The Truth Must Not Be Set Free: A Look at Charlie LeDuff and Mark Binelli's Recent Books on the Demise of Detroit -- a now 90%+ Black City

Charlie LeDuff stares into the black abyss of 90% black Detroit in his book -- and closes his eyes from the truth

The impending, imminent, inevitable collapse of 82 percent black Detroit is the primary subject of two recent books: Charlies LeDuff’s “Detroit: An American Autopsy” and Mark Binelli’s “Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis.”

Of course, the sad fate of one of America’s former achievements – it was known as the “Paris of the West” – is nothing more than a horror story of immigration: replacing the population that built, sustained and created the conditions in a civilization (the hated Historic Majority Population of America – white people) with a population (blacks) that was attracted by those very conditions, ultimately becoming the dominant population of city and doing nothing more once in a position of political power then preside over the ruination and destabilizing of said civilization. 

LeDuff tells us this about the “Great Migration” of black people to Detroit:

During Detroit’s great expansion between 1920 and 1960, nearly half a million blacks came north from the cotton fields of the South as part of what is known as the Great Migration. Detroit was seen as the Promised Land, where a man could buy himself a house with a patch of grass, just as long as he had a job to pay for it. (p. 43)

What LeDuff fails to point out is that 100 years ago, Detroit was nearly 100 percent white; it was white people who had created the jobs, thriving economy, and conditions ripe for middle-class expansion that drove the black migrants to abandon the South and head North for the proverbial promised land.

They wanted a piece of the pie. 

And the black population did explode in numbers and overall percentage of the whole in Detroit, so much so that after the 1967 Black Race Riot in Detroit, white flight from the city became a white tsunami into the outlying suburbs in Oakland and Macomb County. 

Blacks would take hold of political power in Detroit with the election of Coleman Young in 1973 and never look back; and as LeDuff painfully admits, the fortunes of the city took a turn for the worse with this act of electoral racial vengeance. LeDuff tries to come off as a blue-collar everyman, but a story from a VFW hall while sharing a beer with his brother, Frankie, shines great insight into true character:

Detroit reached a peak population of nearly 1.9 million in the 1950s and was 83 percent white. Now Detroit has fewer than 700,000 people, is 83 percent black and is the only American city that has surpassed a million people only to contract below that threshold.

The blacks wanted out of the ghetto and now the whole city’s a ghetto,” said the blue-haired bartender at the VFW hall… Young ruined that city.”

Frankie was smiling at the bartender. “I guess that depends on who you’re asking,” he said with a dismissive wave of his cigarette. “And which side of the Eight Mile you’re standing on. Blacks might think you ruined it when you left without cleaning up your mess.” (p. 44-45)

It was the conditions white people created in Detroit that attracted black people to the city to begin with; now, black people have been in complete political control of the city for 40 years, and the conditions they have created there are attracting absolutely no one. Indeed, as LeDuff notes, the city is losing population. 

That LeDuff would include this anecdote in his book, simultaneously revealing both his disdain for the whites who fled the city and the source of the ruin of Detroit (hey, LeDuff claimed his book was an autopsy – it’s more like the Warren Commission on the JFK Assassination, with the “Magic Bullet” theory sitting in for the real reason for Detroit’s Demise: white people left) , is a perfect lead into the only interesting story from Binelli’s boring tome.  

Binelli writes how blacks waved to white vacating their city in the early 1970s -- today, blacks threaten riots as whites try to bring financial accountability to the black metropolis

Raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Binelli is that white liberal with trendy accolades on his resume the New York intelligentsia loves to promote; a writer for Rolling Stone and a SWPL white guy who has no problem blaming white racism for the collapse of Detroit. 

Here’s his take on the black takeover of Detroit:

When I was growing up in the eighties, though, the riots were still invoked with the compulsive regularity of a fresh grudge. This was in the suburbs, of course, where the grudge was not always expressed politely, and where even today, blame for Detroit going off the rails harks back to that distant summer [PK NOTE: the 1967 Black Race Riot that Life magazine dubbed “The Negro Revolt”]. Meanwhile, across 8 Mile Road, an entirely different oral history had been passed along. University of Michigan Professor Angela Dillard, a black Detroiter whose research focused on racialism in the African American religious tradition, told me, “The black middle class, in some ways, has good narrative about the riot. My uncles talked about how they stood on the border waving at the white people leaving, then bought their homes! It wasn’t such a terrible thing when these people who had been terrorizing us for decades left.” (p.112)

Considering that white people were the only ones providing tax revenue to the city and keeping property values healthy in Detroit, you have to wonder what Professor Dillard is smoking.

Alien Nation: Thy name is Detroit

 Tamar Jacoby notes in her 1998 book “Someone Else’s House” that ‘By the mid-seventies, Detroit was heavily dependent on outside aid: everything from block grants to the food stamps that sustained one-third of its residents. And with more than half the state’s voters living in the white ring outside of the town, [Mayor Coleman] Young depended on them to support the crumbling city not just with their business, but also with their taxes and by electing a generous state government.” (p. 310)

Detroit City was the place to be, but the afterlife of an American Metropolis is nothing more than the great warning of what happens when replacing a population that built, sustained, and created the very conditions/social capital for a civilization to thrive is replaced with a population via immigration (and the ensuing conditions these new migrants import with them: high crime, blight, disruptive children who impede the public education process, etc.) that had nothing to do with the founding, building, or sustaining – let alone the maintaining – of said civilization. 

What Binelli and LeDuff can’t admit in their tales of Detroit’s demise is the extreme correlation the city’s collapse has to what VDare has dubbed “The National Question.”

Just as the conditions the Historic Majority Population of America – white people, just as in Detroit – created in the United States are still the envy of the world and attracts people who drop everything to migrate here (legally or illegally) to get their slice of the American Dream; when too many black migrants finally drove away whites from Detroit, they drove away the American Dream and instead, created the authentically black American Nightmare of the former Motor City. 

Detroit is the ultimate city that illustrates the folly of both immigration as a source cheap labor (Henry Ford, that great capitalist, invited blacks to Detroit to work in his factories and drive-down wages from union members), and an open-border policy. 

Nearly 100 years to the date when Detroit had a 100 percent white population, the 82 percent black population of Detroit can’t cough up enough tax money to keep the lights on [Left In The Dark: Copper Thieves Rob Detroit Freeways Of Light, CBS Detroit, 2-17-13]:

The Michigan Department of Transportation says one-fifth of the lights along freeways in Metro Detroit aren’t working — and copper thieves are mainly to blame.

 “We are responsible for about 5,500 light poles and also about 5,000 individual lights that are installed beneath overpasses,” MDOT spokesman Rob Morosi told The Detroit News. “Right now we’re estimating 1,100 outages to those poles for a number of reasons.”

The lights are out in Detroit City. But judging from Binelli and LeDuff’s take on the fall of Detroit, perhaps this is the city where Peter Brimelow’s fictional white family from his proposed last chapter of “Alien Nation” should have been set. 

And that civilizations complete collapse is nothing more than a powerful lesson in the failure of open borders and the toleration of unlimited immigration because of the cheap labor it provides. Demography is destiny, and eventually the civilization that attracted blacks to Detroit in the first place was toppled. 

Once in power, they presided over the dismantling of that very civilization. 

The answer to the National Question is in the ruins of Detroit.