I'm worn from years of racial slurs. But I'll no longer be silent about bigotry. | Opinion

https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/columnists/james-causey/2023/11/29/racist-comments-bigotry-black-journalists-milwaukee/ [login to see] 7/
"After covering business and working as an editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for 30 years, I became a columnist in 2008. It was a dream.

As a youth, I always read a newspaper. My parents subscribed to the Milwaukee Sentinel, which I loved reading so I could be an expert on the news quiz at Jackie Robinson Middle School. In high school, I became an intern at the Sentinel. Sometimes, I had to catch a ride to assignments. I never left.

I took on the columnist role after I returned from a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, following in the footsteps of two mentors — Greg Stanford and Eugene Kane, both accomplished Black journalists at the paper.

I wanted to write about issues that affected the community in the spirit of Greg, and I wanted to address inequity and class like Eugene. My boss on the editorial page, Ricardo Pimentel, started me out writing a column every other week.

As you might imagine, readers reacted to my writing. We’d get emails and sometimes phone calls, but it was still a time when we’d regularly get letters in the mail — usually handwritten, sometimes typed out.

Most were positive. A few were uncomplimentary, but one stood out after I wrote a piece critical of Milwaukee Public Schools’ poor reading scores and the lack of urgency to change it.

It was the first time I opened a letter to see myself called the N-word".