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.