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Why America loves to fear Detroit.
By Kristin Palm
March 2003
You need Detroit.
Detroit is your punching bag, your kicking post, your whipping boy--with
all the attendant hideous implications the phrase engenders in
postŠCivil War America. As long as you have Detroit, no other city in
America will be so inexplicably cursed, no other city will strike such
fear into the hearts of otherwise strong men, no other city will have to
jump up in the middle of the night screaming, "My God! What have we
done?"
"Detroit. Lots of violence there, right?" a San Francisco bank
teller remarked recently upon seeing my driver's license.
"I was there in the seventies," another West Coaster recently
told me. "It looked like a war zone."
"Our location was a crack house," writes a Spin magazine
photographer about her spread on a Detroit rock band. Of course,
according to a local who worked with her, the set was just a
run-of-the-mill vacant building in a block of homes slated for
redevelopment. But who can blame these folks for being scared of
Detroit, or recoiling at its landscape, or even using its terrifying
reputation to gain a little hipster credibility? And who can blame you
for thinking one or all of these same things? After all, the national
media's been feeding your imagination, rehashing age-old events--riots,
white flight, arson, recession
--for years. Decades even.
Now before I go any further, I've got to come clean. Last August I left
Detroit, where I lived for more than ten years, and moved to San
Francisco, a city that might be Detroit's polar opposite in the American
imagination. I can offer up myriad reasons for my departure, and
graduate school is only one of them. As justification for pointing fingers
from this vantage point, I have only the sincere belief that there is a
difference between leaving a city physically and leaving it
psychologically, some lingering guilt, and the knowledge that reaction
to my relocation to the largely immigrant working-class Excelsior
neighborhood underscores my argument. "Is that on the south side of
the city?" one San Franciscan asked me. "Nobody's ever been
there." It seems that in some ways I've moved to Detroit all over
again.
To identify how Detroit's image may have come to be or, rather, how it
has managed to hold fast in America's psyche for so long, it is
instructive to look at the most influential newspaper--the New York
Times. Turn to the nation's paper of record, pull up any article with
Detroit in the headline and, if it's not about the auto industry or
Eminem, you'll find that the city is consistently qualified as "the
nation's poorest big city," as fluidly as New York is called the Big
Apple or Philadelphia the City of Brotherly Love. But if the
investigative honchos at the Times were to look at the numbers a little
more closely, they might be surprised to find that the differences
between Detroit and their home base aren't so drastic. Chew on these
figures for a moment: about 250,000 individuals live below the poverty
line in Detroit; in New York that number is more than 1.5 million. So
being named the nation's poorest big city is not so much a function of
poverty as one of wealth. If you have enough upper-class residents to
offset the poor ones, then you're in the clear. And curiously it doesn't
take many wealthy people to tilt the scales: 26 percent of Detroit's
population is officially poor; in New York that number dips all the way
down to...21.
And here's where this explication gets tricky, because any thinking
person knows to read the subtext in this differentiation. When we say
"the nation's poorest big city" we're not talking about
economics any more than we are when we talk about "building an
urban middle class." What we are talking about is the topic that
planners and architects and countless others concerned with the fate of
America's cities all too often avoid--race. This is, after all, where
the percentages begin to diverge. Percentage of Detroiters who are
African American: 82. Percentage of New Yorkers: 26.
"People in Windsor are afraid of Detroit. They don't believe people
live there," my Canadian boyfriend, who lives just over the border
from Detroit, told me when we first met. I mulled this observation over
for days, baffled at how Windsorites could look across the river at
Detroit, see the buildings and the buses and the streetlights and the
cars, and think it was empty. Eventually I grasped its insidious
implications: people in Windsor, like people throughout North America,
don't believe white people live in Detroit.
In this sense Detroit becomes a macrocosmic version of Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man, a story now more than 50 years old--and as relevant as
ever. A quick survey of pop culture shows just how habitually this
notion is played out. "A new study says cities must attract the new
'creative class'...or they'll go the way of Detroit" read a
headline in Salon last year. The likely accuracy of the study's
conclusions aside, I set to wondering, "Where exactly did we
go?" At that moment I grasped that my city had been reduced to a
trope for all that ails urban America.
Not that the folks at Salon are the only ones to treat Detroit as if it
has been wiped off the map. Remember Robocop? And then, of course, there
are the adoring fans of Camilo Josˇ Vergara, the New York photographer
who once proposed turning a portion of Detroit into an urban ruins park
(Metropolis, Visible City, April 1995, p. 33.) Worse yet are the
suburbanites who drive downtown to celebrate whenever the Red Wings win
the Stanley Cup, parking on the front lawns of run-down mansions because
they don't believe anybody lives in them.
But that is just the tip of the tragedy. Blame must inevitably be placed
for this situation in which Detroiters find themselves, and--true to one
of the most insipid ironies of racism--who should end up shouldering
that responsibility but Detroiters themselves (who suddenly become
visible when responsibility must be doled out)? This mind-set plays out
in subtle ways every day, a sort of supersize version of the leading
American explanation for the ghetto: "Those people" can't take
care of their children, their homes, their neighborhoods, their
city.
Sometimes, of course, the accusations are anything but implicit. On a
now infamous 1990 segment of Prime Time Live, white reporter Judd Rose
asked then mayor Coleman Young how it was that Detroit's neighborhoods
had collapsed on his watch. Never one to mince words, Mayor Young let
Rose in on one of Detroit's best-kept secrets. "The neighborhoods
collapsed because half the goddamn population left!" he replied.
End of interview. But in no way an end to the insinuations.
"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.
Kristin Palm is a freelance journalist who recently moved from Detroit
to the San Francisco Bay Area to study creative writing at Mills
College.
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