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.