The Black Metropolis

Tied up with much of the coverage of Detroit's bankruptcy is an unmistakable race angle: that poor political leadership, the product of a generation of African American mayors, betrayed one of America's great cities.  The story, as told by these writers, is that corruption and racialized political favoritism produced a political process that narrowly rewarded a black elite, while punishing whites.  Great civic goals - and any hope of reviving the city - were pushed aside, left in the dust as black leaders picked through the ashes of a dying Detroit, keeping what they found there.  Andrew O'Hehir published a piece on Salon recently that made the sweeping claim that the right has relished the collapse of Detroit and New Orleans as evidence that African Americans are poorly-suited to lead.  What evidence does O'Hehir have to support this?

In fact, history shows O'Hehir is on target.  Carl Stokes, who, as mayor of Cleveland, was the first African American to lead a large American city, was dismissed by white councilmen and state politicians in Columbus as a radical black nationalist, interested in dismantling the city's politics and rebuilding it to benefit blacks.  It wasn't true, Stokes was a pragmatist, interested in arresting the city's decline by harnessing the aspirations of the city's struggling poor and its middle class, who saw the floor dropping out from under them as industrial jobs left town.  But white political leaders committed themselves to isolating Stokes, withholding aid, refusing to cooperate, rejecting compromise.  O'Hehir gets something unmistakably right - as cities decline, politicians fight over the shrinking treasure, and political deals are harder to make.  For Cleveland's white political elite in 1967, compromising meant giving up not just power, but control over contracts and payoffs and the city's shrinking financial resources.  And the same logic shapes choices made by black politicians in collapsing cities.  It is a pathology related to urban decline.  Race gets entangled in this when the fight over resources also challenges white privilege.  And, unmistakably, partisan politics is part of the shameful mess we see unfolding in Detroit.  Michigan's emergency manager law has been used exclusively to push aside Democratic mayors - in predominately black municipalities, putting key decisions in the hands of managers appointed by Michigan's Republican governor.  In other Michigan cities, the job managers have done - ripping up contracts, repurposing public funds - hasn't changed the trajectories of failing municipalities.  As one former emergency manager said, with remarkable frankness:

I do not believe [emergency managers] can be successful—they abrogate the civic structure of the community for a period of years then return it virtually dismantled for the community to attempt to somehow make a go of it. The program provides no structure for long term recovery, and that is why most communities slide back into trouble, if they experience any relief at all—a vicious cycle.

So we can see Detroit's fate - its few remaining assets will be dismantled and sold off, and then the city will be returned to voters, worse off than before. African American leaders will be blamed for this, or African American voters, as a narrative is laid out that the state did all it could but, in the end, there is only so much you can expect from a black metropolis.

Another thing that this focus on failed black leadership does is allow conservatives to absolve corporations of any role in Detroit's fate.   As I discussed elsewhere, the contemporary American business class has come to view the accumulation of wealth, as an end in itself, as a sacred objective.  No expectation exists that their efforts should benefit anyone other than the investor class.  Adam Smith, who modern businessmen would view as a liberal do-gooder, believed the aim of the capitalist should be to increase the wealth of the nation; it is the effect of our use of capital in improving the overall well-being of society that matters. Without question, Detroit's decline can be seen as a failure of American automakers to map out a strategy to compete in a global market. But it can also be seen as a failure of Smith's vision: unconcerned with the effect on their communities, automakers closed plants in Detroit to move production overseas, or to the union-free promised land of the sunbelt, all in a desire to improve profits, regardless of the social cost.   

Summarizing Detroit's decline as a failure of black leadership also serves another central concern of modern day conservatives - discrediting the Presidency of Barack Obama.  Conservatives have, since he began his campaign in 2007, worked hard to position Obama as the President of black America, exclusively concerned with rewarding his African American supporters.  Romney pouted about this after he lost in 2012.  It was inconceivable to the man who thought the White House was his birthright to imagine that voters just believed that Obama was a better choice as the nation's chief executive.  Over and over again, Republicans have portrayed Obama, who by any objective view is cautious in his employment of race-based rhetoric, as a "divider", as a champion of black America, as a vehicle for expressing African Americans' misplaced anger against white America.  How convenient for this cause that they can hold up Detroit as an example of what happens when you let blacks run things. 

Sliding into the Abyss

Growing up in Cleveland, and seeing the city collapse, like Detroit, and watching city services slashed, just like Detroit, I've seen this as a crucial public policy question: What does a municipal government owe its residents? And at what point does the elimination of these services accelerate the city's decline, making a rebound impossible? As cities like Cleveland shed jobs in the 1960s and 1970s, politicians gave tax breaks to companies in an effort to prevent employers from departing.  But the practice seldom worked, and cities gave away taxes that could have supported schools, and libraries, and infrastructure. It hastened the city's slide, as services declined, and families fled to the suburbs. The result: racial polarization and metropolitan sprawl. As whites moved out of Detroit and Cleveland, they stopped worrying about fighting for city services. From a recent article by Matthew O'Brien in the Atlantic: "Well-off whites who work in the city and live close by have an interest in paying for the kind of public goods, like mass transit, that benefit everybody. Well-off whites who live far away don't. Atlanta, of course, is the prototypical case here: going back to the 1970s, it's under-invested in public transit, because car-driving suburbanites haven't wanted to pay for something they think only poor blacks would use."  This is as true in Cleveland as in Atlanta.  Study after study shows housing being abandoned in Cleveland, and new homes, for the more affluent, built in distant suburbs.  Abandoned homes accelerate the decline of inner-city neighborhoods, the cost of demolishing them - estimated at more than $525 million - beyond the reach of a cash-strapped municipality.  Meanwhile, suburban families, who drive to work, lobby politicians to repurpose transportation spending to build and improve expressways, rather than support bus and rapid transit service in the city.

In an earlier post - one devoted to the music of Pere Ubu  - I said this about Cleveland:

In sociologist William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, I find a compelling description of what happens when cities like Cleveland die.  Persistent joblessness, caused by the relocation of industry and the resulting collapse of retail businesses and enterprises that service the manufacturers and the employees who depend on the manufacturers for their paychecks, results in a cascade of social and organizational collapse. Families that can – those with breadwinners with better educations and more marketable and adaptable skills – flee the city, relocating to suburbs to work in new industrial parks or, in the case of Cleveland, moving to the sun belt to take jobs in Atlanta and Houston. As families leave, stability providing local institutions shut their doors, as churches and lodges and social clubs lose membership.

The result is a form of social isolation. The unemployed in the city’s inner‐city neighborhoods lose their connection with one another – a function churches and clubs once provided – and, perhaps more centrally to our story, the residents of the city, immersed in its decline, lose touch with any other possible narratives. This story – one of poverty and hopelessness, of irreversible decline – becomes the seemingly inescapable truth of their lives. 

Obama's address at Knox College, aimed at mapping out a middle class agenda, is too little, and comes too late for cities like Cleveland and Detroit and Youngstown.  I look at the parade of horrors coming out of Cleveland - the kidnapping and killing of young women, seemingly over and over again - and I see a social fabric so frayed, and police resources so stretched, that basic expectations of public safety are no longer guaranteed.  Photos of Detroit's spectacular decay have become a form of internet porn - the crumbling grandeur somehow stirs our emotions, reminding us of what we were.  Are the monsters who stalk Cleveland's streets and abandoned neighborhoods a truer glimpse at what happens when communities fall into the abyss and we no longer care what happens to our neighbors? That's the bottom line - we have become a society where individuals no longer care about one another.  

Vast income inequality, social distance, diverging trajectories, deepening racial distrust, have led us to a point where it is hard to imagine a path out of this discouraging fate.  And this is a fundamental problem.  The right loved to make fun of the Obama campaign's focus on Hope in 2008.  But they were wrong.  Obama said this during that campaign: 

Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

What's funny about that?  In what way is that inconsistent with a prevailing, deeply rooted American belief in progress?   But here's the problem: if we have lost faith in one another, if we no longer care about our neighbor, or more broadly about our common fate, if we believe we can only struggle on alone, what hope is there to solve shared problems?  

For a portion of our population, George Zimmerman is a hero.  In our stand-your-ground society, where our safety and security is only guaranteed by our hair-trigger decisions, and the use of our concealed weapon, shooting first and asking questions later makes sense.  Police won't be there for us.  Our neighbors won't be there for us.  Our safety is in our hands. In the form of our Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm pistol.  But that is a discouragingly dystopian view.  Government was engineered to provide for our common security, to permit us to achieve the things we could not accomplish alone.  As the right has shredded our faith in government, and as municipal services have been dismantled in our decaying cities, large portions of the American public have come to believe that they are utterly alone in a hostile world.