People engaging in simple philosophical debates or with too time on their hands have at one point pondered the ever stupid question: If a tree falls in the forest and no is around to hear it does it make a sound? I’ll save my response for later but lets dive into a little history first.
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I grew up in Detroit. I went to high school in Detroit. My neighbors are black. My classmates were black. My community is black. My mother grew up in Detroit. She went to high school in Detroit. Her neighbors were black. Her classmates were black. Her community was black. My lineage is from Detroit. Our high schools, neighbors, classmates and community were black. We don’t travel much.
“From the 1920s through the 1940s, the majority of Detroit’s black population was confined to a densely populated, sixty-square-block section of the city’s Lower East Side which migrants named, perhaps with more than a touch of irony, Paradise Valley.” (Surgrue, 23)
I am in Detroit, my bad I think I am still in Detroit. My high school is still there but every year more white classmates are coming. My neighbors are still black but now there are only 4 houses left on the block. My community was black but according to a Google I don’t think we fit the criteria for community anymore I think the more appropriate word would be demolished.
“White neighborhoods, especially enclaves of working-class homeowners, interpreted the influx of blacks as a threat and began to defend themselves against the newcomers, first by refusing to sell to blacks, then by using force and threats of violence against those who attempted to escape the black sections of the city, and finally by establishing restrictive covenants to assume the homogeneity of neighborhoods.” (Surgrue, 24)
I don’t belong in Detroit. It is their high school and those are their students. The 4 people left on their block are just numbers not people. The only numbers that matter are the ones that can afford things that have a lot of numbers. They justified the demolition job citing that the numbers were small and they didn’t fit in the new plan.
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Still wanna know if that tree makes a sound? How about this for your philosophical debate. Who the hell cares if it makes a sound you know it fell, go get a truck and pick it up. A tree just died and you’re too star struck looking at the carcass to call the ambulance. We know that the people who own Detroit allowed the drought of revenue, bugs in the private sector to nibbles on our portfolios and for the kicker they let us believe that these things were good for us. Of course our roots were shriveled by the time that tornado of recession came. And we fell with a resounding crash to the Earth. After the Quicken Loan sharks came for the rest our resources claiming to reallocate we got Q-Lines, wealthy outsiders building waterfront condos but more important we got eviction notices.
Way to say it bluntly Dom. I like your point a lot–we spend so much time anylizing and debating over things like these philosophical questions and hypothetical business opportunities and the effects of those, but we often do that while removing ourselves from the situation. On one hand this book provides a lot of information to the public about Detroit and its history, however it doesn’t put the reader IN Detroit. Not that a book should do that, but I think it’s interesting to analyze cities and people’s communities in an academic context, but at the same time I’m not sure of another way that works better. I guess what I’m saying is I like your point and I like your attitude of “if you know it fell, pick it up.” Hopefully we can all put ourselves back in situations in which we have some sort of autonomy over what happens and can impat it for the better.