Yeah, yeah. I know the mayor does hire more blacks and he makes better speeches than his predecessors, but his approach to city building still marginalizes and deems black neighborhood development unimportant.
It pains me to say this, but the mayor is fiddling while blacks are being displaced from neighborhood after neighborhood in Buffalo. He is fiddling while underdeveloped neighborhoods are spewing undesirable outcomes in housing, education, employment, and health. He is fiddling. The mayor knows about black suffering and pain, but the solutions to these nasty problems do not fit into the economic growth model he celebrates.
So black neighborhood development is chronically placed on the back burner. Yes, black faces in high places can support systemic structural racism.
But we, the people, have a choice. We have a right to the city.
Don’t get me wrong. The white latte group moving back to Buffalo is a good thing. I get that; but the choice we face is not between the white hedonic latte city and blacks living in blighted, disfigured, and slum-like neighborhoods. That’s where the mayor gets it wrong. The real choice, my friends, is between the hedonic latte city and the just city.
Hear me, Buffalo.
Our city does not belong to those powerful faces in high places; it does not belong to the developers, the bankers, and all those folks profiting off the latte city. We have a right to this city. The masses of black, brown, yellow, red, and white faces have a right to build the just city. We can make that choice. The future is “uncreated.” It is not some type of preordained, futuristic place that is immutable and fixed. No! The future is “uncreated,” and we have a right to build the just city, a good place, where we find liberation and the higher freedoms.
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Buffalo! The time has come for us to answer Rabbi Hillel’s question: If not us, who? And if not now, when?
AARON FOLEY
Can Detroit Save White People?
OKAY, SO, ALL YOU WHITE people coming from Brooklyn (or L.A., or Portland, or Austin, or Chicago, or London, or whatever) to Detroit looking to “save” yourself: What, exactly, are you saving yourself from?
I’m curious! What is it like being born into the most spoiled classes on the planet and wanting to move to a city full of black folks who have been ruined by centuries of your tyrannical rule? Serious question here.
All right, maybe that’s being a little harsh. I didn’t mean to call you folks spoiled. Because as we all know in New Detroit, we have to get along and pretend racism doesn’t exist anymore. Just ignore all those elderly black people being pushed out of downtown. It’s really just a class issue, don’tcha know.
What is this obsession? What is this desperate need for people to fix themselves in a city that’s broken? You may heal, you may find your emotional center, but your surroundings remain the same.
Why is it that the Detroit I know is so drastically different from what all these starving artists think it is? The city that made me, that made us, who we are: driven to succeed, dressing to impress, never saying die, forever against the odds, is now becoming the Island of Misfit Toys? Is this your pilgrimage to Mecca? A journey through the universe to the softest place on earth? Who are you misguided strangers who aren’t even close to having your life together in a city where we’ve constantly been told that we’d never be worth anything if we weren’t on your level?
Yes, we were told that. Us east-side and west-side kids were always told to not even think about going to the parks in Grosse Pointe, to drive slow in West Bloomfield, to just ignore those stars and bars on the back of Taylor pickup trucks, and to outperform the kids in all the rest of the suburbs so that we might have a chance to get a scholarship to a U of M, an MSU or a CMU, only to be told on the first day of orientation that we were only there as pitiful affirmative-action cases and that our Detroit/Highland Park/Southfield/Inkster educations would never be enough to make it in the real world, so we go back home to make sure that the next generation would never have to deal with the kind of stuff we had to put up with, only now we have to deal with not only these overcrowded schools, these abandoned houses, these unpredictable summers, but on top of all this, these armies of confused Williamsburg rejects who simultaneously have all the answers on how to make it in Detroit after living here for five weeks but don’t even know how to fix their own lives because they need to be “saved.”
What are you looking for here that you can’t find elsewhere? Can’t you just admit that you came for the cheap rent? Because that’s what it all boils down to, right? And that’s fine. Perfectly fine, and I’m not being cynical or sarcastic. I love the fact that there are still places in Detroit that rent for the same as what my mom paid in Lafayette Park in the nineties. I don’t love how the “cheap rent” excuse is fine for the newcomers but not the longtime business owners. But I’ve seen Brooklyn prices, and you’d be a fool not to take advantage of what we’ve got here. And we could certainly use more (live) bodies here. But can you at least be up front with your intent, and not cover it up with this hippie malarkey about “finding yourself”?
I’m not sure what else you’re looking for, or what exactly you’re trying to get away from when you say you want to save yourself.
