"By and large, Detroit is falsely portrayed in the monopoly media as a pariah. Detroit is actually great because it has such a large portion of Black people."
Yes! I agree with Charles, and I'm Anglo. Detroit is now over 90 percent Black. Black people run the city government and shape most institutional life, except ownership of assets. Black people are at the bottom nationwide on quality of life indicators, but here in Detroit they also occupy a deteriorating, near-bankrupt urban space that was abandoned by white capital and white residents. Now, does that package help make a city great? Yes it does, absolutely. I'm not talking directly about Black personality or Black art forms which, of course, are intimately linked to the material conditions of life. I'm talking about the brute issue of survival today, in Detroit, of fellow citizens who have withstood centuries of exploitation and oppression, and still create great art and human warmth, and still commune together on solutions to the difficult life they experience. Just last evening Charles and I attended a Town Hall held by the Detroit City Council campaign of Maureen Taylor, a long-time Black 'radical' in Detroit. There was a certain 'greatness' to the mostly-Black audience, expressed in its collective sadness and frustration about how bad things are, but resolved to do something about it, even if it meant civil disobiedence and arrest. This is the 2005 version of the civil rights movement, that moved this country forward so much, but now is based on survival in the so-called 'post-industrial' era.
Threads like "Rap and Detroit" are frustrating. Alright, race and class are mixed into cultural forms, and we all know that. But rap is not Detroit (or St. Louis or Chicago or Atlanta) anymore than jazz or blues is Detroit. Detroit is poverty, pain, and debilitations, mixed in with adaptation to material conditions, mixed in with struggles to make change. I would hope that folks try to clarify their subject lines better.
Bob
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