What Brought Detroit to it's Knees?

 This is just an amazingly, on-target post by a Detroit resident who counters the notion that poor politics, liberal democrats, union members, or wild spending bankrupted Detroit. It is, in fact, a response from a progressive libertarian who blames racism, pure and simple, for Detroit's fiscal problems...and who sees great promise in the city still.  Thank you to Milo Sales for this impassioned analysis:

Anyone who knows anything about Detroit knows how dumb this (blaming Obama or specific politicians) is. If a racist had a city, it's what Detroit would look like 50 years later. You might want to look up what White Flight and Redlining are - because that's what turned Detroit into what it is today. When you move all the jobs to the suburbs and refuse to let poor minorities rent/buy houses in the area, with shit for mass transportation (effectively stranding them with no means of reasonable income) guess what, the city will degenerate.
What you fail to realize is that METRO Detroit (ie, the Suburbs) are prosperous. As a matter of fact one of our suburbs is the second richest city in the ENTIRE country. [I suspect he is referring to Grosse Pointe].  If you understand the scale of Detroit (we can fit Manhattan, Austin and SF all in our city borders only) and then consider the size of the suburbs (at least 15x larger) you might start to make some connections here. The Old Detroit spread out, taking its wealth and jobs with it. It's not coincidence that the City/Suburbs is the most racially segregated part of the entire USA - 8 Mile is a Black/White Line, even still. 

 
You have a city designed for a tax base of a million trying to make do with 200,000 - which falls daily as black people whose families got left behind emigrate to the more prosperous suburbs now that, you know, they can actually do that.

Detroit wasn't killed by Democrats or Liberalism, it was killed by Racism - pure and fucking simple. Now tell me, which party is more Racist? Yeah, I thought so. It's amazing that the city has held on as long as it has without going bankrupt.

Second, despite all of this - Detroit is an amazing place; especially for Libertarians. Where else could a couple kids buy a 3 story building downtown for 40k? I renovated an entire loft out of nothing, no electricity, no water, with no permits, no government interference. I built a place that in another city would have been so far out of my budget it's absurd. You know how many permits I pull when I go till an abandoned lot and plant a community garden? None. We have communities, real ones, where people stick together and know each others names still. We have neighborhood watches where we manage not to kill unarmed kids, despite their being ACTUAL crime. We have an incredible entrepreneurial spirit - art galleries which spring from nowhere, designer clothing shops started up by 20 year old's, 2k and a screen printer. Nineteen year old's are buying and renovating homes, starting businesses.

But maybe you're right, if Obama had a city maybe it would be Detroit. A city where blacks and whites come together despite centuries of racism, create and achieve things that no one expected or thought possible. While I'm no fan of the president, I'll take that comparison.

The general ignorance of people is amazing. Maybe we're all Secret Muslims too.

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Why Whites Insist on Defending Zimmerman

I have really been shocked at the stridency with which so many white folk – otherwise intelligent, even liberal white folk – have engaged in semantic gymnastics in an effort to justify the Zimmerman verdict and criticize those who see injustice.  The righteous anger in defense of Zimmerman is startling, even for someone like me, who has grown accustomed to racial animus as a fact of life.  But why has this case struck such a nerve, in the white community as well as in the black community?

I think back to something a very wise, sympathetic figure said about me more than a decade ago.  

I was still closeted, and had not come to terms with my sexuality. I was engaged in furious online debates with this man, who was unapologetically open about his orientation. I came up with every argument in the book as to why he was wrong, mistaken, sinful, sick, twisted, and deluded.  I would grasp at any weird event that had happened in the gay community, and attempted to characterize it as ‘normal’ for that group. With each such bizarre post, I would punctuate my comments with the equivalent of “A-ha!  See?!  You’re a hypocrite/wrong/blind blah blah blah."  I was irrational in my need to prove I was right.

This gentlemen with whom I was debating wrote a private message to someone else, who had the courage to send it to me.  What it said was,

“Thom is a man conflicted.  You fight yourself the hardest, and he is not really fighting me…he is fighting himself.”

That insight was brilliant.  I have never forgotten it (eternal thanks, John/Jane Z)

And I see the same concept manifesting itself among white people in the aftermath of the trial.

White people who insist that they are not racist, because, in their heads, they know it's a bad thing to be racist.

But for who, in their guts, still have knee-jerk feelings...based on race.

In their hearts, they know they distrust blacks more than whites.  They know they’re even afraid of blacks, and will cross the street to avoid them.  They know in their gut that when they hear about welfare queens and people who rip-off the tax system, they envision a black family.  They can’t avoid these feelings, often because they were raised in an environment where they were taught to fear and loathe blacks.

But, they know in their heads that such misplaced hate and prejudice is simply wrong. Ergo, they deal with a conflict between the head and the gut.

And so, “they fight themselves the hardest.”  They scour their minds and the internet and every cliché they can find to make sure that they can satisfy the racial fears in their guts by lauding Zimmerman, without violating their conscience which tells them that racial fear is not a good enough reason.

They throw punches in the air:

“Black on black crime is much worse…”

“No one ever talks about a white kid getting killed by blacks…”

“The jury spoke, it’s over…”

“You don’t see whites rioting…”

“Zimmerman was being pummeled…”

“It’s the media’s fault…”

"He was a thug.."

“If Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton wouldn't get involved….”

“The civil war ended over a hundred years ago, and all you people do is talk about race…”

Of course, not one of these arguments is a legitimate reason to support George Zimmerman. Not one of them addresses the District Attorney’s sweeping this under the rug for 45 days,  the misuse of the Stand Your Ground Statute and the refusal of the Judge to issue jury instructions on that matter, the admission of concrete slabs and shirtless pictures of Trayvon as evidence, the lack of *any* pre-emptory challenges by the prosecution over jurors, the lack of any men or blacks on the jury, the fact that Zimmerman’s father was a local Judge and the venue wasn't changed,  and a host of other suspect irregularities.

But what these folk are doing is not fighting for or against Justice.

They are using George Zimmerman as a proxy for themselves.

They know that George suspected Trayvon, because Trayvon was a young black man in a gated, middle class neighborhood.  

And they know they would have felt the same.  

Putting Zimmerman on trial is like putting them on trial.

And so the only way to fight the inner vestiges of racism in their gut, is to ‘fight themselves the hardest’ – lash out and defend Zimmerman any way they can, so they can avoid the ugly reality of having to reconcile Gut with Mind.

It’s an irrational, ugly, brutal process.

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