In one of Karen Dybis's posts last week to the Detroit Blog, she introduced her audience to Attorney C, an acquaintance who is having a terrible time making it in the present economy. After the brief introduction of Attorney C, Dybis let the lawyer tell her own story, which included a narration of two bad decisions she had made: one, buying a house several years ago in Detroit and, two, getting a law degree. Attorney C wrote about the huge chunk of money she and her husband had lost by buying the house. (They bailed, however, before the economic downturn.) And she wrote of the difficulty of finding employment as an attorney in this day and time, especially in Metro Detroit.
Attorney C's experience would be classified as a human interest story, and the appeal of such stories is the reader's ability to relate to whatever might be the focus of the story and of course to the person profiled. Certainly, Attorney C's unemployment woes are very common in the present economy, yet possibly it was, for Dybis, other characteristics of this woman's life that made her story newsworthy. My guess concerning how Attorney C's story made the cut would be that Dybis found some irony in the fact that in the present economy even well educated people, who have, as Attorney C put it, done "everything right" may experience difficulty finding and sustaining employment. For Attorney C, everything right began with her ancestors' immigration from South Africa, their belief in and commitment to the American Dream.
I'm afraid that for me, the romantic nature of this immigrant story is more troubling than inspiring. There is something strange yet at the same time not unexpected in Attorney C's expectations. The logic is simple enough. Attorney C is the hope of her ancestors' dreams and of their sacrifices. She followed their plan for her life, got an education as her father encouraged her to do. Yet, the American Dream remains for her own created family--husband and child--elusive. What message does this story send? What message did Dybis think it sent? What message was Attorney C herself hoping to send by making this private failing public? On the surface, Dybis simply introduced a person for whom the American Dream should be attainable, perhaps even in any economy. That it isn't, or has not yet been anyway, is what may have, in Dybis's mind, made the story newsworthy. The irony.
Unfortunately, the present economy thwarts this simple logic. Anyone, yes anyone, can find him or herself unemployed these days. I personally know of an educated, highly experienced, chief financial officer who has in the last eight or more years had about that many jobs that have ended quickly. Thank God for his family's savings. Yet, it isn't just the mere fact that unemployment may be an equal opportunity possibility that justifies the focus of this piece, and it is specifically the fact that Dybis thought Attorney C's story worthy of publication that led me to write about this coverage. I take some issue with the publication of this particular story in the way that Dybis framed it. However, I can admit that Dybis, being a trained journalist, bet right on her readers' likely responses. Readers chimed in with reassuring words for Attorney C, advice, and well-wishes. "Hang in there. I hope you make it. I admire your grit," one commentor wrote, a thought echoed by others.
Dybis put a human face on the crisis of unemployment, a face on the effects of the recession. Personalization of what might otherwise be experienced by some as overly objective, dry, and abstract treatments of these socio-economic conditions is a humane thing to do, but, at the same time, personalization can sometimes obliterate the pains of many by focusing on the pain of one. This happens I think when, as is the case with C's story, the subject is presented as someone who should have been spared the crisis, someone whose attributes should have protected them from the fate of thousands of others. Just imagine how the message might change were these assumptions not underlying. I must point now to the specific manner in which Dybis described Attorney C as she introduced her to readers. I quote. "She's an angel of sorts--a beautiful blond, smart, funny, delicate without being too soft."
I shake my head. What was Dybis thinking? The answer I'm afraid is that she wasn't thinking, at least not critically. Apparently, Dybis doesn't see anything wrong with describing Attorney C in this anything but objective or neutral way. Dybis may see nothing wrong whatsoever with equating angelic character with good looks, or what she takes to be good looks. Dybis may also see nothing wrong with so easily anointing this rather ordinary person. If Dybis doesn't recognize the intrinsic racism and classism in her presentation of Attorney C it is because her decision to offer this story and her treatment of it she expects her readers to embrace.
To be fair, I will admit that Dybis doesn't construct Attorney C as an angel entirely based on appearance and pluck. Rather, the case for sainthood or, actually, angelhood is made also of the struggling attorney's willingness to live in--even to purchase a home in--the forlorn City of Detroit. One gets the sense that this "poor" decision was an unfortunate parting of ways with the immigrant ancestors' dreams. Again, they sacrificed so that their daughter could attain the good life; though they themselves were very poor, they found a way to raise Attorney C in (northern) Oakland County. Along the lines of their own strategy for success, their child's choice of residence made little sense. Why she would choose to live in the blackened city can only be understood if we see Attorney C as a daring urban pioneer, as a missionary, or--though it's a stretch--as a savior. Older and wiser, she has admitted to the lost cause of the first two if not the last. Attorney C publically admits of "failure," and this admission of the immaturity of trying to do it her way is a partial plea for her father's forgiveness (memory of his high hopes haunts her).
In a sense, then, this is a familiar tale of a prodigal daughter and of youthful idealism, and Dybis's publication of the story provides assistance to get Attorney C back on the right track. At the end of her testimony, Attorney C commits herself to making her "own damn pie" by going into business for herself. Readers admired her determination and resourcefulness. I myself admire her awareness that nothing comes easy in this economy as one would like to think, and nothing can be counted on in ways that some people have maybe come to in the past. If all of the social supports have not been lost, one has to search really hard for them, or, better yet, create them. The titillating question is whether new wine in old wine casks will do. Attorney C leads us to this question and leads me as well to focus on underlying currents in this piece as I try to answer the question. I would describe this as a highly empathetic argument. Even with Attorney C's bold statements of self reliance, she still depends on constructing an image that the world will get behind. And the world does, first of all, through Dybis. Attorney C ends with a statement of hope, a realization that the American Dream has changed since her father's time. Though some would say that it has died, Attorney C shows us that it is only more difficult to see. While Susan Faludi argues in her book Stiffed, the Betrayal of the American Man, that the social contract between the "average" man and the capitalists who once provided jobs for them has been broken, her work also makes clear that success today depends on inventing oneself as a commidity. If life were ever a game, if finding employment were ever a contest, it is only more clearly so now. Film illustrates this. Ten years ago it was Michael Douglas and the Game. A few years ago, it was Saw IV. These cultural productions teach us that obtaining a degree and specialized training is only one stage in an endless game of strange, required performances. In truth, I'm not sure that this reality comes as a surprise either to Attorney C or to the journalist Dybis, for beneath the councillor's lament I see someone who is shrewd enough to survive and even thrive. She has been granted another day in court.
I expect that if she continues as she is doing, she will land on her feet, but not without society's support. Her bold declaration rings familiar. It sounds like Scarlett O'Hara's commitment never to be hungry again. It teaches the same lesson as blogger Julie Powell's strange success. In the present economy, those who will fare best will not necessarily be most intelligent or the fittest but those who can best make the case that they are worthy of support by constructing an image that appeals, that sings the right tune, and pulls at the right strings.
Attorney C closes, "But maybe in all this wreckage, there lies some hope, and I'll cling to that." It would be easy enough to think that Attorney C is referring to her life alone, but of course she is not. We should see her life in a local, national, and even global context. The death of manufacturing and all of its implications are the wreckage she speaks of. And she places her life--her determination to survive the apocalypse--at the center. The message is painfully clear, and it pains me to state it more than it will pain my readers to hear it: this blond angel is the hope of Detroit and, if of Detroit, then of the nation, and, if of the nation, then of the world. What are the implications of this idea?
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Taming the Wild or Colonialism by Any Other Name
Twenty years after ABC aired what Mayor Coleman Young referred to as a “chop job” portrayal of Detroit, NBC sent in another so-called insider, Chris Hansen, to capture the woes of America’s former Arsenal of Democracy. Hansen’s piece, presented like the 2000 “Prime Time Live” story, in the urban legend genre, was marinated in a contradictory mix of pity and judgment and was sprinkled with sometimes stated, sometimes unstated imminence.
“The future of Detroit rests,” Hansen’s voiceover declared, “on how much someone like Cordette can accomplish.” Cordette Grantling is a middle-aged surrogate mother of what the report described as abandoned children. Cordette was, at the time of the interview, employed as a cleaner of suburban office buildings, a job that garnered for her only a meager wage. One paycheck, which we watched her cash, was for $185. At the close of the story, Cordette had lost even that means of income. To be sure, Cordette’s story is real, and she is a heroine, fighting as she does for the city’s disadvantaged youth. Coupled with a brief profile of a laid-off auto worker whose American Dream has quickly fallen as he faces foreclosure on his home, these are undoubtedly stories that viewers across the country can relate to, maybe even sympathize with.
However, neither Cordette’s experiences nor those of the lone autoworker are the whole story of Detroit nor even half of it no matter how much their situations, in the context of postindustrialism, may strike a chord with other Americans. This expose of the Motor City, admittedly a shell of its former self, was on the surface offered as an unfortunate American story. Its title—“America Now”—implies that Detroit’s story belongs to all Americans; Detroit is, as it were, a microcosm of what ails the entire nation. Perhaps it was in fact because of the intent to share this particular city’s pain that the very name of the place—Detroit—did not appear in either the program’s title or subtitle. Rather, America itself was equated with “heartbreak and hope.”
People of Detroit are however used to not making light of such elipses and eclipses, for arguably no other cause more than simple benign neglect-- temporary agreement on regional and national levels that the city had been or should be wiped from the map--has been responsible for Detroit’s decline. Recent conversations about the possibility that Oakland County will replace Detroit as the center of southeastern Michigan are only the latest proof that being lost from the economic radar is the first step toward wholesale disenfranchisement.
As it turns out then, the title of this “Dateline” telecast contained a subtle contradiction as it called Americans to turn their hearts back toward this metaphorically absent city. The challenge for a reporter charged with getting Americans to care about a city that they had been trained for at least the last thirty-five years (some would date the phenomenon beyond forty years, to the ’67 Riot) to associate with failure, crime, violence, arson, and African Americans, was to construct Detroit in such a way that its portrayal would engender something akin to sympathy while at the same time pointing the finger at what the producers of the show cast as the culprit of Detroit’s decline--corrupt administration. Hansen’s task was to send a message of despair and depravity, the lowest of the human condition, in order that those watching the program from around the country might reach an unquestionable conclusion: Detroit as we’ve known it—read, “run by blacks,”--can no longer be allowed to exist even in its usual, marginal, state.
If Detroit is already dead save for Cordette, an African American matriarchal figure who appears to hold the city’s future in her single hand, then that municipality that used to lie on the strait is at last ready, begging even, for rebirth. Perhaps NBC’s producers would deny such designs on Detroit, and if they are not in fact complicit in a phenomenal resurgence of interest in this city in the last year, interest that has not been remiss in publicizing the fact of Detroit’s bottom floor real estate prices, then one would perhaps expect a more balanced treatment. Unfortunately, echoing the idea of a hard-core city at its end was a cast of others besides Cordette who ironically could find no good word to say about their home.
Not the least of the dejected was veteran newspaper professional Luther Keith, whose championing of the city is well known by many. Keith, a former editor and columnist with The Detroit News, is to be credited with mentoring a generation of Detroiters capable of telling their city’s stories in a better light and for his community activism. However, in the “Dateline” broadcast, Keith unfortunately is presented speechless. He appears on the screen only to introduce the audience to two dejected seniors, would-be sages who, heads hung low, have also been rendered nearly mute. Coerced to say something good about their city, in the presence of Hansen, who has himself been introduced as a Detroiter though he apparently grew up in the suburbs, one of the elderly men finally states sheepishly, “The best is all gone.” The second man, Keith’s former mentor, whom Keith actually brings Hansen to his old neighborhood to meet, admits that he only remains in Detroit because his wife forces him to.
Unfortunately, the viewer of this lamentation does not get to meet the wife of Keith’s role model. Perhaps she would have had a few positive things to say about the city. Instead, we meet a line-up of other people, Police Chief Warren Evans, ten or so young black men “loitering” in an abandoned garage, another elderly black man who shoots raccoons outside the city and brings them back to sell, a young black man wielding a stick intent upon beating somebody with it; Pam Good, a white suburbanite who has tutored over five thousand school children within the city; Robert Bobb, an administrator brought in under the city’s new mayor to begin the process of downsizing the Detroit Public Schools; Kid Rock, a local musician who wants to return a measure of appreciation back to the city that has shown him so much love; political consultant to convicted former councilwoman Monica Conyers, Sam Riddle; and, finally, Mayor Dave Bing.
Viewed together, this bunch is easily and quickly divided into good guys and bad guys, and as if on cue, Chief Warren provides the viewing audience with a little urban theater as he, before the ready camera, rounds up the “delinquent” youth accused of gambling and drinking. Was this a random bust? Were the officers tipped off by a concerned neighbor, or was the whole event staged for Dateline’s production? It’s hard to say since this information was not provided, but the circumstance looked very suspicious. The men, busy as they were being a “nuisance,” actually seemed rather lethargic though they might have summoned energy to handcuff themselves so willing did they seem to be to confess their wrongs. Were they paid to submit? Were these the same young black thugs who Clint Eastwood put in place a couple of years ago in his movie?
“There’s a new sheriff in town”
At the very least, Warren and his troops, along with Hansen, appeared to have prowled the streets looking for a situation just like this, one that would not have put the reporter in too grave a danger but which would for your average American viewer be convincing enough that Detroit’s neighborhoods are full of vice to send the underlying message. And just what might that message be? Warren explains to Hansen who questions the sense in giving so much attention to what seems a minor offense, that such troubling activity—a precursor to serious crime--will no longer be tolerated in Detroit. The city is, according to Warren, entering a new paradigm, nipping in the bud the violent, gang-related, drug-related, crimes the city has too long accepted. “On the front lines,” to borrow the war terminology used by Hansen to describe the battle of upstanding citizen-leaders like Cordette and even Warren himself, employing a proactive strategy to get in front of the city’s deep, complex crime problem seems to make all of the sense in the world.
For viewers searching this story for signs that Detroit’s new leaders have got a sensible plan in place to get the natives in order, such “tough on crime” talk is meant to reassure. For some other viewers, those who remember pre-Sixties’ Detroit, over-policing as a crime prevention strategy may raise concerns. Of course, few people, myself included, would argue that Detroit’s serious crime problem doesn’t call for creative solutions, tough justice, and regular patrolling, but those Detroiters who remember the days of STRESS (Stop Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets) must understand all too well how active policing quickly degenerates into harassment according to race and class. By all appearances, the breaking up of the friendly game of dice treaded a line between crime prevention and the targeting of certain groups. For this particular viewer, the former policing strategy harkens back not just to a time when the number of robberies in the city called for increased patrolling but when black men could be expected to be stopped on a regular basis on any given suspicion, no suspicion at all, or the crime of being on the street. Few former Detroiters or crime and prevention experts for that matter would argue that STRESS was successful, which is one of the myriad reasons why, ultimately, its public relations campaign—which promised to keep “the robbers” under control--did not work. Besides, both the politics and the economics of the time made it more sensible for the middle class, whites and then later blacks, to escape to the suburbs.
Thinking as I do, I have always maintained that Detroit’s real crime, the difference that made Metropolitan Detroit’s racial divide more marked and passions more intense than that of other metropolitan areas around the nation, was the failure of programs like STRESS to keep blacks under control. This neighborhood policing program was, however, destined for failure not just because it was so unpopular with black residents, but mainly because African American mobility in Detroit, movement of blacks throughout the city’s neighborhoods, movement enabled by the automobile and factory employment, never allowed blacks to be cordoned off in one area. Widespread demographic shifts within the city, from the 1940s to the present, made inevitable that an African American majority would quickly become a reality, which in turn, made possible election of the city’s first black mayor. By then, the writing was firmly on the wall; Detroit was destined to become a majority black city. Few whites of that time could stand to live shoulder to shoulder with blacks, as minorities in a city whose leaders were by each new election cycle becoming more and more black. The times did not make such a scenario acceptable. Nineteen seventy four was not that far removed from 1967.
But what about now? What about America now as Dateline inquires? All kinds of arguments could be made that whites are ready to return to this much maligned city. For anyone with her eye’s open, the question isn’t so much why (since that is all too obvious). The question is how their re-entry will be assisted. These are not difficult questions to answer though some of the conclusions to which I have come are and should be disturbing. If Bing’s plan points to the possibility of a white middle-class or upper middle class haven within the city, something that Detroit has not seen for fifty or more years, the recent media concentration on Detroit indicates the need to sell the city to the children and possibly grandchildren of urban expatriates. Someone once said, when one has spent years in wild regions, one longs for a city. The sixty year suburban experiment suggests that the opposite is true as well, which surely means that whatever “wildness” remains in Detroit it will have to be tamed. There are many means towards such an end; incarceration and emasculation are two of the most inhumane. And Hansen is of course wrong; the future of Detroit does not lie solely or even mostly with Cordette. She is simply a face put on the romantic portrayal of Detroit’s decline and anticipated rise. The Renaissance will perhaps be affected however by whether Cordette’s adopted son, brought to tears by Hansen’s suggestion that she is all that he has, rejects further emasculation. There is no other word for the manner in which Hansen broke the young man down than vile.
With the near death of the automobile industry, an anticipated attendant decline in wages, and Bing’s plan to create a forty square mile area ready for redevelopment, it appears that Detroit’s sin is about to change. No one paying serious attention to all of the recent coverage that Detroit has been getting can fail to see what the future on the Detroit horizon will look like. Woodward Avenue’s stadium district is just a sneak preview. In the last few minutes of the Dateline piece, Hansen mentioned a new French bistro and Hollywood’s interest in shooting more films in the city. We get the picture. But unless some serious players, some anchor industries, come to town Detroit will become two separate cities, with the dishwashers and busboys of Hockeytown and Hard Rock Café certainly not able to live in the new high rent districts, or regentrified historic districts. To some, this would be an acceptable future, business as usual in capitalist America. But to this observer, a far greater crime than gambling in an abandoned garage has taken place over the last forty plus years; this city has been allowed to suffer near death because blacks talked back. Detroit has been made to fall to its knees in order that those who buy low and sell high might see this day of cheap labor and cheap land.
What then was the purpose of the Hansen piece? To drum up sympathy around the nation for those left high and dry? Or to rationalize America’s return to the city and to invite investment now in what has, in the age of peak oil, become the new frontier again? It is a strategy centuries old. Capital and the missionary’s entrance tend to go hand in hand.
“The future of Detroit rests,” Hansen’s voiceover declared, “on how much someone like Cordette can accomplish.” Cordette Grantling is a middle-aged surrogate mother of what the report described as abandoned children. Cordette was, at the time of the interview, employed as a cleaner of suburban office buildings, a job that garnered for her only a meager wage. One paycheck, which we watched her cash, was for $185. At the close of the story, Cordette had lost even that means of income. To be sure, Cordette’s story is real, and she is a heroine, fighting as she does for the city’s disadvantaged youth. Coupled with a brief profile of a laid-off auto worker whose American Dream has quickly fallen as he faces foreclosure on his home, these are undoubtedly stories that viewers across the country can relate to, maybe even sympathize with.
However, neither Cordette’s experiences nor those of the lone autoworker are the whole story of Detroit nor even half of it no matter how much their situations, in the context of postindustrialism, may strike a chord with other Americans. This expose of the Motor City, admittedly a shell of its former self, was on the surface offered as an unfortunate American story. Its title—“America Now”—implies that Detroit’s story belongs to all Americans; Detroit is, as it were, a microcosm of what ails the entire nation. Perhaps it was in fact because of the intent to share this particular city’s pain that the very name of the place—Detroit—did not appear in either the program’s title or subtitle. Rather, America itself was equated with “heartbreak and hope.”
People of Detroit are however used to not making light of such elipses and eclipses, for arguably no other cause more than simple benign neglect-- temporary agreement on regional and national levels that the city had been or should be wiped from the map--has been responsible for Detroit’s decline. Recent conversations about the possibility that Oakland County will replace Detroit as the center of southeastern Michigan are only the latest proof that being lost from the economic radar is the first step toward wholesale disenfranchisement.
As it turns out then, the title of this “Dateline” telecast contained a subtle contradiction as it called Americans to turn their hearts back toward this metaphorically absent city. The challenge for a reporter charged with getting Americans to care about a city that they had been trained for at least the last thirty-five years (some would date the phenomenon beyond forty years, to the ’67 Riot) to associate with failure, crime, violence, arson, and African Americans, was to construct Detroit in such a way that its portrayal would engender something akin to sympathy while at the same time pointing the finger at what the producers of the show cast as the culprit of Detroit’s decline--corrupt administration. Hansen’s task was to send a message of despair and depravity, the lowest of the human condition, in order that those watching the program from around the country might reach an unquestionable conclusion: Detroit as we’ve known it—read, “run by blacks,”--can no longer be allowed to exist even in its usual, marginal, state.
If Detroit is already dead save for Cordette, an African American matriarchal figure who appears to hold the city’s future in her single hand, then that municipality that used to lie on the strait is at last ready, begging even, for rebirth. Perhaps NBC’s producers would deny such designs on Detroit, and if they are not in fact complicit in a phenomenal resurgence of interest in this city in the last year, interest that has not been remiss in publicizing the fact of Detroit’s bottom floor real estate prices, then one would perhaps expect a more balanced treatment. Unfortunately, echoing the idea of a hard-core city at its end was a cast of others besides Cordette who ironically could find no good word to say about their home.
Not the least of the dejected was veteran newspaper professional Luther Keith, whose championing of the city is well known by many. Keith, a former editor and columnist with The Detroit News, is to be credited with mentoring a generation of Detroiters capable of telling their city’s stories in a better light and for his community activism. However, in the “Dateline” broadcast, Keith unfortunately is presented speechless. He appears on the screen only to introduce the audience to two dejected seniors, would-be sages who, heads hung low, have also been rendered nearly mute. Coerced to say something good about their city, in the presence of Hansen, who has himself been introduced as a Detroiter though he apparently grew up in the suburbs, one of the elderly men finally states sheepishly, “The best is all gone.” The second man, Keith’s former mentor, whom Keith actually brings Hansen to his old neighborhood to meet, admits that he only remains in Detroit because his wife forces him to.
Unfortunately, the viewer of this lamentation does not get to meet the wife of Keith’s role model. Perhaps she would have had a few positive things to say about the city. Instead, we meet a line-up of other people, Police Chief Warren Evans, ten or so young black men “loitering” in an abandoned garage, another elderly black man who shoots raccoons outside the city and brings them back to sell, a young black man wielding a stick intent upon beating somebody with it; Pam Good, a white suburbanite who has tutored over five thousand school children within the city; Robert Bobb, an administrator brought in under the city’s new mayor to begin the process of downsizing the Detroit Public Schools; Kid Rock, a local musician who wants to return a measure of appreciation back to the city that has shown him so much love; political consultant to convicted former councilwoman Monica Conyers, Sam Riddle; and, finally, Mayor Dave Bing.
Viewed together, this bunch is easily and quickly divided into good guys and bad guys, and as if on cue, Chief Warren provides the viewing audience with a little urban theater as he, before the ready camera, rounds up the “delinquent” youth accused of gambling and drinking. Was this a random bust? Were the officers tipped off by a concerned neighbor, or was the whole event staged for Dateline’s production? It’s hard to say since this information was not provided, but the circumstance looked very suspicious. The men, busy as they were being a “nuisance,” actually seemed rather lethargic though they might have summoned energy to handcuff themselves so willing did they seem to be to confess their wrongs. Were they paid to submit? Were these the same young black thugs who Clint Eastwood put in place a couple of years ago in his movie?
“There’s a new sheriff in town”
At the very least, Warren and his troops, along with Hansen, appeared to have prowled the streets looking for a situation just like this, one that would not have put the reporter in too grave a danger but which would for your average American viewer be convincing enough that Detroit’s neighborhoods are full of vice to send the underlying message. And just what might that message be? Warren explains to Hansen who questions the sense in giving so much attention to what seems a minor offense, that such troubling activity—a precursor to serious crime--will no longer be tolerated in Detroit. The city is, according to Warren, entering a new paradigm, nipping in the bud the violent, gang-related, drug-related, crimes the city has too long accepted. “On the front lines,” to borrow the war terminology used by Hansen to describe the battle of upstanding citizen-leaders like Cordette and even Warren himself, employing a proactive strategy to get in front of the city’s deep, complex crime problem seems to make all of the sense in the world.
For viewers searching this story for signs that Detroit’s new leaders have got a sensible plan in place to get the natives in order, such “tough on crime” talk is meant to reassure. For some other viewers, those who remember pre-Sixties’ Detroit, over-policing as a crime prevention strategy may raise concerns. Of course, few people, myself included, would argue that Detroit’s serious crime problem doesn’t call for creative solutions, tough justice, and regular patrolling, but those Detroiters who remember the days of STRESS (Stop Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets) must understand all too well how active policing quickly degenerates into harassment according to race and class. By all appearances, the breaking up of the friendly game of dice treaded a line between crime prevention and the targeting of certain groups. For this particular viewer, the former policing strategy harkens back not just to a time when the number of robberies in the city called for increased patrolling but when black men could be expected to be stopped on a regular basis on any given suspicion, no suspicion at all, or the crime of being on the street. Few former Detroiters or crime and prevention experts for that matter would argue that STRESS was successful, which is one of the myriad reasons why, ultimately, its public relations campaign—which promised to keep “the robbers” under control--did not work. Besides, both the politics and the economics of the time made it more sensible for the middle class, whites and then later blacks, to escape to the suburbs.
Thinking as I do, I have always maintained that Detroit’s real crime, the difference that made Metropolitan Detroit’s racial divide more marked and passions more intense than that of other metropolitan areas around the nation, was the failure of programs like STRESS to keep blacks under control. This neighborhood policing program was, however, destined for failure not just because it was so unpopular with black residents, but mainly because African American mobility in Detroit, movement of blacks throughout the city’s neighborhoods, movement enabled by the automobile and factory employment, never allowed blacks to be cordoned off in one area. Widespread demographic shifts within the city, from the 1940s to the present, made inevitable that an African American majority would quickly become a reality, which in turn, made possible election of the city’s first black mayor. By then, the writing was firmly on the wall; Detroit was destined to become a majority black city. Few whites of that time could stand to live shoulder to shoulder with blacks, as minorities in a city whose leaders were by each new election cycle becoming more and more black. The times did not make such a scenario acceptable. Nineteen seventy four was not that far removed from 1967.
But what about now? What about America now as Dateline inquires? All kinds of arguments could be made that whites are ready to return to this much maligned city. For anyone with her eye’s open, the question isn’t so much why (since that is all too obvious). The question is how their re-entry will be assisted. These are not difficult questions to answer though some of the conclusions to which I have come are and should be disturbing. If Bing’s plan points to the possibility of a white middle-class or upper middle class haven within the city, something that Detroit has not seen for fifty or more years, the recent media concentration on Detroit indicates the need to sell the city to the children and possibly grandchildren of urban expatriates. Someone once said, when one has spent years in wild regions, one longs for a city. The sixty year suburban experiment suggests that the opposite is true as well, which surely means that whatever “wildness” remains in Detroit it will have to be tamed. There are many means towards such an end; incarceration and emasculation are two of the most inhumane. And Hansen is of course wrong; the future of Detroit does not lie solely or even mostly with Cordette. She is simply a face put on the romantic portrayal of Detroit’s decline and anticipated rise. The Renaissance will perhaps be affected however by whether Cordette’s adopted son, brought to tears by Hansen’s suggestion that she is all that he has, rejects further emasculation. There is no other word for the manner in which Hansen broke the young man down than vile.
With the near death of the automobile industry, an anticipated attendant decline in wages, and Bing’s plan to create a forty square mile area ready for redevelopment, it appears that Detroit’s sin is about to change. No one paying serious attention to all of the recent coverage that Detroit has been getting can fail to see what the future on the Detroit horizon will look like. Woodward Avenue’s stadium district is just a sneak preview. In the last few minutes of the Dateline piece, Hansen mentioned a new French bistro and Hollywood’s interest in shooting more films in the city. We get the picture. But unless some serious players, some anchor industries, come to town Detroit will become two separate cities, with the dishwashers and busboys of Hockeytown and Hard Rock Café certainly not able to live in the new high rent districts, or regentrified historic districts. To some, this would be an acceptable future, business as usual in capitalist America. But to this observer, a far greater crime than gambling in an abandoned garage has taken place over the last forty plus years; this city has been allowed to suffer near death because blacks talked back. Detroit has been made to fall to its knees in order that those who buy low and sell high might see this day of cheap labor and cheap land.
What then was the purpose of the Hansen piece? To drum up sympathy around the nation for those left high and dry? Or to rationalize America’s return to the city and to invite investment now in what has, in the age of peak oil, become the new frontier again? It is a strategy centuries old. Capital and the missionary’s entrance tend to go hand in hand.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Times Reporter Steven Gray on Tavis Smiley
On March 25, PBS personality Tavis Smiley interviewed Time Magazine reporter Steven Gray on the state of the Detroit economy. Gray, on special assignment in Detroit since last summer, has observed the city as a resident, albeit a temporary one. Now well publicized is the fact that Time purchased a house within the city, and Gray has been living in the home, a few miles from downtown Detroit, for about six months.
In a slightly longer than ten-minute interview with Gray, Smiley asked the Times' reporter to sum up how Detroit residents are dealing with the city's economic malaise, a condition shared by the state and region but which seems especially challenging for Detroit, which has for the last hundred years relied heavily on America's once vibrant, now fledgling auto industry. With sharp, clipped speech contradicted by a furrowed brow, Gray stated and then repeated that Detroit is in a critical state, "on the verge," he explained when Smiley asked him what he meant by "critical state," "of economic collapse."
I have not studied Detroit's books, but I certainly have no great difficulty comprehending that my beloved hometown is experiencing deep fiscal problems. Anyone who is from Detroit (and especially anyone who lived in the city at any time between 1950 and 2000) knows all too well the city's deferred destruction. If you grew up in Detroit, as I did, you had a front-row seat to the city's decline. This first-hand knowledge gives one keen insight into some of the reasons for Detroit's failure and also gives one an ingrained understanding of this city's peoples.
Unfortunately, Gray's perspective is myopic, lacking in substance and historical understanding, which is strange considering that he is from a southern city whose problems are as deeply rooted as Detroit's if not of the same exact source . Gray's pronouncement of a Detroit in crisis can't help but to give me pause, and I think that this effect is what was intended. Yet, vehement sounding of the alarm or, of the horn, as it were, at this particular moment in time--national economic recession, peak oil, global warming, end of surburbia--seems to me suspicious and, I might add, untrustworthy.
To put things simply, Detroit, like other Rustbelt cities, has been in a state of economic jeopardy ever since the federal government sponsored a highway program that would assist the development of suburbia. Economies of northern, industrial-based cities have been in trouble ever since the first Toyota, or Volkswagen for that matter, rolled off a cargo ship into an American port. Furthermore, the future of America's cities has been precarious ever since school integration of the '60s and '70s, combined with an increase in the availability of federally sponsored, low-interest home loans, sped up white flight. Simply put, there is to this observer something very questionable about the kairos of the current distress signal, about the sudden congregation of Detroit well-wishers, about the cacophony of voices alternately singing for this particular city a dirge with a half-plaintive, half-excited refrain of investment possibilities.
The low cost of doing business in Detroit these days is supposed to be part of the good news, or, as Smiley himself framed it, one aspect of the "sunny side" of life in The Motor City and of the prospects for our town. With relatively negligible start-up costs, Detroit is, Gray reasoned, a good location for entrepreneurs, i.e. a new frontier. It appears to me that this was not a point lost on Time Warner, Inc. (parent company of the publication) when it, in September of last year, made the clarion call that inaugurated its Detroit project. (See Detroit: the Death--and Possible Life of a Great City)
It may just be my imagination, but it seems to me that at least since the start of Time's attention to the city Detroit has gotten more press coverage--positive and negative--than it has gotten in at least the last thirty years, ending the decades when the national media, seemingly operating under the belief that the lights really had been turned off by the last person to leave the city, virtually erased this locale from the map. It's been only five or so years since many a morning program's national weather report indicated--simply by eclipsing Detroit--that there was no sizeable city between New York and Chicago worthy of coverage. The conspicuous absence communicated something that I think Americans had been trained to think every time they saw or heard the word Detroit. "That is no place to visit." "That is no place to move." "That is no place to start a business." This particular illustration of slighting was however over the course of many, many years only one part of a trend of maligning Detroit.
Given this decades-long treatment, it is not without an appropriate amount of suspicion that I ask why my hometown is being allowed to exist again--even if with a still strong measure of disdain.
It should go without saying, but perhaps it does not, that speaking about people as cheap labor, which was done in Time's initial piece, is distasteful if not downright inhumane. I can hear a chorus of "haters"--folks who don't have sense enough to recognize the key role that Detroit has for years played in achieving for working men and women a living wage--laughing at our city and glorying in its demise as Detroit's once-proud institutions have crumbled and new state of the art plants have been built elsewhere--farther and farther southward. I have lived in transitional Southern towns--late 20th century boomtowns in Right to Work states--where business owners publically bragged at what a good break they were getting on labor costs. As a transplanted Detroiter, such talk always made me cringe. The effect of hearing the same up North is no different in its effect. I recognize it for what it is and recognize as well that crude pragmatism is about to relocate itself not just in Detroit but I suspect in all of the nation's struggling cities. Still, I would expect Mr. Gray to see the designs and to anticipate the design's implications, an equally proud and discounted New Orleans being his home, but instead he forewarns the economically adventurous and urban romantics alike that the city has not yet been made completely civil, read safe and clear. There has been in other words, no official cession, no completed eviction. There are still lurking about elements not good for business, elements, I suspect who frighten tourists and would be entrepreneurs alike. The same kinds that encouraged whites to hightail it out of the city forty years ago? The truly disadvantaged?
To allay these concerns, Time provided in its feature a nearly-full-page map showing its readers which zip codes were virtually people free. The graphic practically screamed, "Here. Right here's a spot for regentrification." Gray, their employee, did not miss the opportunity to talk about the city's near-give-away real estate prices. And Smiley, who in all honesty seemed to want to be on this city's side but strangely caved to Gray's mojo, lightly chuckled with his guest as the two of them considered the rumor that a home in Detroit could be had for as little as $6,000.
Needless to say, I found this fact somewhat less than funny not only because that fire-sale price means the bottoming out of the city's tax base but because this reality means in turn horribly underfunded schools for kids who remain in the city. And their numbers--despite depictions of a nearly abandoned Detroit--are at around 250,000, a third or more of the city's residents. Sure, one person's loss may be another person's gain, and I certainly understand that the city needs new businesses and the jobs that come with them, but what kind of people have we become when two African American men no less make light of the stark truth that there is a direct line between corporate disinvestment and unequal education in this country, between the decision of business not to invest in Detroit for so many years and the murdering of the dreams of hundreds of thousands of children? And make no mistake that was and continues to be the true consequence of Detroit's maligning.
In Smiley's defense, I do not think the insensitivity was intentional. He in fact kept encouraging Gray throughout the interview to talk about the bright side if he saw one. And, perhaps to his credit, Gray did admit that despite the city's critical state he was quite surprised to find many Detroiters who were optimistic about their city's future. Gray needs to understand, and I'm pretty sure that he does not yet understand, that the blessed assurance that he has witnessed in this still-great city is neither innocence nor gullibility but a special tenacity built not just from long-term residence within a city that has weathered many metaphorical storms but of southern experience as well. Many Detroiters who have never lost faith, never given up on their city, have invested their very lives in the idea that this northern refuge would be a place where they could live with dignity. No more "Yassuh boss"; no more lynchings. Actually, former Mayor Coleman Young said it best, "Detroit ain't no sharecropper." The Detroiters I know have no intention of repeating past disenfranchisement, business or otherwise. They will demand a fair share of the American Dream not a pittance. This was the vision of residents who are aged today, and it is the legacy of Detroit's youth.
See Tavis Smiley's interview with Steven Gray here.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
