----- Original Message -----
Subject: The Late Great City of Detroit
An older article here on the blackness
afflicting Detroit.
Anywhere you have hegros and shegros congregating in
large #'s you're going to have overwhelming
crime.
Erect turds simply don't possess the intellect
to govern
themselves.
The Late Great City
of Detroit
The first in our occasional series on the shifting
racial composition
of America's
cities.
by William Robertson Boggs
Every year, at Halloween, the
city of Detroit goes up in flames. In an
annual
observance known as Devil's Night, gangs of young blacks set
fire to
hundreds of buildings, while fire trucks scream helplessly from
one
conflagration to the next. Devil's Night has become a choice event
for fire buffs,
who come from as far as Europe and Japan to gape at
the spectacle
of a city gone mad.
The tradition of Devil's Night arson began for
unknown reasons in 1983
and caught the
city by surprise. Fires blazed out of control, and smoke
hung over the
city for days. Now, every year, the city braces for the worst.
Fire
departments from neighboring suburbs converge on Detroit to help
fight the
flames, and thousands of civilian volunteers patrol the streets
for arsonists.
Nothing works. Last year, more fires were set than the year
before. Much of
the city now looks as if it had been carpet bombed.
Capital of Black
America
In Detroit, appearance is a faithful reflection of reality. The
city is one
of the most
wretched, dangerous, ugly, and dispirited in the country.
Every year, it
competes with Washington (DC) for the distinction as
murder capital
of the United States. Neighborhood merchants do business
behind
bullet-proof barriers and leave their stores with weapons drawn.
Of the
approximately 20,000 children who start first grade every year,
only 500 (2.5%)
will ever get enough education to do college work, and
only 100 of
these will be boys. One third of Detroit's residents are on
public
assistance, and food stamps are a virtual second currency. Drugs
are everywhere,
and the city has black-Africa rates of AIDS and infant
mortality.
Detroit, the sixth largest city in America, is more than 70 percent
black. It
thinks of itself as the African-American capital of the continent.
[ Comment: 81.55 percent Black per the 2000 Census. Now
Detroit is
just another Haiti, of course, under the French, Haiti was known
as the
"Pearl of the Carribean.]
Only a little over a
generation ago, the city was a proud, prosperous,
mainly-white
metropolis--the motor capital of the world. Incongruous
as it may now
seem, in the mid-1960s, it was widely hailed as an urban
success story.
The Washington Post wrote that Jerry Cavanaugh, then
mayor, "has
succeeded where other big city mayors have failed."Time
magazine wrote
that he was "restoring the heart"of the city. Detroit
was a show
piece for Lyndon Johnson's "great society,"and prided
itself on its
liberal progressiveness. When Martin Luther King visited
Detroit in
1963, he was given a hero's welcome.
The Illusion Ends
Show
piece Detroit fell apart in 1967. That summer, as they had in so
many other
cities, black neighborhoods erupted in a frenzy of violence
and rapine.
Detroit's riots were the worst the country has seen this
century. They
went on for five days and left 43 people dead. The 101st
and 82nd
Airborne divisions had to be called in to restore order.
Detroit never
recovered from those five days in 1967. Whites have
fled the city;
in the 20 years following the riots, Detroit lost 600,000
people. The 70
percent white majority of 1960 dropped so quickly that
in 1973 Detroit
had both a black majority and a black mayor. Now, no
other city in
the United States has a character or identity that is so
clearly
black.
Mayor Coleman Young calls himself "the black mayor
of a black
city."
This is scarcely an exaggeration. The police chief and all four
police
commissioners
are black. The school superintendent is black, as are
the heads of
virtually every city department. Both of the city's
congressmen and
most of its judges are black.
While federal and state subsidies keep
Detroit from complete collapse,
Mayor Young
operates his city much as an African potentate might.
His picture
hangs in every city office building, and his name graces
the municipal
letterhead. The personal business cards of every city
employee bear
the mayor's name. At every opportunity, he names parks
and civic
centers after himself. Even the city zoo is now named for
Coleman A.
Young.
The very history of the city now has something of a
colonial-African
hue. The period
of prosperity before the riots is now officially viewed
as analogous to
colonization. A city document describes the pre-1967
police force as
"a hostile white army, entrusted by white authorities
with the job of
keeping nonwhites penned up in ghettos."As the riots
recede further
into the past, they are increasingly seen as a glorious
insurrection,
in which the oppressed black man threw off his shackles
and wrested
control from the white man.
Detroit even has its own anthem, which is
also the unofficial anthem
of black
America: Lift Every Voice and Sing. The people of Detroit
still sing the
Star Spangled Banner when the presence of whites makes
it necessary,
but it is invariably followed by an enthusiastic chorus of
what Detroiters
call "our"anthem. No city in America is more self-
consciously
black, no city more clearly and completely governed by
blacks than
Detroit.
A Series of Failures
Black rule has not been a success.
As the city's population shifted,
all indices of
its health went sour. The murder rate rose 1000 percent
between 1950
and 1990. Welfare became the single largest employer.
Industry
escaped to the suburbs, and the tax base shrank.
Despite massive,
Devil's-Night destruction of housing stock, the
building
industry withered to nearly nothing; in 1987, the city issued
only two
building permits for single-family houses. As the population
shrank to one
half its 1950 figure and arson leveled entire blocks,
large
tracts
of the city simply reverted to nature. Wildfowl not
normally
seen
in cities have been found nesting in Detroit's urban
prairies. In
the center of town, skyscrapers stand vacant. One can
easily walk an
entire downtown block, on a week day, and not see
a soul.
Of all the city's horrors, violent crime is surely the worst. People
who live in
Detroit are two and three times more likely to kill each
other than
people who live in New York or Chicago. Detroit's murder
statistics are
so grim that they push the entire state into the top of the
league for
black homicide. In the 15-24 age bracket, 232 black men
for every
100,000 can expect to be killed every year. Washington
(DC) trails far
behind at 139. For whites of the same age, the murder
rate in
Michigan is 6.6 per 100,000, which means the state is 35 times
more dangerous
for young blacks than it is for young whites. Virtually
all blacks are
killed by other blacks.
Although it is nearly impossible for anyone not
familiar with the city
to imagine the
texture of life in Detroit, a recent incident at a movie
theater
captures the atmosphere. When the Americana 8 theater had
its first
showing of the Eddie Murphy movie, Harlem Nights, the
crowd was so
large and unmanageable that ushers stopped checking
for tickets.
Nearly 1,500 people pushed into the theater, filling the
seats and
aisles. As they waited for the movie to begin, some people
passed around
bottles of liquor, and others danced on the stage in front
of the movie
screen. The theater manager was worried by the unruly
crowd, and
started the movie with the house lights on.
A few minutes into the
movie, some men got into a fist fight. The
manager stopped
the show and called the police, who restored quiet.
Shortly after
the movie started up again, a group of women began
fighting and
the movie was stopped. Theater personnel were able to
make peace and
the movie started again. Yet another fight broke out,
the movie was
stopped, order was restored, and the movie started up
again. Then,
just as the Eddie Murphy movie character loosed a burst
of gunfire,
someone in the audience started firing.
Two men in the theater were
wounded, and most of the audience ran
out of the
building in a panic. One woman was in such a rush that she
was hit by a
passing car and badly injured. When police and first aid
personnel
arrived, they were duly fired on. They returned fire,
wounding their
assailant. It would be wrong to call this a typical
Friday night at
the movies, but the city has long gone numb to
savagery of this kind.
In Detroit, it is sensible to assume that virtually every man is
armed
--non-criminals
must defend themselves against criminals. In one famous
incident a few
years ago, a bus load of 19 black preachers took an
excursion
across the border into Canada. They were stopped and
searched by
customs agents, who discovered 19 hand guns--one
per clergyman.
Who is Responsible?
A great city does not become a wasteland
without a reason. When the
once-great city
is populated and governed almost entirely by blacks,
one might think
that the official and obligatory explanation for black
failure--white
racism--rings hollow. One would be wrong.
Mayor Young has developed the
well-timed charge of racism into
a
fine
art. He dismisses any criticism of the city by white-owned
newspapers or
television stations as racism. Despite the fact that
Detroit no
longer has any whites in positions of power--indeed,
scarcely any
whites at all--Mayor Young regularly wins reelection
on the theme
that white malevolence is at the root of the city's problems.
Even when
whites are out of sight and out of power they are believed
to be casting a
miasma of despair over what would otherwise be an
African-American paradise. In fact, without the welfare and surrounding
infrastructure
of a rich white nation, Detroit might well be no different
from
Haiti.
For anyone willing to seek instruction in contrasts, there is
much to
be learned
about Detroit from the city of Toronto. Only 230 miles
away, on the
shore of Lake Erie rather than Lake Ontario, Toronto
has become the
city that Detroit once was. While Detroit's population
was dropping by
half, from nearly two million to one million, Toronto's
doubled from
one million to two million. It weathered declines in its
old
manufacturing base and found a new role as a center of finance.
Safe, bright,
upbeat, described by admirers as "New York run by the
Swiss,"Toronto
could hardly be a more striking contrast to the squalor
of Detroit. It
is only eleven percent black.
Even though whites dare not discuss the
obvious connection between
a city's racial
composition and its level of culture, blacks are freer to
state the
obvious. In Ze'ev Chafets' recent book on Detroit, Devil's
Night, the
author quotes a young black welfare recipient, who has
managed better
than virtually every black "spokesman"and white PhD
to cut through
the fog of self-delusion and excuse-making that warps
any discussion
of race in America: "Blacks can't sit around and wait
for whites to
do for us,"she says; "The trouble with us is us."
But if the trouble
with blacks is blacks, the trouble with whites is whites.
Though they are
still a 75 percent majority in the nation as a whole
(this figure is
now debatable) --about the same majority as Detroit at
the height of
its power--whites have established immigration (see
following
article) and welfare policies at are rapidly cutting into that
majority. If
these policies do not change, whites will become a minority
within the next
few decades.
Whites still have the power to change their destiny. If
they do not, they
need only look
to Detroit to see the future.