Community Observations and Community Responsibility

Here we are! Week three, officially one-third done with DCBRP. Things are moving fast at DFA as we get ready for our kids to join us for our summer program, and I am so excited to put all of my plans into action. I’m also really pumped to be working with youth again, something I haven’t done during my last couple years of community organizing. My supervisor, the rest of the staff, and I have hardly had time to catch our breaths the last week, but I’m loving being so busy. I’ve noticed, though, that even with how busy everyone is, folks are still willing to offer help and support. That means the world to me, as I am experiencing a lot of firsts this summer (I’m lesson planning for the first time in my life, which I never thought I would have to do), and I can tell that it is part of DFA’s culture.

I’ve observed a lot about the city in the past three weeks, and the feelings my observations bring up are pulling me in one hundred different directions. The most pressing thing, which I am acutely aware of, is how folks treat people who panhandle in Detroit. People at shops and restaurants will ignore them, clutch their purses, or give them dirty looks, and all of it makes me so mad. I try to be intentional and kind through smiling, wishing people well, and giving if I can. I know some people will never be actively kind to folks who panhandle, but it really irks me when people don’t have, at the very least, a neutral attitude. There is absolutely no need to be cruel to someone asking for money or resources (What does it accomplish? Whose day is made better by being mean? What happened to our shared humanity?), but I see it happen all the time here. Given Detroit’s intense gentrification, many of the folks panhandling very well may be people who formerly lived around places that now cost too much money for even the middle class to patron, so being mean to people asking for money makes absolutely no sense to me.

Moving on, I have also observed through communication with longtime residents that people in Detroit are unbelievably resilient. Residents are fighting every day to keep their homes, have access to water, resist police brutality, and do other community work that is authentic and transformative for the people who live in the city’s neighborhoods outside of mid- and downtown. While the fact that they have to do this work makes me sad and angry, it also inspires me and makes me want to do whatever I can to engage in meaningful solidarity work, something that is really important to me.

Since the start of the program, I have been thinking a lot about if, how, and where I fit into Detroit-based community activism as a white woman from the suburbs. I never want to take up space that is not for me, speak for others, overstep, or wander into white savior territory, nor do I expect education from folks who do not want to give it to me. I don’t have an answer to this question yet, and don’t know if I will by the end of this program, but I do know that we have a duty to show up for each other. That duty is one that I take very seriously, and I will continue to respectfully search for actions I can take that let me show up for people in a way that is actually helpful, and in a way that dismantles privilege and supremacy.