By Gary Blonston, 28 October 1990
Like
so many urban white kids in the 1960s, Detroit teen-ager Ze'ev Chafets
was captivated by the black people around him. He embraced their music,
imitated the cool cadences of their lives, affected a walk and a talk
and an insouciant worldliness that was as close as a Jewish teen-ager of
Russian immigrant heritage could come to changing color.
It was
kid stuff, but even after Chafets grew up, left Detroit and lived 20
years amid the more pressing concerns of his adopted Israel, the
fascination lingered.
Eventually, it lured him back again to become an
explorer in his old hometown, part journalist, part anthropologist, part
wide-eyed white man in a city that, during his absence, had turned
overwhelmingly, uncompromisingly black.
Detroit
had, in fact, become so racially troubled and criminally beset by the
late 1980s that when Chafets told white suburban friends he was going to
live there to gather material for a book, they were aghast. They told
him he was risking his life and urged him at least to buy a gun.
That
is how it is these days around Detroit, the Rust Belt's archetype of
urban decline. It isn't the South Bronx, it isn't Beirut, but the
symptoms of its blight, the crime and decay and disillusionment, have
created a kind of antipathy between city and suburbs that is arguably
unique in America.
As Chafets describes it in his book, "Devil's
Night and Other True Tales of Detroit," the Motor Capital is the first
big American city to demonstrate what can happen when, in just one
generation, an industrial center loses its employment base, loses its
middle class, shrinks in population by half, turns from majority white
to majority black and watches most of its money, power and expertise
move fearfully and angrily to the suburbs and beyond.
Chafets
reports all that anecdotally in a book that is part personal adventure
and part sociological travelogue. Wherever he goes--whether to
inner-city neighborhoods he likens to Nairobi because so few whites
venture in, or to places two counties away where the Ku Klux Klan still
has a passably good reputation--Chafets is buffeted by differences of
black versus white and class versus class. Mutual racial stereotyping
and class consciousness seem to provide the city's essential energy,
without which there would be no politics, no passion, no competition, no
conversation. In "Devil's Night," whites and blacks rage about one
another with a fierce, goading anger.
"People in the suburbs want
us to fail," city Planning Director Ron Hewitt tells Chafets. "The
situation here is very similar to post-colonial situations in the Third
World. People always say, 'The Africans can't govern themselves,' and
that's what they say about us, too."
As if to confirm Hewitt's
view, Richard Sabaugh, a city councilman in the bordering city of
Warren, says, "We view the values of Detroit as completely foreign. To
us it's like a foreign country and culture. The language is different
and the way people think there is different. We just want to live in
peace. And we feel that anybody coming from Detroit is going to cause
problems."
The book is full of such forthright quotes, but as
Chafets declares at the outset, he is neither sociologist, political
scientist nor any other kind of urban analyst, and when it comes to
wrapping meaning around the words, the book falls short. As admirably as
he documents the disturbing clash of hopes and humanity that typify
Detroit, what Chafets sees and hears cries out for more context,
explanation and insight.
Take
the phenomenon of Devil's Night for which his book is named: that
notorious night before Halloween when arsonists annually make national
news by setting fire to hundreds of mostly vacant structures around
Detroit. Superficially it seems an example of a city gone mad, so much
so that Chafets opens his book with the outrageously lurid sentence, "It
was in the fall of 1986 that I first saw the devil on the streets of
Detroit." After a night watching buildings burn, Chafets asks a white
Detroit newspaper reporter why it happens, and the response is,
"Frustration, anger, boredom. I only work here. I stopped trying to
figure out this city a long time ago."
That's about all we learn
of Devil's Night, other than the fact that white suburban fire buffs
find it sufficiently seductive that they dare come into the city on this
particular night so they can watch. But Devil's Night represents much
more than just inexplicable destruction, a good book title and a
melodramatic lead sentence. Those neighborhoods didn't go bad all by
themselves, and all those Detroiters didn't become pyromaniacs by
spontaneous combustion.
Devil's
Night's roots reach back to the 1970s, when crooked real-estate people
and crooked federal bureaucrats brought on one of the great housing
scandals of the country, leaving thousands of inner-city Detroit homes
in default and abandonment. The city fell years behind in demolishing
dangerous structures, and cynics took to calling the growing number of
arsons "urban renewal, Detroit-style."
More houses disappeared
each year, and at the same time so did jobs, and so did people.
Pheasants and other wildlife returned to share bulldozed, pastoral space
with drug dealers in neighborhoods that, for half a century, had been
densely urbanized. For those left behind, physical and psychological
decline lay all around. It isn't quite accurate, later, when incredulous
spectators marvel to Chafets, "They're burning down their own
neighborhoods." To the dispossessed of Detroit, those connections had
withered long before.
In
1984, the first Devil's Night eruption occurred, and in a city with
such a tradition of anti-authoritarian defiance, local officials
virtually assured that it would become an ongoing tradition by vowing to
stop it.
The fires almost certainly will burn this Devil's Night
once more, illuminating some of Detroit's most fundamental problems. But
we don't get much discussions below the surface of "Devil's Night." And
without more examination of the reasons behind the extremes of life in
Detroit, big sections of Chafets' book serve only to reflect the
region's baffled alienation.
Chafets does learn one important fact
of Detroit-area life. In that swirl of hostility (and to the surprise
of his suburban friends), he lives, works and socializes without being
mugged, shot, stabbed, burglarized, lured into hard-drug addiction or
even insulted very harshly. Part of the reason, he discovers, is that
most of the region's whites and blacks live such effectively separate
lives that in-your-face racial hostility is rare. Still, he writes,
"Each side has an orthodox, almost ritual explanation for what has
happened to the city they once shared and no longer do, and not
surprisingly, each side blames the other."
Detroit's powerhouse of
a mayor, Coleman Young, both gives and gets as much of that blame as
anyone in town, but there is plenty to go around, the product of years
of unrealized dreams and sometimes malevolent neglect. Activist priest
William Cunningham, one of the most articulate and angry of Detroit's
liberal white voices, tells Chafets: "If the enrollment of the Detroit
schools was all white, industry and the state government would come down
here and put the Board of Education in jail for fraud and failure.
Corporations would be screaming. But in America there is a marvelous
neglect of what is black."
Others in the book speak with hope,
though. They predict a new kind of urban experience in a place
sufficiently black not to be obstructed by white indifference or
hostility as it pursues successful, separate self-government and
economic recovery. That notion intrigues Chafets, and near the book's
end, it seems to rise powerfully, as he revisits a childhood friend who
has survived crime, drugs and failure to live a normal life.
The
implicit parallel between friend and city is unavoidable, but it rings
false. Detroit is a city struggling these days to find any clear avenue
to the future, socially or economically. Optimism, implicit or
otherwise, seems a bit out of place from someone who once found the
devil in this place.
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