Waking Up From the American Dream: The "Inception" of Detroit

The last 40 years in Detroit never happened.

Never.

It was a dream.

Collectively, as a nation, when we awoke all that was around us was disorder, blight, chaos, and urban anarchy.

It's just a dream... just a dream

But there was no one to blame for the mess; no custodian in charge of the city could be fingered as the villain in this story.

But like any dream, you remember certain parts of it.

Somewhere in your subconscious, you remember a mayor who always said he was a “black man first and a Democrat second.” This same man worked assiduously to remove whiteness from his administration:

During his 1973 campaign Young had promised to give blacks their rightful place in city government. He decreed that for every white cop promoted, a black officer had to be advanced too. One housing manager recalls: "I was a white liberal intent on doing some good. What surer route to doing good than public housing? Then in 1977 my career halted. My supervisor warned me nicely: because of my race, I had no future in the agency." To the complaint that such measures amounted to reverse discrimination, Young had a categorical reply: "You're damn right—the only way to arrest discrimination is to reverse it."

But that was just from the dream, right?

It never actually happened.

Just a figment of the imagination – this type of mindset couldn’t be the reason for the crumbling infrastructure of the city in 2013, or the reason the impressive the Emergency Manger of Detroit has hired Christie’s to appraise the Detroit Institute of Art collection (as a way of paying for a fraction of the $18.5 billion in debt owed to Detroit creditors).

Only eight years into this dream sequence, this same city was on the verge of bankruptcy (only kept alive by huge amounts of federal loans/aide).  But this was just in the dream: there’s no way this scenario actually played in real-life, right? [DETROIT MAYOR IS WARNED THAT BANKRUPTCY IS NEAR, New York Times, April 2, 1981]

But that hadn’t happened? We just dreamed it.

Right?

The collapse of the city, in this dream collapsing into a dream (damn that Christopher Nolan), wasn’t already set by 1981. No, that was just in the dream where the ascension of one type of political power (black) drove away the very people responsible for creating the conditions in the Detroit community that allowed it become the greatest city in America (white people).

Only in the dream did we see such drastic changes in such a short amount of time [Danger for Coleman Young, The Afro-American, 9-15-1984]

Since 1971, the number of businesses in the city had fallen by 30 percent, from 15,527 to 10,923. The number of tax returns from employed Detroiters had also fallen by 24 percent – from 408, 378 to 309,554.
 Young saw jobs leaving for the suburbs. The general population was declining, but the proportion of people with problems – the number of households on welfare or public assistance – was rising.
 He saw that the tax base wasn’t growing, and Detroit was caught between the pincers of declining revenues and increased demand for city services. Nearly 60 percent of Detroit’s residents were receiving some form of public aid in 1981 and enrollment in welfare programs had increased by 64,000 people during the previous year alone. 

What was that quote from Inception? Oh yes: “Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”

But it’s the next part of the dialogue that answers the question behind Detroit’s collapse – I think: “Let me ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on.”

Right in the middle of the dream? What was happening during the last forty years in Detroit that no one dares mention when discussing the reasons behind the largest bankruptcy for a city in American history?: 

According to data collected by the city, 891,000 whites had lived in Detroit in 1969, but by 1976, when Young was proudly unveiling his Renaissance Center, only 543,000 remained.
 As a result of the massive out-migration of urban whites, between 1970 and 1990 the percentage of blacks in Detroit rose from 44.5 to 78.4 percent, giving the Motor City one of the largest African-American populations in the urban North.
 In fact, nothing Young ever said stemmed the tide of white fight, and the effect of this exodus was to bring severe economic distress to the city. When Detroit lost much of its white population, it also lost a signficant portion of its economic base. As the social geographers Bryan Thompson and Robert Sinclair have pointed out, when white Detroiters left the inner city, they took “the majority of the important service, professional, and leadership activities of the Detroit Metropolitan system” with them. Soon it was no longer inner-city Detroit but the surrounding suburbs that housed the core of the region’s auto industry. And, in time, industry foremen, supervisors, inspectors, and many white workers no longer called Detroit their home, either. Increasingly, they moved to suburbs such as Royal Oak Township, Troy, East Detroit, the Grosse Pointes, Dearborn, Hazel Park, Ferndale, Madison Heights, Sterling Heights, Southfield, Redford Township, Westland, Farmington, Allen Park, Melvindale, and Lincoln Park. Increasingly, they moved to nearby suburbs that had few, if any, blacks within their borders.
 As Detroit became more impoverished after 1973, its neighboring suburbs grew ever wealthier. By 1980 the median income in Detroit was $17,033, whereas in the bordering suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods it was $35,673. That same year in Detroit 27 percent of blacks and 6.8 percent of whites were receiving some type of public assistance and 25 percent of blacks and 7 percent whites lived below the poverty line.  When Detroit lost most of its white population, tax base, and political support, its future was severely compromised. As Rich notes, Detroit was irreparably harmed by “the impact of changing demographics, especially the loss of revenue occasioned by white flight.” Not coincidentally, while Detroit had lost 56,400 jobs by 1977, the suburbs had gained 36,500.  (p. 240-241, African American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City, Edited by David Colburn and Jeffrey Adler)

But how could the absence of whiteness and the proliferation of darkness doom a city to the fate of Detroit in 2013? Aren’t we all equal, individually capable of success in whichever we steer ourselves? Shouldn’t a black community boast the same social capital and conditions found in a white community, where entrepreneurial activity flourishes?

Arthur Johnson, one-time president of the Detroit branch of the N.A.A.C.P., was quoted in a 1990 article in the New York Times – no, that was a dream…  But it was in this dream, I think, that he said [The Tragedy of Detroit, New York Times, July 29, 1990]:

Johnson, who serves as one of Detroit's four police commissioners, is not naive about the city's problems. But in his view, they spring not from black incompetence, or violence, but from white hostility. 

''Whites don't know a goddamned thing about what's gone wrong here. They say, 'Detroit had this, Detroit had that. . . .' But economic power is still in the hands of whites. It's apartheid. They rape the city, and then they come and say, 'Look what these niggers did to the city,' as if they were guiltless.'' 

De Lisle spoke about the death of a city; but to Arthur Johnson and the rest of Detroit's black intelligentsia, something is being born in Detroit. 

''Detroit has helped nurture a new black mentality,'' he said, pounding his desk for emphasis. ''More than any other city, blacks here make an issue of where you live. If you're with us, you'll find a place in the city.'' 

Whites often say, in their own defense, that many middle-class blacks also leave the city at the first opportunity. I mentioned this to Johnson, but he waved it away. ''The majority of the black middle class is here,'' he said. ''We are engaged in the most determined, feverish effort to save Detroit. Why? Because Detroit is special. It's the first major city in the United States to have taken on the symbols of a black city. It has elected a strong, powerful black mayor, powerful in both his personality and his office. Detroit, more than anywhere else, has gathered power and put it in black hands.''
 

As Detroit dies, isn’t this what happened: “Detroit, more than anywhere else, has gathered power and put it in black hands.”

No.

The last 40 years in Detroit never happened.

Never.

It was a dream.

No in the media is talking about any of the things mentioned above.

Not one Republican has brought it up, so it must have been the delusions of one individual enjoying a Rip Van Winkle-type sleep.

But… something seemed awfully close to a vision of reality.

'Look what these niggers did to the city…’

Detroit.

What are the demographics of Detroit in 2013?

Never mind.

Go back to sleep.

You are just dreaming.

But like any dream, you remember certain parts of it…