"It will rise from the ashes": Detroit's Motto Needs Changing

Detroit is the Black capital of America. This statement is indisputable. Which is why the next two months are going to be extremely interesting, with the city of Detroit slated to run out of money and be taken over by the state of Michigan in the hopes of curbing monetary mismanagement: financial martial law. 

The decline of Detroit was only cemented when Black people rioted in 1967, forcing whites to flee to the suburbs. Since that time, the Big Three car companies - Ford, GM, and Chrysler - have survived (reorganizing with each challenge), while Actual Black-Run America Detroit has become the case study for post-colonialism in America.

The Great Migration of Black people from the North were the colonizers (they now return back South, defeated, the cities they leave in ruins), and Detroit's demise is courtesy of these individuals - when taken as a whole - whose civilization was incompatible with that of the one white people created.

Detroit is now the poster child for welfare/TANF entitlements, Section 8 Housing, EBT/Food Stamps, and free lunches at schools for all children. Were it not for the generosity of white taxpayers, it's hard to imagine were the money would come from to support the citizens of Detroit. Philanthropy? Churches? Not anymore:

Detroit's struggling neighborhoods stand to lose far more than just a church -- they'll lose a lifeline
On the east side of Detroit, the Nativity of Our Lord Catholic Church is the anchor of a neighborhood that has seen the addition of 14 new homes and a 62-unit senior center.

Joyce Anderson, an administrative assistant for the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, moved into a new house two years ago, in part, because of Nativity's outreach in the neighborhood.

Now Nativity is fighting a recommendation that calls for the parish, and three others on the east side, to close.
"The church is really the reason I'm here. They were building up the community," said Anderson, 56, who is not Catholic. "If they closed, all the positive energy would go with them."
"If Nativity leaves," Anderson said, "I'm gone."

Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron is reviewing recommendations to close up to 20 churches in Detroit, Highland Park and Hamtramck, and about 30 more in the suburbs. The pending closures -- which are expected to be finalized this month -- could shrivel the church's urban footprint to nearly one-third of the 112 parishes that existed in Detroit and its enclaves in 1988.

Since 2000, about 25 parishes have closed in Detroit and the surrounding suburbs. Recently, at least seven parishes in the suburbs have decided to close or merge in the next year or two. But unlike the pending suburban closures, many of the urban parishes didn't ask to be closed.

Many of the threatened urban parishes provide services to poor and homeless people. They are beacons of stability. And they are fighting to stay open.

"If it is providing food services, helping the homeless, closing (a church) is really a symbolic death knell of a neighborhood," said demographer Kurt Metzger, who directs Data Driven Detroit and shared population trends and statistics with the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council, which made the closure recommendations.

Detroit is a dying city, deprived of all hope and a future. It's fitting that Detroit's city flag has a Latin motto describing how it will rise from the ashes:

The two Latin mottos read Speramus Meliora and Resurget Cineribus, meaning "We hope for better things" and "It will rise from the ashes," which was written by Gabriel Richard after the fire of 1805. The seal is a representation of the Detroit fire which occurred on June 11, 1805. The fire caused the entire city to burn with only one building saved from the flames. The figure on the left weeps over the destruction while the figure on the right gestures to the new city that will rise in in its place.

Detroit isn't going to rise from the ashes. It's settling into them, letting the dust settle over buildings and an infrastructure that Black people have no ability to maintain.

It is being abandoned. Completely. Is this what those who are Pro-Life want? The death of one of the world's greatest cities, where vigilante criminality is rising because the Detroit Police were the causality of oppressive affirmative action policies in the 1970s (after Mayor Coleman Young took over).

Nolan Finley of The Detroit News has written a brave column, asking what can be done to save Detroit. The answer is, of course, nothing:

Since the national attention is on birth control, here's my idea: If we want to fight poverty, reduce violent crime and bring down our embarrassing drop-out rate, we should swap contraceptives for fluoride in Michigan's drinking water.

We've got a baby problem in Michigan. Too many babies are born to immature parents who don't have the skills to raise them, too many are delivered by poor women who can't afford them, and too many are fathered by sorry layabouts who spread their seed like dandelions and then wander away from the consequences.
Michigan's social problems and the huge costs attached to them won't recede until we embrace reproductive responsibility.

Last year, 43 percent of the babies born in Michigan were to single mothers. And even though Medicaid pays for birth control, half of the babies born here were to mothers on welfare. Eighteen percent were born to teenagers who already had at least one child. And nearly 1-in-5 new babies had mothers with no high school diploma.

In Michigan, poverty is as much a cultural problem as it is an economic one.

I spoke with an educator who is dealing with a single mother, mid-30s, with 12 children and a 13th on the way. The kids have an assortment of fathers with one thing in common — none married their mother. This woman's womb is a poverty factory.

It wouldn't matter if Michigan's economy were bursting with jobs, the woman and her children would still be poor.

Who's supporting these kids? If you're a taxpayer, you are. The roughly 45,000 children a year born onto the welfare rolls is a major reason Medicaid will consume 25 percent of next year's budget.

Those kids are more likely to grow up to be a strain on Corrections spending or welfare recipients themselves. And they'll drain money from the schools and universities that could help break this cycle.
In the 1990s, Michigan considered penalizing women who had more babies while on welfare, but pro-life groups killed the idea out of fear it would lead to more abortions.

Now, says state Human Services Director Maura Corrigan, the state is trying other measures, including attacking school truancy and the new four-year limit on welfare benefits, which she says is already increasing participation in work training programs.

"We are trying to get at generational poverty," she says. "We're studying positive incentives to change."
But she says the cultural breakdown is a strong tide to row against.

"We're watching marriage move from being part of the social fabric to being merely optional," says Corrigan, who devotes her personal time to working with disadvantaged children. "The kids I mentor don't know people who are married."

They do know people whose irresponsible behavior is being subsidized by their neighbors.
And as long as the taxpayers of Michigan keep paying for them, those babies will keep on coming.

Detroit is the future for all big cities in America. How many other cities have property values that mirror the titanic fall of residential properties in Detroit, all courtesy of the Black Undertow? We ask this not to endorse what Finley has prescribed, but to debate it.

Life in Detroit is worthless. A feckless reminder that nature is brutal, and nurture is a pipe-dream. Now, the nightmarish existence of Detroit of 2012 is a glimpse of what is to come for all cities that suffer under ABRA.

An MSNBC host, Melissa Harris-Perry, has a theory that Black people tend to be elected mayors of cities only after they've tipped into economic decline. Sadly, she doesn't point out that only when Black people - who vote nearly 97 - 99 percent for a Black candidate - become either a numerical majority of a city's population or the majority in a plurality, the economic decline is only a reality of the majority:

Week seven of Melissa Harris-Perry’s introductory course in African-American studies at Tulane University includes a lecture about “the hollow prize” — a theory that African-Americans tend to be elected as mayor only after a city has tipped into economic decline.

One day last summer, when Ms. Harris-Perry was filling in for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, she recast the class lecture as a television segment, invoking Detroit; her adopted home, New Orleans; President Obama; and tax policy.

“I’ve given that lecture a million times — a million times,” Ms. Harris-Perry said in a recent interview. “But I do it once on Rachel’s show, and it was everywhere the next day. It was up on Web sites, people were e-mailing me — that, for me, was a really clear indication of how powerful television is.”

Peter Eisinger wrote The Politics of Racial Economic Advancement in 1979. It details Newark, Gary, Detroit and discusses Atlanta, all under the harsh rule of Black mayors. Only Atlanta ever recovered, and it's collapse is inevitable.

We know that New York City almost died in the mid-1990s, until the Black mayor was displaced by Rudy.

Dr. Perry's, whose PhD in African-American History is only valuable in Black-Run America (BRA), thesis is embarrassing. It is only when the Black Undertow becomes too great a menace to maintain businesses, civil society, law and order, top-notch school districts, and a flourishing tax-base that white flight occurs in rapid enough numbers to ensure a Black mayor can be elected. Once this happens, the trickle of white people from the city becomes a torrent.

Once this occurs, it is rare that a city will survive. Coleman Young in Detroit enacted affirmative action policies throughout the city government positions, with the consequences still being felt today. The ramifications of these pro-Black, anti-merit policies can be seen in the abandoned sections of a city settling into... into the silence of indifference.

Rise from the ashes? Detroit needs a new motto.