" and, given her anti-White sentiments and hallucinations, thought "rednecks" were shooting at her? If a Black coed were "shot at" during her first week at UW-Oshkosh, her ordeal would have been on the front page of the New York Times and featured on NPR. 

But it's far more likely that she's lying in order to demonize Whites and Oshkosh and to advance the myth of "systemic racism" and Black victimization, the paranoid illusion of an America in which Blacks are in constant danger of being assaulted and murdered by Whites. In reality, of course, exactly the opposite is true for tens of millions of Whites and has been so for the last 50 years. 

More typical is this lament by NicePolishBoy: "There is little diversity. Racism is quite common but on a subtle level." 

Ironically, a population whose "lack of diversity" so vexes and saddens NicePolishBoy and many others now includes every race and sub-race on earth with the possible exception of Aborigines and New Guineans. And dozens of non-White ethnicities. 

In my travels around town, I see many Blacks, mulattos, mestizos, Amerindians, Latinos, Native Americans, and sundry Asians. The Asians include not only people who were once called "Orientals" — Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, etc. — but also those of Indian and Middle Eastern descent. 

Here's an example of how my life in Oshkosh has been enriched by diversity: For two or three months in 2009, a family of Muslim Arabs or Persians(?), lived in the first floor apartment directly beneath me. I could often hear them praying or chanting or whatever during the night and playing music in a strange foreign language. The husband was always slamming the door and going outside to smoke or getting into his car and driving away and then soon coming back. I never saw the wife, and only once did I see the children. Then, suddenly, they were gone. I didn't even see and/or hear them leave. I was so happy I felt like kneeling and bowing to Mecca.

According to the 2000 census, there are nearly as many Latinos as Blacks in Oshkosh. And there are more "Asians" than Blacks. Most of these are Hmong. Almost every day, I see dozens of Blacks but far fewer Latinos and Hmong. And almost every day I see Blacks I haven't seen before.  [more]