DANCIN' IN THE STREETS:

Public Enemy #1: Why America loves to fear Detroit. (Kristin Palm, March 2003, Metropolis)

"Nearly every article I read [about Detroit] has to work in the 1967 riots," observes historian Thomas Sugrue, a Detroit native and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, a seminal study of racism and American cities. Never mind that cities across America erupted in violence that year and the next. Never mind that the riots may have very little to do with Detroit today.
"To look at Detroit's fate as primarily a consequence of an urban riot or black politics of the late sixties and early seventies is to entirely misread the history of postwar America," Sugrue continues. "We miss out on the far deeper roots of economic disinvestment and the far deeper roots of racial division. And more than that, by focusing on the riots and Coleman Young and black power, the mainstream journalists--the white media--put the blame implicitly on blacks. It's blacks' fault that Detroit is the way it is."

And if it's blacks' fault, then the whites who turned their backs on Detroit--the whites who turn their backs on Detroits all over America--can go on turning, guilt-free. And they'll always have the current state of Detroit--or rather the psychological construction of it--to justify their departure.

"Everyone needs this kind of two-headed thing--on the one hand to be frightened of and on the other hand to be better than," explains Bill Harris, a Detroit playwright and professor who has long maintained that the situation of his hometown mirrors that of the black man in America. "It's a way that you can confront what you can't confront--which is what racism is." If we can't locate the bogeyman, Harris reminds, we must create him. So is Detroit America's bogeyman? "Yeah," he says without missing a beat. "Because it's black, because it's poor, because it's everything that we don't want to be."

And then comes the question that has been gnawing at me ever since I began thinking about this essay, or more accurately, ever since I arrived in the city more than ten years ago. "Shouldn't we be over Detroit by now?" I ask Sugrue. Shouldn't the city have ceased to be America's bogeyman decades ago? His answer confirms my most cynical suspicions. "Detroit," he contends, "stands as a rebuke to our optimistic views of racial progress in America." And I believe him. I believe him because I lived it, am living it. I believe him because you're living it too.

The national murder rate in 2001 was 5.6 per 100,000 in America. For Detroit it was 41.3 per 100,000. Who would not be frightened, regardless of their race? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2003 9:33 AM