This article was originally published 23 March, 2012.
Remember the time you were in class and knew the answer to a question
posed by your teacher, but didn’t raise your hand out of fear you might
be wrong? Or the time you had a crush on a beautiful girl, but were too
afraid to ask her on a date because she might say ‘no’?
Well, we are reaching the political equivalent of that moment—where
that self-induced fear and trepidation which precludes us from doing
what is rational and natural because of the negative consequences we
perceive could arise from such action—with the impending financial
collapse of Detroit.
“Impending” is the wrong word. “Imminent” would be, too. “Inevitable” is the apt word.
Why the insolvency of Detroit has been an inevitability now must be
stated, because others will raise their hand and supply the wrong
answer.
The American Thinker will try and blame
Democrats and Unions without mentioning that America’s most livable big city,
Pittsburgh, is filled with both.
Free Republic won’t allow anyone to even mention the word “Black” in
the strange color-blind world the owners of that site have cultivated
(with a religious zeal and intensity normally seen in a cult).
Beloved conservative economist Thomas Sowell can state it is due to “
liberal social policies,”
without acknowledging these same policies are in place in cities that
attract corporate investments, like Portland, Seattle, Boulder, and
Denver. Others will state that a city under “
total Democrat hegemony” for 50 years was bound to collapse, maintaining a desire to stay color-blind even in the face of economic Armageddon.
Michael Barone, famous for stating that Hispanics will save the
Republican Party, was in Detroit during the Black riots of late July
1967, still the worst riots this nation has ever seen. He wrote an
article for the
American Enterprise Institute
stating how his politics were shaped by this event. Considering that he
advocates the continued mass immigration of a people who in 2006
marched in major American cities waving the Mexican flags defiantly, we
have to wonder what exactly Barone learned.
The Weekly Standard
published Matt Labash’s ode to Detroit’s collapse back in 2008, where
he only in passing pointed out the racial significance of a city’s
collapse. (In 1960, Detroit was 76 percent White. Though at the time
Blacks represented only 24 percent of the population, there were
responsible for 65 percent of the violence crime there):
Somewhere along the way, Detroit became our national ashtray, a safe place for everyone to stub out the butt of their jokes.
It happens, though, when you're from Detroit. In the popular
imagination, the Motor City has gone from being the Arsenal of
Democracy, so named for their converting auto factories to make the
weapons which helped us win World War II, and the incubator of the
middle class (now leading the nation in foreclosure rates, Detroit once
had the highest rate of home ownership in the country), to being
Dysfunction Junction. To Detroit's credit, they've earned it.
How bad is Detroit? It once gave the keys to the city to Saddam Hussein.
Over the last several years, it has ranked as the most murderous
city, the poorest city, the most segregated city, as the city with the
highest auto-insurance rates, with the bleakest outlook for workers in
their 20s and 30s, and as the place with the most heart attacks, slowest
income growth, and fewest sunny days. It is a city without a single
national grocery store chain. It has been deemed the most stressful
metropolitan area in America. Likewise, it has ranked last in numerous
studies: in new employment growth, in environmental indicators, in the
rate of immunization of 2-year-olds, and, among big cities, in the
number of high school or college graduates.
Men's Fitness magazine christened Detroit America's fattest city, while Men's Health called
it America's sexual disease capital. Should the editors of these two
metrosexual magazines be concerned for their safety after slagging the
citizens of a city which has won the "most dangerous" title for five of
the last ten years? Probably not: 47 percent of Detroit adults are
functionally illiterate.
Precisely what caused all this mess is perhaps best left to
historians. Locals' ideas for how it happened could keep one pinned to a
barstool for weeks: auto companies failing or pushing out to the
suburbs and beyond, white flight caused by the '67 riots and busing
orders, the 20-year reign of Mayor Coleman Young who scared additional
middle-class whites off with statements such as "The only way to handle
discrimination is to reverse it," freeways destroying mass transit
infrastructure, ineptitude, corruption, Japanese cars--take your pick.
We no longer have the luxury of such utopian dreams of taking our
pick when it comes to placing the blame for Detroit’s monumental
collapse; we must deal with the facts as they are and point out that
Detroit has become the best friend of budding photographers hoping to
publish the next best-selling coffee table book because it is a city
that most resembles the dangerous foreign landscapes pictured in
National Geographic. (For an actual coffee table book on modern Detroit, check out
The Ruins of Detroit, by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre .)
Detroit is 82 percent Black. The Great Migration to Detroit of
Blacks from the South (exacerbated by Henry Ford’s promise to hire 10 percent of his employees from the Black population) inexorably created
White Flight from that city, turning the city once known as “The Paris of the West” into the American version of
the Paris Suburbs. Much of the rest of
the city been torn down due to neglect.
Detoirt's Woodward Ave. (from The Ruins of Detroit).
That Democrat hegemony bemoaned for ruining the city has been
overwhelmingly Black for 40 years, starting with the election of Coleman
Young, the first Black mayor in the history of Detroit. The mass exodus
of people from the city was primarily White back in the 1960s and '70s
(which turned a majority White city into the majority Black mess you
have now), but is currently a torrent of
Black people fleeing in hopes of finding a place to live with a national grocery chain.
White people fled Black crime then; Black people flee Black crime now.
Mike Brownfield of The Heritage Foundation has said Detroit is “a
liberal’s worst nightmare,” but fails to point out that it is
Black people fleeing a liberal Black cityto the tune of a 25 percent population decline in 10 years.
What are you afraid of saying Mr. Brownfield? Why can’t you just say
Detroit is in trouble because of its majority population (why doesn’t
the
Detroit Free Pressever run an article that asks,
In changing world, Detroit remains overwhelming black?)? Why can’t Dr. Sowell? Why can’t
The American Thinker? Why can’t
National Review?
The decline of Detroit (and America’s major cities such as Baltimore,
Milwaukee, Memphis, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cleveland, Newark, New
Orleans, Atlanta, Birmingham, Chicago, etc.) is completely racial in
nature. Michael Walsh of
National Review laments that “
some day, we’ll all live in Detroit”
without mentioning the fact that Detroit’s lily-white suburbs--where
the White descendants of the War of Detroit (the 1967 Black riot)
retreated to--are perhaps the nicest in America.
Conservatives must understand that is the Black residents of Detroit
who have helped depreciate what was once some of the highest property
value in the country to the majority of zip codes in
America with the lowest property value.
The Black press seems to understand understands this:
The Atlanta Post
published a story in 2010 stating that to Abandon Detroit = Abandoning
Black America; Detroit post-1967 is a direct representation of Black
America.
One mustn’t forget that every student in Detroit now eats for free
(courtesy of the state) so that the stigma of being on the free lunch
program won’t affect the self-esteem of Black children. As of 2009, more
than 300,000 Black residents of Detroit were on food stamps, which
equates to
38 percent of the citizenry. One can only guess what that number is now.
With news that Detroit could run out
cash by December, Mayor Dave Bing has had to announce massive cuts to the city that contradict the
USA Today’s triumphant, front-page, above the fold claim in October of 2011 that
Detroit was back! from a few months ago.
The Detroit Free Press reported:
Delivering on his pledge to avoid an emergency manager, Mayor Dave
Bing said today he will lay off 1,000 employees, implement a hiring
freeze and increase his demands on unions to accept 10% pay cuts and
deep concessions in health care and pension benefits.
This follows an earlier proclamation from Bing that stopped
garbage removal, police patrols and other government services in 20 percent of the city. Who can forget that more than
100 Detroit Department of Transportation bus drivers
refused to work and stayed at the Rosa Parks Bus Terminal because of
rampaging Black youth (who have helped earn Detroit the honor of
America’s Most Dangerous City) attacking them.
That same bus system is so
unreliable that LaWanda Flake,
a disabled mother of six, recently bartered her home on Craigslist for a
van to get her children to school on time. That house once belonged to
one of the top Mo’ Town artists (The Supremes), but has since come to
represent how quickly property depreciates once Black people assume
control of a city.
If Detroit fails, then the unthinkable could happen: Michigan recently passed a “
financial martial law”
bill which allows the state to assume control of a bankrupt city. Once
Detroit fails, an Emergency Manager will put in charge of the city and
The American Interest warns us a 21
st Century version of a “Plantation” will be created in America:
That’s not the only problem: if the review determines that the city
is broke, white Republican officials could end up making decisions that
change the fate of a predominantly African American city — imposing cuts
in employment, pay, benefits and services that will affect almost
everyone who lives in Detroit.
Detroit Free Press columnist Jeff Gerritt lays out what the governor will face if the takeover goes forward:
“Plantation” is a word he’ll hear a lot — in fact, Councilman Kwame
Kenyatta already invoked it to describe what would happen if the state
took control of the city’s finances in an effort to keep it from running
out of money by spring…
Nothing happens in this region outside the context of race. Our
often-painful history is the oxygen we breathe, even when we choke on
it. We’re all finding it a little hard to breathe just now.
“Plantation” is the wrong word. On actual plantations, people worked.
In the case of Detroit, the White Republican “owners” will labor away
on behalf of their "slaves."
As Black people flee Detroit and head into the prosperous lily-white suburbs surrounding the city, they
ensure that the middle-class areas will continue to shrink.
The classic 1980s film
Robocop teased at that truth when the
CEO of OCP said, “Old Detroit has a cancer. That cancer is crime.” In
Hollywood’s Detroit, multi-racial gangs, made up primarily of White
males, prevailed.
Detroit faces a dual problem of spiking murder rates and a police force that is either incompetent or, increasingly,
absent. This has led many residents to take the law into their own hands.
The Daily reports, in an article entitled “911 is a Joke”:
Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the
previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves
and took matters into their own hands. The local rate of self-defense
killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents,
unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are
fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re
offering no apologies.
Black dysfunction has, ironically, realized the dream of
Reason magazine and
Anarcho-Capitalists—a
laissez-faire city with few government services. In Detroit, the dream is a nightmare.
In the span of only a few months, two of the former industrial giants
that represented America’s once mighty manufacturing base will have
become virtually insolvent. Sad that 72 percent Black Birmingham,
Alabama, was responsible for the bankruptcy of Jefferson County.
Now, it is precisely those who comprise the 82 percent share of
Detroit’s population that will be responsible for the financial ruin of
that city, because they were incapable of sustaining the civilization
that was left behind to them.
Only a few people will raise their hand and give the correct answer as to why "the Motor City" is finally out of gas.
To admit that Detroit is a failure because of its majority population
is not possible in the political climate of 2012 America. To do so
would undermine the political aim and drive of what this writer has
dubbed “Black-Run America” (BRA).
This does not mean that Black people run actually America—far from
it—but that America (corporate, religious, government, legal system,
entertainment, etc.) is run for the advancement of Black people, and
that to publicly say anything negative about Black people is, more or
less, against the law of the land.
The National Question can’t be properly answered until we have the
courage to proclaim the truth of Detroit’s demise. "Liberalism,"
"socialism," the "Democrat-controlled political class" are all partial,
insufficient answers at best.
It’s about race, stupid.
