One moment in the ten-year-old Repairing Together program, aimed at a better Milwaukee and a more tolerant world
MILWAUKEE – Kellen Abston, the hip-hop performer who goes by “Klassik,” told the kids that he was here today on his birthday.
He added that there was nowhere he’d rather be.
The Milwaukee showman – who infuses his work with soul, jazz, storytelling and a healthy dose of impressive falsetto – does youth engagement workshops at schools, museums, and elsewhere. This one was special.
At Milwaukee Jewish Day School on April 15, he performed for its students and children from Bruce-Guadalupe Community School in Walker’s Point, which serves a predominantly Hispanic population. He was there for a better Milwaukee, to bring different worlds together.
But “performed” isn’t quite the right word. It would be more accurate to say he took complete control of the energy in the room. Klassik spun around the room like a top (or a dreidel?), pointing at a child and singing “I’m going to celebrate you,” then onto the next child for more celebrating in a flash, holding the attention of a roomful of kids. Pouring energy into every word, he sang in falsetto: “We are all connected; and in many ways the same; but the things that make us different; we don’t need to be ashamed.”
The fifth-grade students were led to sing along at times, then broke into groups comprised of students from both schools, to work on projects. That’s the key – repeatedly, at different moments, the students were told to pair up with kids from the other school. And these kids will all see each other again, at another program in a couple of months or so.
“The main thing that we do is we do what we call ‘culture shares’ where they go to one school or the other, and the whole school teaches about some sort of element of their culture,” explained Bobby Ehrlich, a Jewish studies teacher and a coordinator for Repairing Together, just before Klassik’s performance shook the room. “So we’ll teach about Chanukah or Yom HaShoah or Purim, and they’ll teach us about Día de los Muertos or their language just or we’ll do an activity about Latin American countries in history.”
In a world and a century that can feel defined by division and discord, these sessions are each just one more step in Repairing Together’s continuing effort to achieve something better for the next generation. For ten years, Repairing Together, a program of MJDS, has been growing, working to bring the young people of Milwaukee together. (See story, page 15)
April 15 was what one session looks like on the ground – literally.
Kids got on the floor for their projects, writing words representing cultural understanding on giant sheets of paper. The kids became engrossed, scrawling feverishly, side-by-side, scrunched up against one another, as though differences in America don’t matter in the slightest.
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