About a week ago I received an email from a friend of mine who works at UW-Milwaukee. She said that she liked my recent blog on conflict resolution, and felt bad that the whole thing happened in the first place. But she also felt somewhat wary, because after the blog was posted, a few prospective deaf students called her to ask if that kind of thing still went on at UWM. “The thing is, Chris,” she said in a subsequent IM conversation, “it happened a long time ago. What about all of our hard work since then? What about all of the improvements we’ve made? Don’t they count for anything?”

She had a point. A lot of people think that the deaf community (“community” in the sense that its fractured factions can still get together long enough to fight) is being overrun by negativity the way it is. So how does another story about a problem—especially a past problem—help anyone?

I asked my friend if I could answer that question with yet another UWM story, and though she’s by now almost certainly warier than she was before, she did say yes. So here goes: During the summer of that same year, 1990, I elected to live in the dorm and work in Milwaukee because it would’ve been as boring as hell to move back home. A deaf buddy of mine, Kevin, was a crew leader for this dormitory work thing called the Project Crew. Sign on with them and you’d basically spend the summer cleaning out three skyscrapers’ worth of old loft posts, beat up couches, and other junk left behind by the students who had just moved out. Kev told me they were hiring so I went and applied… and voila, this dream job became mine!

Anyway it came to pass that one day in July the supervisor of the crews told Kev to pick out six or seven people for a warehouse trip. None of us knew what this meant so Kev explained that UWM owned this huge warehouse about a mile off campus on Kenilworth Avenue. From what I could gather, it used to be a torpedo factory before it was donated as a gift to the University some years back, and had been used for storage ever since. We piled into a van and were there in ten minutes.

After a couple of hours spent moving some extraordinarily heavy metal desks around, we finally got our mid-morning break and went exploring. Kev found a bunch of us rifling through boxes of old Psychology Today magazines dating back to the 1970s—one contained some rather revealing photos depicting nude poolside therapy—and said he wanted to show us something. So we followed him up to the second floor to a wide hallway, and there it was: a water bubbler with the word “COLORED” stenciled above it. At first I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. I looked across the hallway and sure enough, there was another water bubbler (neither of them was hooked up, by the way) with the word “WHITE” stenciled above it in the same bold, black letters.

What can I say? It was a surreal moment. A couple of guys were muttering and touching the letters, as if using some other sense besides their vision would help prove that they were real. Another guy on the crew, a black student, looked on silently. Why hadn’t anyone painted over those words in all of these years? It was 1990, after all. How long had they been left on the walls? Forty years? More?

Now as bad as this all sounds, I also have to tell you something that will initially come across as contradictory. If you had asked me either then or today if—based on this story—I thought UW-Milwaukee was a racist campus, I would have said “no.” Even if you dragged me back to that warehouse and stood there with me as we looked at the word “COLORED” together. It’s not that simple. What if that sign was made when the warehouse was still a torpedo factory, before the building became a gift to the University? If so, what did its existence have to do with UWM? Nothing. Maybe the people who knew the sign was there but didn’t do anything about it bore some measure of responsibility (this wouldn’t include people who mentioned something to their supervisor, as Kev did). But how many people really knew? Enough to implicate an entire campus? Enough to prove that everyone who ever worked or went to school there believed the same things, endorsed the same things, and ignored the same things? That nobody there ever hoped for something different? The vast majority of people who went to UWM probably didn’t even know the warehouse existed!

Not that this is really the point. A painted sign on a wall is hardly a requirement for racism to exist on a given college campus. But if that’s true, let’s say we take that sign off the wall. It’s highly likely that it happened eventually anyway. The warehouse was recently converted into an upscale dormitory complete with studio space for art classes. We can safely assume the layout of the entire building has been probably altered to the extent that not only the signs but also the water bubblers and possibly even the hallway and stairs no longer exist.

What do these changes mean? Are they a good thing? In a sense, yes, because at least one of them shows that time has moved on. Shameful signs depicting a shameful era in Milwaukee’s history have been removed. It doesn’t matter if this happened for a reason as noble as the fight against segregation or for a reason as practical as needing to paint a wall so that a Coke machine could be installed. Or even some combination of the two. The signs are gone and we should be glad, right?

But it’s a good bet that somewhere, someone isn’t glad, and not because he’s a racist. All too often we move on at a price; one this world pays over and over, in one fashion or another, when our stories aren’t told. Suppose that there really is a Coke machine or something standing where that water bubbler used to be. Some kid drops a buck fifty in quarters into the slot to get his soda… but that’s all he gets. Is he better off for it? Are the rest of us? He has no opportunity to see what I saw that day, to run his fingers over those letters, or alter his life accordingly… even if in some small way. Outside of this story, what proof does he have that they were ever there? We can’t build a museum around every mistake we ever made. Yet for every choice that we made to preserve one sign, we painted over dozens of others. Thus we end up producing generations of students who not only will probably never visit a Black History Museum… they’ll also probably never learn anything about the humiliation black people once endured in the very building they live in.

So to my friend I’d like to say this: If some of our stories are painful or negative, then in telling them, we should strive to not destroy the progress that has been made since the time that we lived those stories. But we still have to tell them. If we don’t, how will we ever be able to judge whether or not any progress has been made?