Ron Scott @ Northwestern School Closure Town Hall

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.