Rush Limbaugh, Ze'ev Chafets, and "Devil's Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit" -- Yes, Detroit's Bankruptcy is a Story of Race

Ze'ev Chafets book on Detroit, Devil's Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit, is in the news more than 20 years after its publication.

A Rosetta Stone in understanding the truth behind Detroit's collapse

On his massive influential radio show, Rush Limbaugh discussed Chafets book and broke the unofficial embargo on discussing the racial role in the decline of the city of Detroit (Note to the Daily Mail: 'The future left Detroit behind' left the Motor City behind, because white people fled the city upon the democratically elected black rule).

He said [America Discovers Zev Chafets' Book on the Role of Race in Detroit's Demise, RushLimbaugh.com, July 24, 2013]:

By the way, I've gotta tell you something.  I talked about Zev Chafets' book about Detroit yesterday, what really explains Detroit's bankruptcy.  Zev Chafets published a book in 1990 called "Devil's Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit"   And I reviewed some of the book. "
 
I skimmed it, a little book report for you yesterday, and the book focuses on the Mayor Coleman Young as the real culprit in what happened to Detroit, and the fact that, yeah, you can't deny that liberalism played a large role in Detroit's failure, unchecked Democrat power, unions as well, the decline of the auto industry, all those are factors, but Zev Chafets' point in his book is that it was Coleman Young, the mayoralty of Coleman Young single-handedly is responsible -- well, nothing is single-handedly, but largely responsible for what happened to Detroit.

By the way, don't misunderstand, folks.  I'm not trying to deemphasize liberalism as a cause for what happened in Detroit, because racial tension is liberalism.  Race wars are liberalism.  Race wars happen because of liberalism, and if they're not caused by, they certainly are encouraged. The flames of race wars are fanned by liberals.  The two are inseparable.  But the point of Zev's book is it would be to miss the point just to chalk it all up to liberalism.  You have a card-carrying communist as a mayor who wanted a black nationalist, separatist city that was really done in by his leadership, and that was all brought about by the riots in 1967.

Read the full transcript at Mr. Limbaugh's site, but stay here for a candid look at Ze'ev Chafets book and some of the key excerpts from Devil's Night.

Unlike Rush, I've read the whole book.

Liberalism - that ubiquitous enemy - didn't bring down Detroit, it was simply blacks that did.

The key quotes from Chafets book:

Detroit's shift from a prosperous white city to a poor black one was extraordinarily fast; within six years of the riot [PK Note: 1967], it had a black majority and a black administration. And the change was far more complete than in other major America cities. Chicago maintained stable white ethnic neighborhoods and a vital business district; Washington D.C. , remained anchored by the federal government, which provided jobs; in Atlanta, mayors from the civil rights movement built economic and political alliances with white suburbia. 

For the two and half million whites who lived in America's most segregated suburbs, Detroit became the The Corner writ large- an alien, threatening wreck, a place to drive through, if at all, with the windows rolled up and the doors securely locked. Whites not only left the city physically, they abandoned it emotionally as well. 

... Detroit today is a genuinely a fearsome-looking place. May of its neighborhoods appear to be the victims of a sadistic aerial bombardment - houses burned and vacant, buildings twisted and crumbling, whole city blocks overrun with wees and the carcases of discarded automobiles. Shopping streets are depressing avenues - banks converted into Fundamentalists churches, party stores with bars and boards on their windows and, here and there, a barbecue joint or saloon. The decay is everywhere, but it is is especially noticeable on the east side, which has lost roughly half its residents in the past thirty years - the most extreme depopulation of any urban area in America. 

Suburban whites are dismayed by the physical degeneration of what was once their city; but they are truly terrified by its racial composition, and the physical threat they associate with blacks, who constitute between 70 and 80 percent of the population. Some, mostly elderly, whites still live in the extremities of the city, and municipal employees are required to reside there by law (although many have fictitious addresses). But in most parts of town, most of the time, Detroit is as black as Nairobi. (p. 23-24)

So pretty quickly into the book, it should be glaringly obvious the reality behind Detroit's unprecedented collapse. Sadly, Chafets book was published in the late 1980s, meaning Detroit has limped along for 23 more years before declaring the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.

Here's a sickening prediction from Chafet's book about how what happened to Detroit will soon happen to all of America. That's a point Charlie LeDuff, author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, concedes in a recent piece at the New York Times.

Chafet's wrote:

A few days after the election, [Detroit] News columnist Chauncey Bailey, a thoughtful man who Coleman Young once branded an Uncle Tom, explained why.

"Observes miss the point when they suggest that Young is lesss of a historical figure because he does not come across as "moderate" as do other African-American leaders now making inroad in less black cities, and is therefore out ofstep with a "new generation" of leadership. 

Only New York City and Chicago have more African-American residents than Detroit. new York is 25 percent African-American and has just elected its "first Black" mayor. Chicago is 40 percent African-American but lost power when African-Americans showed disunity. Due to their racial makeups, leaders in those cities must be more moderate to win. But Detroit is where more big cities will be in the coming decades. Young's legend will be the model, not a myth, that many will turn to."

Bailey's prediction reminded me of something I had heard more than a year earlier from Father William Cunningham, a very savvy white priest who has worked in the inner city for twenty years. "Detroit is the center of an American revolution," he had told me. "We're twenty years ahead of Chicago, forty years ahead of New York City. God knows where we are in comparison to San Diego. In terms of civil rights, this is Broadway. There's no place else where black power has spoken like it has in this city. And what happens here will eventually happen in the rest of the country. (p. 231 - 232)

Mr. Limbaugh... do you get it yet?

Do you?

Here's more:

But most black Detroiters do not measure their lives, or their city, by the yardsticks of the American middle class. [Mayor Coleman Young -- the first black mayor of Detroit; elected in 1973] Young may not have provided them with the safest streets or most efficient services; nor has he been able to raise their standard of living. But he has given his constituents something even more valuable: a feeling of empowerment and personal worth. Detroit is one of the few places in the country where blacks can live in a sympathetic, black-oriented milieu.  

"Detroit is an environment where you can forget about being black," said Cassandra Smith-Gray, who heads the city's welfare department. (p. 178)

 The conditions of the city don't matter, as long as black people are in charge and running things.

Do you get it now Mr. Limbaugh?

Do you?

Here's more, Mr. Limbaugh. Please, be sure to read this passage to your audience on Monday:

Coleman Young is the black mayor of a black city, a fact never from his consciousness. 

As Arthur Johnson observed, in no other place in the country have blacks succeeded in gathering so much political power into their own hands; specifically, the hands of the mayor. After four terms, he has cast the city government in his own image. Five of the nine members of the City Council are black [this book was published in 1990; now, all members are Black]. So were the chief of police, the fire chief, all four police commissioners, and the heads of most city departments (and, although Young does not appoint them, both congressmen, the superintendent of the schools and a majority of the city’s judges).

In city departments, where they are a minority, white often feel like outsiders. One senior official told me that she received bomb threats from colleagues because she was not part of the “black political mafia.”

But Young has done more than broaden access to the pork barrel. Under him, Detroit has become not merely an American city that happens to have a black majority, but a black metropolis, the first major Third World city in the United States. The trappings are all there – showcase projects [Renaissance Center], black-fisted symbols [Joe Louis Statue], an external enemy and the cult of personality. Detroit has even developed a quasi-official ideology that regards the pre-Young era as a time of white colonialism, ended by the 1967 insurrection and its aftermath. An official city publication describes the police department as having been a “hostile white army, entrusted by white authorities with the job of keeping nonwhites penned up in ghettos.” (p. 176-177)

Do you get it now Mr. Limbaugh?

Do you?