no one wears baggy jeans anymore

A quote by David Goldberg in the article “G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class” in the New York Times Magazine says it all; “It wasn’t that long ago that Detroit was the home of the nation’s most affluent African-American population with the largest percentage of black homeowners and the highest comparative wages”.  While the rest of us are preoccupied with the fact of the death of Michael Jackson, himself from Gary, In, an old working town the truth about the reality of the Black Middle Class, which has shifted from Detroit to elsewhere in the country there is never enough that can be said about the rise and fall of the middle class from a small Midwestern class to the rest of the Midwest for those looking to redeem themselves through the manufacturing sector.  Detroit was never an “educated town” full of white collar administrative jobs in call centers or government jobs or service industry jobs as many places where an African-American with enough of an education to stay off of the streets but not enough to make $50,000 a year could reside.  No instead Detroit is a place where Blacks were once relegated to a single side of town and had  eventually grew in population to take over the city and make the city their own.  Detroit was that rare city in the North, in particular the Midwest, where this was possible whereas in other cities, including Chicago, the politics of having a city that was “half and half” or where Blacks were a minority created a situation ripe for the complex yet convulted politics of having enclaves of power and influence in small neighborhoods in the city yet no real presence in the city itself. 

It isn’t that Detroit was the first American city to have a Black mayor, though many may have simply assumed that the designation actually goes to Cleveland of which Carl B. Stokes was the first African-American to become the mayor of an American city in 1967.  Yet it was not long behind as Coleman Young held the office of mayor in Detroit from 1974 to 1993, and things have never been the same in Detroit.  Many will say that Young destroyed the city, others will point to his legacy as a reminder that no one is perfect, five times or not.  The truth of Detroit, as always, is somewhere inbetween; on one hand the virtual isolation of African-Americans in Detroit not just from other racial groups but the cultures of African-Americans in other cities as well can be a serious problem, on the other hand it has created the underpinnings for a unique celebration of African-American culture that can only truly be understood and appreciated by someone who was born and raised in the city. 

It is not that Detroit does not have a diverse population outside of the Blacks and Whites that live there, but the way in which the city has developed has always encouraged and fostered seperatism, as was the case with many cities up North.  To this day the demographics of the city is 81% Black, 12% White leaving just 7% for other ethnic groups which in a city of over 900,000 is still over 63,000 which means there are larger ethnic neighborhoods in that city than African-American neighborhoods in general elsewhere. Yet that in itself may speak volumes for a solidarity that you do not often see in other cities where African-Americans would be more likely to engage with other cultures and try on other things and experience something outside what outsiders may percieve to be the monolithic culture of Detroit. 

You also see this in Atlanta and cities like Washington DC where generations were able to benefit from the “opening up” of the city.  Washington DC actively and aggressively recruited African-Americans to work in the city as early as the forties whereas other cities were about to be thrown head first into our civil rights struggle a decade later.  At least this is what I remember having read in a museum in the city somewhere; that African-Americans could easily find work in the city or is that revisionist history, have things always been as rosy in Washington DC as they are now?  It isn’t that hard to figure out; when you have great pay at jobs that do not require an advanced education to get that were relatively easy to obtain and you could get the entire family to move into the city and you were free to celebrate your culture in ways that you may not have been able to do elsewhere it makes for a powerful combination.  The question is, can the city leverage that level of committment and reinvent itself and make it a place where African-Americans would want to move to again in the near future or are those successes of the past a big part of how the city may get in its own way?  The answer to that question is in part of what could put it over the top again years from now and help it to differentiate itself from the rest of the North as it is now pecieved as being the biggest casualty in the Rust Belt.

So it is easy for someone else to question one’s level of commitment without exploring where that commitment comes from. I can look at the city and raise any number of questions, but the city hasn’t done for me what it has done or given that sense of pride of me to that which has been born and raise there in particular if they are of a second or third generation resident.  So the arguments are a moot point because in all truth the city does off a unique experience over other American cities, despite what it may look like to outsiders.  The strength and relevancy of the city is not measured by residents through the same means that we measure the strength and relevancy of our own city or those that we admire.