Read it on Salon
Join HULU, SEINFELD and SALON to celebrate Festivus!
Sponsored Post
Saturday, Jul 27, 2013 4:30 PM UTC
Why the right hates Detroit
How the fates of two great cities, Detroit and New Orleans, symbolize what's gone wrong with America
Topics: Politics, Detroit, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, Detropia, A Band Called Death, Movies, Editor's Picks, Life News, Entertainment News, News
Two great American cities have now faced near-death experiences in the 21st century. While Detroit’s gradual slide into bankruptcy and the almost biblical inundation of New Orleans in 2005 look quite different on the surface, I’m more struck by the similarities. Both these tragic events were a long time coming. Only the earlier one involved a literal act of God – although the Almighty was goosed along a bit by rising carbon emissions and rising temperatures – but both could clearly have been prevented. Both tragedies were shaped by larger economic forces and historical trends that lay (or at least appeared to lie) beyond the control of individual politicians or policy makers. Then there’s the obvious but uncomfortable fact that both are cities with large black majorities, in a country where African-Americans are only about 13 percent of the population.
But Detroit and New Orleans are not just cities where lots of black people happen to live. They are uniquely important and symbolic centers of African-American culture in particular and American culture in general, whose influence spread into every luxury high-rise, every suburban street and every farmhouse in the country. Both cities have been rigidly resegregated now, but at their cultural height both were places of tremendous fusion and ferment. Jazz was born from the children and grandchildren of kidnapped Africans learning to play European instruments for the dance parties of biracial French-speaking aristocrats; Berry Gordy’s great Motown recordings borrowed the Detroit Symphony’s string section to create what he called “the Sound of Young America,” driving white teenagers to shake a tail feather at sock hops across the land.
The cultural legacy of New Orleans and Detroit is not limited by race or geography. Even before it went around the world, jazz traveled up the Mississippi on riverboats, which is how Louis Armstrong (according to legend) met an Iowa kid named Bix Beiderbecke, who would become the era’s second greatest trumpet player. Detroit produced not just the black-owned Motown empire, but also shaped the future of rock with a thriving underground scene that included the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges and the recently rediscovered proto-punk band Death (profiled in a recent documentary), a trio of African-American preacher’s kids who preferred Alice Cooper to Aretha Franklin. Detroit’s most famous rapper, by far, is a white kid from the suburbs.
Is it pure coincidence that these two landmark cities, known around the world as fountainheads of the most vibrant and creative aspects of American culture, have become our two direst examples of urban failure and collapse? If so, it’s an awfully strange one. I’m tempted to propose a conspiracy theory: As centers of African-American cultural and political power and engines of a worldwide multiracial pop culture that was egalitarian, hedonistic and anti-authoritarian, these cities posed a psychic threat to the most reactionary and racist strains in American life. I mean the strain represented by Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby” (imagine what he’d have to say about New Orleans jazz) or by the slightly more coded racism of Sean Hannity today. As payback for the worldwide revolution symbolized by hot jazz, Smokey Robinson dancin’ to keep from cryin’ and Eminem trading verses with Rihanna, New Orleans and Detroit had to be punished. Specifically, they had to be isolated, impoverished and almost literally destroyed, so they could be held up as examples of what happens when black people are allowed to govern themselves.
Hang on, you can stop composing that all-caps comment – I don’t actually believe that what happened to Detroit and New Orleans resulted from anyone’s conscious plan. Real history is much more complicated than that. I do, however, think that narrative has some validity on a psychological level, and that some right-wingers in America are so delusional, so short-sighted and, frankly, so unpatriotic and culturally backward that they were delighted to see those cities fail and did everything possible to help them along. (I’m not exempting the Democratic political class of those cities from responsibility. Speaking broadly, those in city government there inherited an unsustainable situation in a downward-trending economy, pursued their own short-term objectives and only made things worse.)
In the wake of both Hurricane Katrina and the Detroit bankruptcy, many mainstream commentators have tried, with varying degrees of subtlety, to frame these events as “black stories,” and specifically as stories of black dysfunction and black political failure. I’m willing to bet that many white Americans still believe those hysterical early post-Katrina stories about New Orleans residents shooting at aid helicopters (all were later retracted or exposed as false), or believe there was widespread rape and murder among the 20,000 refugees in the Louisiana Superdome. (There were no homicides and only one reported sexual assault, an attempted rape.) While the Detroit situation is normally described as a failure of tax-and-spend, pro-union liberal policies, the racial coding you’ll find on Fox News and elsewhere is crystal clear – and the reader comments on any Detroit-related article, on Salon as elsewhere, will curl your hair with overt racial hatred.
Most Read
