[In this interview from five years ago, the author of this
important book discusses some of the events and policies that have
made Detroit a showcase for the neoliberal mode of urban development.
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

AUTHOR FINDS LESSONS IN DETROIT’S ‘50-YEAR REBELLION’  
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Michael Jackman
September 8, 2017
Detroit Metro Times
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_ In this interview from five years ago, the author of this important
book discusses some of the events and policies that have made Detroit
a showcase for the neoliberal mode of urban development. _

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_The Fifty-Year Rebellion How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in
Detroit_
Scott Kurashige
University of California Press
ISBN: 9780520294912

_We've just experienced a summer filled with exhibits, panel
discussions, and books marking a half-century since Detroit exploded
into international headlines. For the most part, it has been a
fruitful look back, as long-held misunderstandings about what happened
in 1967 have been challenged by scholarship, oral history, and
many-sided perspectives. Maybe even a few who have long used the word
“riot” to describe those events 50 years ago have learned why
others called it a “rebellion” — or vice versa. We don't all
have to agree on one way of looking at it, but it's a major step
forward to concede why others might see it differently._

_But as this backward-looking summer winds down, it's worth noting
another look back that tackles perspectives on the ensuing
half-century. That would be Scott Kurashige's new book _The Fifty-Year
Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit_. It's
inspired by the groundbreaking scholarship of Thomas Sugrue's _Origins
of the Urban Crisis_, which Kurashige says "is really good at
diagnosing the problems that led to urban rebellion" but that, even
with an author's postscript in later editions, "a lot of people at the
end of that book want to know what happens next."_

_His book's central idea is a similar one to this summer's
retrospectives: For many people in and around Detroit, the story of
1967 to recent times is one of decline and decay. However, at the risk
of oversimplifying Kurashige's book, concurrent with that long
economic slide is another story: the struggle of Detroit’s African
American community for empowerment and self-determination. Kurashige
makes a strong case that the reactionary forces at work across the
country find their inspiration in how the powers that be have opposed
that struggle here, but also that the lessons learned by Detroit
activists can provide tactics, wisdom, and hope for popular opposition
all over the country._

_In other words, Kurashige trains his sights on a whole new batch of
popular narratives to upend. Kurashige recasts the period of Detroit's
long “decline” as the rise of the city's long-mistreated black
majority, which asserts itself politically. He presents Detroit's
receivership and “rebirth” under the “grand bargain” as a
scandal-ridden effort to disenfranchise Detroiters and neutralize
people power. He illustrates how corporate interests aren't
“rescuing” the city so much as taking advantage of sweetheart
deals downtown while the city's most disadvantaged are squeezed out by
unfairly high property value assessments, school closures, water
shutoffs, and toxic pollution._
_Kurashige, who lived in Detroit and taught a number of
Detroit-centered classes at the University of Michigan, spent more
than a dozen years studying the city, and forming friendships with
left-leaning politicians, activists, educators, urban
agriculturalists, and community elders. His book represents a
corrective to mass media accounts of Detroit's decline and
“comeback,” a primer for progressives fighting corporate overreach
and government austerity, and a sort of “love letter” to the
people he connected with during his many years here in our city._

_He spoke with us a few weeks ago from his home on the West Coast, and
we present this abridged version of our hour-long discussion in
advance of his speaking engagement here at the Wright Museum Tuesday
evening. (See the end of this article for details)._

METRO TIMES: What I like best about your book is the way it takes a
lot of popular narratives about Detroit and shows how topsy-turvy they
are.

SCOTT KURASHIGE: I didn't grow up in Detroit, so I didn't grow up with
those specific narratives as a child, but I grew up in Los Angeles,
which had its own urban rebellions in 1965 and in 1992, when I was
really just starting my research. I definitely could relate to popular
accounts, many of which were overlaid with racial stereotypes. I
certainly realized that I needed to know the deeper history. But even
more than that, I am an academic who believes that knowledge is not in
the ivory tower; it's within the organizations and activist movements
and the wisdom of elders. My relationship with Grace Lee Boggs made it
possible to get deeper insight into the history. The other thing that
affected me was teaching history at the University of Michigan for 14
years, particularly on the history of race and politics. I didn't come
in as an expert. I did choose to live in Detroit, which I came to
realize was an extraordinarily rare thing to do. The whole time I was
there, I never met another tenure-track professor who lived in
Detroit. People were approaching me when I'd only been there a year to
do something about having student experiences in the city. I was
thrown into that somewhat reluctantly at first, because people were
looking to me for leadership on that campus. Building knowledge
through my connection with Detroit, I began to recognize my own
limitations.

MT: This was around the time that U-M offered a bunch of courses on
Detroit, right?

KURASHIGE: What happened was, after I started in 2000, in 2001 there
was the 300th anniversary of Detroit, and the university wanted to
connect with that. They wanted professors to offer courses on Detroit
history, Detroit art, Detroit current events … and I drew together a
class based on what I could gather from community organizers I knew at
that point. That was one of my signature courses over 14 years. It
went through different names but the general theme was race and
politics and activism in Detroit. I wanted students to realize they
needed to recognize their own limitations. If you're a University of
Michigan student not from Detroit, you start with your own
limitations. So many generations of particularly white, privileged,
suburban college students had been reared on these narratives of
Detroit as a wasteland, how Coleman Young ruined the city, how the
"riots" destroyed the city, and they had no knowledge, in most cases,
of the deep history of racial discrimination, housing segregation, or
inequality within the schools. For example, when I tried to teach
students about the issue of gentrification, some students, coming
from their background, were really resistant to engage the topic on a
critical level because they identified with those young suburban
professionals coming into city, and they said that they're not like
the racists of their parents' and grandparents' generations — they
wanted to help the city. But there was sometimes an inability to see
that hidden force — what some people call “white savior
complex.” Fortunately, some of them really took away a lot from
that experience, and some of them now are actually quite prominent
organizers in the city.

MT: I'm sure you're aware that turning these narratives on their head
often provokes deep emotional reactions. For instance, you portray
Coleman Young, and quite factually, as a fiscal conservative who was
accommodating to business interests.

KURASHIGE: I would make several points about Coleman Young. He
certainly is elected amid a lot of hope. I certainly saw parallels
between Obama's election and the way I heard Detroit elders talk about
the election of Coleman Young. Again, the students at the University
of Michigan couldn't see that at first, then a few years after Obama
was elected, they saw he was being called a socialist, divisive, and
spreading hatred of white people. [laughs] And they said, “Oh, I
guess it really doesn't matter if you're a Harvard-educated law
professor like Barack Obama or if you're Coleman Young speaking the
language of the streets of Detroit, there are a lot of folks who will
try to delegitimize you either way.” So I think that's one thing:
Young represented a lot of hope. But I also think Young represented
emerging divisions within black politics and certainly within the
black power movement. Obviously Ken Cockrel and others, including
DRUM, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the Boggses,
represented a much more radical political agenda than what Coleman
Young was ever able to implement. And Coleman Young, as part of his
efforts to do what he felt he needed to do politically, built many
alliances with corporate leaders like Henry Ford II. I think the
second thing that's really important is, while I think he was by every
account deeply committed to trying to uplift working-class people,
black people, and poor people of all races, he was in many ways stuck
in an older paradigm from the heyday of industrialism in Detroit. He
had developed a left-wing view informed by radicals on that industrial
society, but it was in many ways contingent upon there being jobs
created by the Big Three, and that would be the basis for people
getting a living wage, union benefits, and fighting for their fair
share of the wealth.

MT: As mayor, he was definitely at odds with radicals. He told one
reporter from a workers' paper in his office, “You can 'revolution'
your ass out of here.”

KURASHIGE: [laughs] And certainly he pushed back against the Boggses
many times, and Grace and Jimmy Boggs credited him with challenging
them to not just protest the destruction of Poletown or the addition
of casinos, but Young created a paradigm shift for them, to go beyond
protesting the current economic system and devising grassroots
alternatives to that system. The third thing about Coleman Young is, I
think we saw that in order to maintain the city's standing and his own
political standing, he would have to balance the budget, and many
times that meant he had to lay people off or make budget cuts, and
this was very well researched and reported by reporters at the _Free
Press_, like John Gallagher and Nathan Bomey. I think that is a
really important corrective to the narrative because he was not
fiscally irresponsible in ways that critics would like to portray him.
In fact, he was maintaining Detroit in good standing with the banks
and with Wall Street. If you're going to blame any of the mayors, it's
the people who came after him and fell under much more sway from those
sources. Again, in some ways people are missing what was wrong about
Kwame Kilpatrick. Certainly he was dishonest in some ways and made
some major errors in terms of ethics, but ...

MT: You concede Kilpatrick's crimes, but you portray him as something
of a patsy — he was sold a bill of goods by his financial officers.

KURASHIGE: Yeah, the big thing that really had the most devastating
impact on the city was that disastrous pension bond deal for over $1.4
billion, and that was celebrated by all the elites in the city!
[laughs] The _Free Press_ actually berated councilmembers like Maryann
Mahaffey, who was a friend of mine I admired very much, for opposing
the deal. And Kilpatrick got an award from a prominent Wall Street
publication for creating “the Deal of the Year.” This was
celebrated not as just a good thing for the city, but as a major
breakthrough in the relationship between finance capitalism and
municipal politics. And, again, it was disastrous in ways that
Kilpatrick deserved a lot of blame, but the blame is not just for him
making an error in judgment, but the blame is for his role in the city
being basically being taken hostage by Wall Street bankers, not just
even for the debt but for something like half a billion dollars in
fees, which the city paid for the privilege of taking on these
predatory loans.

MT: And in the aftermath, Kwame is in jail and his financial wizard
Sean Werdlow is free as a bird and probably a multimillionaire.

KURASHIGE: I haven't followed him more recently but this was reported
on: He not only got a high-paying job, but a high-paying job with one
of financial firms that engineered the disastrous pension fund deal. I
think this is the problem: Certainly racial divisions are very real in
this country, but what we see is that the focus on Kwame Kilpatrick
— and the comments he made about race and his own personal foibles
— has really overshadowed this deeper conversation we should be
having about how politics, not just in Detroit but in many places,
have been corrupted by the influence of big banks on Wall Street, who
are now using what I call a "hostile takeover" of Detroit as a model
for going around the world and advocating for Wall Street resolutions
to these crises.

MT: And that's another inversion in your book: that the city's
bankruptcy is portrayed as something like a smash-and-grab operation.

KURASHIGE: When I go around the country, well-intentioned people say,
“Isn't it good that Detroit is finally coming back?” It reflects
how people wrongly believe the bankruptcy was a bailout. The auto
bailout was a bailout — although, as I point out, it was a bailout
that favored corporations, not the workers. The Detroit bankruptcy was
not a bailout — other than some of the money to prop up the
so-called “grand bargain” to protect art at the DIA. You don't
get this infusion of low- or no-interest financing. What you get are
changes in policy which all shift toward a more business-friendly
direction and political disenfranchisement.

MT: An assault on voting rights and community control.

KURASHIGE: It's really all part of a voter-suppression wave
nationwide. These policies are so unpopular with voters, even the
emergency manager law was voted down by the entire population of
Michigan. It wasn't even that close. These policies, when they're
deemed unpopular with voters, you have schemes designed to ram these
through without any kind of democratic accountability.

MT: Another narrative you flip is the downtown resurgence, which you
quote Sugrue as calling “trickle-down urbanism.” You point out
that, as downtown makes gains, there are considerable losses for
majority of residents of city.

KURASHIGE: Yeah, I think it's pretty clear. When Dave Bing was mayor,
he or some of his aides initially threw out this word
“rightsizing.” And there has certainly been a lot of critical
discussion of how you use these vacant spaces with more sensitivity to
the environment and a better sense of how people can live in these
spaces designed for much bigger populations. That's an important
conversation. But what's happened with Detroit Future City plan was
really a shift that sort of used “greening” as window dressing to
promote ways to simply reduce the city's responsibility for services
and the needs of residents in these areas. So it became a way for the
mayor's office to collaborate with these big foundations to decide who
would be the winners and losers among the neighborhoods. Well, maybe
it's true that there weren't enough resources to give everyone in the
city what they needed, but I think that the policy now of picking
winners and losers pretty much guarantees that a lot of people will
suffer. And I think one of the biggest examples of that is that over
$250 million, those were bailout funds, designed to help distressed
homeowners who were facing foreclosures or had properties that were
underwater, and they were diverted under urging from Gov. Snyder and
the Emergency Manager Orr and now Mayor Duggan toward demolition
rather than helping people stay in their homes. To me, if you're
worried about homes becoming a source of blight, the best way to
actually prevent that is to help people stay in them.

MT: Or why not asses the houses at their realistic value so that the
taxes aren't sky-high on devalued properties, and then use the funds
to help people stay their homes and stabilize neighborhoods instead of
demolishing them after they're forced to leave?

KURASHIGE: Instead it was simply accepted that the foreclosures and
the evictions were basically a_ fait accompli _and so the money should
be used to tear many of those houses down. Again, I think that, along
with roughly 200 school closures, after the emergency managers took
over the school district, and water shutoffs, anywhere from 80,000 to
100,000 people losing their water, it's a sign that the city is now
only set up to serve some, and it's really telling others [to leave].
It's not the same specific kind of forced removal that occurred during
the rampant era of eminent domain and urban renewal, but it's
accomplishing those dynamics.

MT: When you remove neighborhood schools, when you jack up the cost of
water and put liens on homes, when you unfairly assess the value of
homes, when you take funds that were supposed to help homeowners and
use them to demolish homes, when you focus services downtown and that
means fewer services for the neighborhoods, you don't need to force
people to move. They move.

KURASHIGE: Yeah. I think what that also shows, though, is that's what
makes the activism in Detroit not just important as a sign of
resistance to these measures but it really as a sign of a paradigm
shift that Detroit activists are fostering for the whole country.
Because given what's happening in Detroit, it's not an option for
people to say, “Well can we have a little bit more equity?” or
“Can we get slightly better wages?” or “Can we get some
reforms?” Not when you have people being pushed out, when you have a
whole school district being eviscerated, when you have whole
neighborhoods being subject to demolition, when you have this strategy
of investment downtown and simply make these other neighborhoods go
down in value, in aesthetic, market, and use value, and you see
something like a giant hand coming in and saying, “I want to buy up
all this property for corporate farming.” What you see from the
grass roots is people saying, “We are not going to make decisions
based on the logic of how developers value neighborhoods. We are not
going to base our decisions about community-building on what big
foundations or the mayor's office says. We are going to focus on
preserving our relationship with our neighbors, on our cultural
history, and creating really a noncommercial alternative: urban
farming, economic cooperatives, freedom schools — noncommercial
alternatives.” Again it's not coming out of City Hall. You can't
expect that. It would be nice if the community groups were strong
enough to impose their will on City Hall, but right now what you're
seeing is opposition and resistance that has the potential to create,
in the future, an alternative system. And what we're seeing around the
country now is people realizing that even our basic democratic rights
are under attack. We're in a really once-in-a-lifetime maybe
once-in-a-millennium struggle to determine what is going to be the
future of humanity: Are we going to continue to slide into this
authoritarian autocracy, which is pretty much the driving ideology
behind emergency management, or are we going to not fix the system but
create an alternative?

MT: Just to underline the “counternarrative” aspect again: Here we
are just coming off all these remembrances of 1967 as the death knell
for the Detroit that was so loved by so many people, and your book
portrays the 50-year interval as an explosion of black pride,
self-determination, and a struggle to chart a more equitable future.
And that actually the bankruptcy and the supposed rebirth of the city
are actually the imposition of a sort of economic feudalism.

KURASHIGE: Yeah, and I think for me and for many what the rebellion
exposed wasn't just that racism and inequality were deeply rooted
within the system in Detroit and throughout the country. That was
known for a long time. There was a period in which people were
investing in reforming the system through racial integration, civil
rights, labor rights, and union membership, and I think '67 was the
voice — as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "A riot is the language of
the unheard" — of those recognizing that this reform not only was
not happening fast enough, but had in many ways reached a roadblock.
And the nation was going to have to confront these issues of racism,
police brutality, and economic inequality much more directly. In many
ways, that's why we're living in a much more polarized world today. If
we pretended these problems didn't exist, then you can act as if
Detroit and America has this Golden Age. But the reality is that
people would not stay silent. And so you have people today that are
much more empowered, you have a whole different set of activist
politics around social justice that exist today, since '67, but you
also have this counterrevolution from those who simply would not
accept change, who viewed equality as "reverse racism" — and I would
agree that there is now this counternarrative in Detroit as you point
out, but it breaks down into different factions.

MT: How so?

KURASHIGE: When I first started teaching at the University of Michigan
in 2001, the idea that any student that came from the suburbs would
even think about living and working in Detroit was an entirely strange
concept — even among the students who took my class! [laughs] It was
kind of a big step for them to even be interested in Detroit. I used
to have to do it as kind of a speculative teaching exercise. Like, "If
you were to live in Detroit, what would you do?" The idea of living in
what they now call Midtown and going to Corktown to eat at Slows
Bar-B-Q was to them this kind of rebellion. [laughs] It's comical now.
Now that is no longer a counternarrative, it has become the dominant
narrative. Detroit is a place where white suburban professionals can
be comfortable and eat and drink as they please, have high-paying jobs
and luxury apartments. I think that has been fueled by the Dan Gilbert
narrative, that he's creating Detroit 2.0 and he's going to
rehabilitate all these buildings into luxury skyscraper apartments and
corporate offices. I think that goes against the narrative of "last
one out of Detroit turn off the lights." But I think the
counternarrative that you're really alluding to is coming from the
grass roots. It's coming from organizations like the Detroit Black
Community Food Security Network, the Michigan Welfare Rights
Organization, the Boggs Center, the Allied Media Project, We the
People of Detroit, the People's Water Board, Detroit Eviction Defense.
The groups I really try to highlight are the ones that have been —
since '67 in some cases, in some cases more recently — not just
fighting for social justice but to create a different vision of the
city and to create a different economic and political system to make
the city work for everyone.

MT: You're not exactly portraying the 50-year interval as some kind of
"Great Leap Forward" either. It's a period where there's also a lot of
disagreement even, I think, among activists on where to go, right?

KURASHIGE: Yeah, and I think that's important to recognize. There's
not one blueprint that leads us to liberation and salvation. There's
not one party or leader that has the solution. And I think there have
been earlier times — and a lot of this comes out of my work with
Grace Lee Boggs — when people in progressive movements wanted to
believe that there was a blueprint, leader, or party that could take
us there. What we realized out of '67 is that the problems are much
more complex, and, in some cases, you can have movements advance and
produce more contradictions than they resolve. I think we see that
Detroit's crisis in 1967 — problems in governance, equity, and
racial and political divisions — in many ways has foreshadowed what
we see on a national level. The point is, not to say that there are
easy solutions, but that we need to learn from people who have been
struggling to identify these contradictions and propose ways to
resolve them. Not that everyone can simply vote for one group or
follow one leader.

MT: Ultimately, what do you hope your book will provide to those who
pick it up and read it and aren't in Detroit?

KURASHIGE: The book's subtitle is _How the U.S. Political Crisis Began
in Detroit_. I don't think anyone who's half-awake at this point in
history doubts that there is a political crisis in this country.
[laughs] Looking at its origins in Detroit helps us understand the
danger of right-wing authoritarianism, racism, police brutality, and
voter suppression. And we see that counterrevolutionary response to
the rebellion of '67 now manifesting itself not just on an urban or
regional scale but on a national scale. Now we have a president who
equivocates rather than denouncing white supremacy. But at the same
time, because Detroit had faced its crisis earlier and in much more
profound ways than other parts of the country, we also see that
activists have been challenged to also be ahead of the curve in
developing not just resistance but transformative alternatives to the
current order. And I think that's why, at the end of the day, I
believe Detroit gives us hope. It's a love letter to Detroit —
though not a conventional love letter [laughs] — but it is to me a
love letter to the city of Detroit in the sense of creativity,
resilience, and hope that I got in the 14 years I was there. And I
think, you know, again, this is a moment of great danger from climate
change, authoritarianism, and white supremacy, but these things have
always been there. Perhaps they haven't been so shockingly
in-our-face, but people in Detroit have been dealing with these
problems in much deeper ways, and that's why, again, there's hope —
although there's been incredible devastation and suffering in Detroit,
there is this vision of how we can not just survive but actually
change the world and create a different social order. It's not going
to happen tomorrow in Detroit, the United States, or the world, but
it's something we can dedicate our lives to and can happen in the
course of our lives.

MT: But in order to get there we have to listen to voices that aren't
heard.

KURASHIGE: Yup. Right. I think we're back to Martin Luther King: "A
riot is the language of the unheard." And I just want to emphasize
that I named a number of activist groups that have inspired me. To me,
in writing this book, I owe everything in the end to them. There's
other information that would have been available to me, but the real
text of the book comes from what I've learned from them particularly
African American elders.

MT: Well, hopefully your book will help provide a corrective to the
sort of "popular wisdom" about Detroit.

KURASHIGE: There are historical distinctions between what happened
after the South lost the Civil War and after the majority of whites
fled Detroit. There's something to the "lost cause" narrative that's
worth exploring, because Detroit has its own "lost cause" narrative
about people nostalgic for a time that certainly was more prosperous
for some but more rooted in segregation and repression for others.
That idea of wanting to “reclaim” Detroit in many ways is resonant
of that type of "Make America Great" message — some people find it
empowering, and others find it quite threatening.

Michael Jackman is a _Detroit Metro Times_ staff writer.

* History of Detroit
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* dispossession
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* urban development
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