"Frank Rizzo"

**Detroitnerd** · November-26-12, 01:56 PM

Detroitplanner: The more I look at Philly Mayor Frank Rizzo, the more I see why you'd think he must have inspired my invention. I remember seeing the mural of him in Philly. [[It was vandalized this year, actually.) Reading about him, and the "Rizzocrats" who followed him even when he switched to the Republican party, you get the sense that the real loyalty underneath party affiliation was race.

National Lampoon also made fun of Rizzo as a bumbling announcer in a spot for the Philadelphia Police League for Retarded Children.

**Danny** · November-26-12, 02:37 PM

Originally Posted by Strong

This sounds racist.
I'm a black Detroiter, not that poor and just miserable when I read comments like this.
And, I ain't going no where a matter of fact I'm moving downtown soon so there's goes the neighborhood. Fried chicken for everybody just bring something to drink.

My comments is not racist. Poor Miserable Black Detroiters need to get out of their negative activities and start getting their common sense straight. You all can think, but not act. Dr. Alonzo Flemming [[ who publish his book "The Cure for Detroit") see this problem as fact. I used to be one of Poor Black miserable Black Detroiter in the 1980s to 2000s. I went with my parents through the ghettoes of Detroit and see the murder, madness and mayhem taking place. We hear gun shots day in night. I cousin got killed. My friends got killed in the streets of Detroit. I get robbled at gun point. A black guy with the knife came up to me and about to stab me while walking minding my own business in the ghettoes of Detroit. Be careful what you write to anyone in the online. You never know what color is this person writing this and that. I'm glad you're joining the social neighborhood in Downtown Detroit and that's what Black Detroiters do. Black Detroiters saw that their best days are gone after white folks move away across 8 Mile Rd. Their city gov't has gone astray and its service almost gone. Poor miserable Black Detroiters have no other choice but to band together like a great African Tribal Villages of ancient times and fix themselves, get educated, stop playing house, put away the killings and the everyday violence, accept outside help and fix up your communities before eniment domain takes place just like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley disappeared.

White folks are comming back to Detroit. Not that quick but by fewer numbers. They will start Downtown and work their way up to Midtown and expand further to the west side the east side by the year 2100. Black folks will be living in Detroit but not poor and miserable, but by accepting the system and fighting it to the end.

**dmike76** · November-26-12, 02:43 PM

Too many threads on this site devolve into this racist us vs. them crap. To those who post that garbage....GTFO. Just leave. It is counterproductive. Instead of inventing negatives, consider positives. There's nothing wrong with formerly suburban white hipsters fixing something up. There's nothing wrong with longtime Detroiters, black or white maintaining or fixing their properties. I love how the naysayers come up with a reason to destroy anything positive that is happening. As for the 'Detroit Experience'....there is no one experience. There are too many different types of neighborhoods, events, problems, successes, etc to use one blanket term.

**old guy** · November-26-12, 03:04 PM

I'm really confused.

**old guy** · November-26-12, 03:07 PM

Yes, I'm really confused.

**old guy** · November-26-12, 03:10 PM

I get it. It's a cyber Monday, 2 for 1 thread.

**Honky Tonk** · November-26-12, 03:13 PM

Originally Posted by Strong

This sounds racist.
I'm a black Detroiter, not that poor and just miserable when I read comments like this.
And, I ain't going no where a matter of fact I'm moving downtown soon so there's goes the neighborhood. Fried chicken for everybody just bring something to drink.

LOL! BRAVO!

That's the best thing you posted, Strong!

**Detroitnerd** · November-26-12, 04:35 PM

Now I'm really, really confused.

**coracle** · November-26-12, 06:07 PM

One has to wonder who the real race baiter is here. Is it the strawman Frank Rizzo from the suburbs who doesn't exist and accreditted with words he didn't say; or is it his "calver" Detroitnerd who does exist and put the words in Frank's mouth?.

**Zacha341** · November-26-12, 06:25 PM

I hear that! I'll bring sweet tea and Perrier water - my two favorites Strong!

Originally Posted by Strong

This sounds racist.
I'm a black Detroiter, not that poor and just miserable when I read comments like this.

And, I ain't going no where a matter of fact I'm moving downtown soon so there's goes the neighborhood. Fried chicken for everybody just bring something to drink.

**Detroitnerd** · November-26-12, 07:08 PM

Originally Posted by coracle

One has to wonder who the real race baiter is here. Is it the strawman Frank Rizzo from the suburbs who doesn't exist and accreditted with words he didn't say; or is it his "calver" Detroitnerd who does exist and put the words in Frank's mouth?.

No. No one has to wonder. I spent half my life listening to white working-class horseshit from a bunch of lame-brained, economically insecure suburban assholes whose idea of quality time was hanging out in the garage and carpet-bombing each other with the N-word to show how superior they were. You want racism? Go into many white barbershops when the only people present are all lighter than a grocery bag and you'll hear enough self-satisfied talk about spearchuckers and camel jockeys to prove that good old white racism is alive and well. Tell some older folks that you live in Detroit and watch the epithets come leaping out of their mouths, as they're shocked that you'd wanna live down there with them. Except they don't say "them."

Now, live with all this bullshit for half your life until you're so fucking sick of it you would rather take your meager possessions and move to another city even with no job lined up. Brother, I did. And now I'm back. And you're going to tell me I'm a "race baiter" for knowing just how the Frank Rizzos of the world behave? That's a fucking laugh. I throw it back in your fuckin' face, coracle. Frank Rizzo is alive and well and FUCKING THIS REGION OVER because to everybody else in the world he looks about as hip and cosmopolitan and up-to-date as George Fucking Wallace, and makes our region look about as tolerant and progressive as places so far south in Alabama you have to pump in the goddamn sunlight. What minority would want to live here? What gay person would want to live here? What progressive person of any stripe would want to live in an ugly place where subnormal white guys sit around in bars and barbershops and talk about n*ggers all day?

But, no. I'm the race-baiter I suppose. Because if there's one thing Frank Rizzo-type assholes don't like, it's being called out on their own racism. If you dare mention how racism hasn't been extinguished, some of these pricks will be hopping all over you, bellowing at you about "playing the race card" and "whining" and "playing the victim" and shit like that. But notice how sly coracle thinks he is when HE plays his little race card. He thinks he's being all subtle and cute and slipping a dagger between the ribs. See that shit? "Oh, maybe you're the race-baiter."

I've dealt with white racism from white assholes my whole life. White racists annoy the shit out of me by trying to feel me out and find out if I share their disease. I'll tell you what I tell them, coracle: Kiss my fat white ass.

**canuck** · November-26-12, 07:45 PM

Well put, detroitnerd. Eloquent and emotionally charged.

I think the problem is that for a long time, blacks had only one crime to commit in order to be ostracized, ignored, abandoned, set apart, looney-binned, imprisoned or ghettoized; that crime was the color of their skin. If this is still viewed as a criminal offence by the Rizzo clan, then you have a point about Detroit not getting better in the short run.

What made you come back to Detroit under the circumstances you described above?

Is your emotional attachment to the city stronger than the defeatist attitudes that undermine its comeback?

**Detroitnerd** · November-26-12, 07:59 PM

Originally Posted by canuck

What made you come back to Detroit under the circumstances you described above?

Part of it was simple economics. I really liked the East Village in New York in the 1990s because it was a place where people moved to really be around all kinds of people. I'd meet people who came down to the village from Harlem because mixed neighborhoods were better. I met people who moved there from boring places like Indiana to live in a city brimming with ethnicities and nationalities.

I started feeling the squeeze, though, in the mid-1990s. The rents started soaring. I had to move again and again. Finally, I figured I couldn't afford it anymore. I was going to leave New York, but where would I go that was inexpensive, diverse and urban? Someplace that couldn't be gentrified overnight. It took some moving around once I got here, but I'm happy to say that my little roost in Hamtramck has that to offer. There, we're all minorities, you know? So we all have to do what it takes to get along.

Originally Posted by canuck

Is your emotional attachment to the city stronger than the defeatist attitudes that undermine its comeback?

Haha. Sometimes it's like an abusive relationship. I work downtown, I go home, I have friends, I have an intense investment and attachment to my environment. I just bought a house in Hamtramck, so now I'm a property owner. I guess I really get the culture shock when I leave the city and encounter the sort of casual white racism I remember all too well. The racism that assumes that I, having white skin, will naturally feel exactly the same way they do. That can get me angry.

But, looking around metro Detroit, I think the only places that are going to grow and prosper are places where people find a spot they love and really dig in their heels and defend their quality of life. Too long in metro Detroit, the solution was to move away. Well, I'm not going anywhere. I don't know if I'll solve any big problems, but I wish we all had more of a willingness to face problems than to try to retreat from them.

JVB · November-26-12, 08:08 PM

Originally Posted by Detroitnerd

Go into any white barbershop when the only people present are all lighter than a grocery bag and you'll hear enough self-satisfied talk about spearchuckers and camel jockeys to prove that good old white racism is alive and well.

I'm only 37, so maybe I'm too young but the only thing I ever hear in the barbershop is people bitching about the weather. You should "out" these barbershops you're talking about so we can boycott them. Which ones are you talking about?

**jt1** · November-26-12, 08:34 PM

Originally Posted by JVB

I'm only 37, so maybe I'm too young but the only thing I ever hear in the barbershop is people bitching about the weather. You should "out" these barbershops you're talking about so we can boycott them. Which ones are you talking about?

Yep, it's only barbershops, let's deflect to that. If you haven't heard what D'nerd is speaking off you [[a) have your head deeply in the sane [[b) sadly, don't realize the blatant and/or veiled racism when you hear it or [[c) are just straight up lying.

Sorry but the reality is that you can't live in the suburbs in this region for a significant part of 37 years and not hear it pretty consistently.

GUSHI · November-26-12, 08:36 PM

And what black are not prejudice, bullshit it goes the same way, you got black tha don't like whites and whites that don't like blacks, and you have whites that don't like whites, or Arabs and so on, and your point is,

**p69rrh51** · November-26-12, 08:37 PM

Originally Posted by JVB

I'm only 37, so maybe I'm too young but the only thing I ever hear in the barbershop is people bitching about the weather. You should "out" these barbershops you're talking about so we can boycott them. Which ones are you talking about?

I am with JVB. I have been going to the same "white" barbershop for the last 43 years and I never once heard the n-word or anyone complaining about the poor of any color! Detroitnerd your generalities are very misplaced.

**canuck** · November-26-12, 08:40 PM

I also get that from Detroit, Detroitnerd. I said it a couple of times and noticed similar comments about the transitory nature of settling in Detroit metro. Maybe the car culture has a bigger part to play than in other metros in the mentalscape of the populace, it certainly has its central identity printed like a tattoo on its face.

It is so present in the city and therefore the popular identity of the city this automotive character that even the flawed culture of the car seems to give the city its ebb and flow, with the crashing waves of boom and bust.

I think you made the right move when you chose Hamtramck, it is a strange sort of cosmopolitan town, battered by the winds of change all around, and at the same time resolutely american in its state of flux.

There is more to be gained from engaging in the discourse you started than avoiding the pitfalls of politically correct asepticized talk on the subject of race and the city. You are on the road to recovery, mon ami.

GUSHI · November-26-12, 08:42 PM

Detroit is fuked , the reason it's fuked is cause the whites moved out, the only way it will come back in our life time is if the whites move back, I don't see it happening. With the exceptions of a few pockets,

A few other things Muslims don't like Jews, Catholics don't like Jews, Jews don't like Muslims , Jews don't like Catholics. No one likes Jehovah's , Italians don't like Sicilians, Albanians don't like Serbs, Serbs don't like Albanians, I heard all this at my local barber shop, so I guess it must all be true,

**Detroitnerd** · November-26-12, 08:51 PM

Originally Posted by p69rrh51

I am with JVB. I have been going to the same "white" barbershop for the last 43 years and I never once heard the n-word or anyone complaining about the poor of any color! Your generalities are very misplaced.

I've been to several white barbershops over the years and experienced this kind of talk. Maybe you go to a nicer, more sensitive barbershop? That's cool. But it does happen, and it does exist. In fact, when I was in the Army, there were many barbershops that were posted off-limits to servicemen just for that very reason. Although that was Alabama, not Michisippi.

**Detroitnerd** · November-26-12, 08:53 PM

Originally Posted by canuck

There is more to be gained from engaging in the discourse you started than avoiding the pitfalls of politically correct asepticized talk on the subject of race and the city. You are on the road to recovery, mon ami.

Agreed. The truth ain't always pretty, but platitudes so often grace the lips of liars ... Thanks for the thoughts, canuck.

JVB · November-26-12, 08:57 PM

Originally Posted by jt1

Yep, it's only barbershops, let's deflect to that. If you haven't heard what D'nerd is speaking off you [[a) have your head deeply in the sane [[b) sadly, don't realize the blatant and/or veiled racism when you hear it or [[c) are just straight up lying.

Sorry but the reality is that you can't live in the suburbs in this region for a significant part of 37 years and not hear it pretty consistently.

I spoke of the barbershops because that's what he specifically said. I'm not denying there are plenty of racists, but it's almost always undercover because it's not socially acceptable in the white community. If there is a room full of whites and someone starts saying racist things you wanna know what really happens? Everyone gets very uncomfortable and that person is essentially ignored and ostracized. And depending on who is there they may get directly challenged for being a racist POS.

I'm sorry if that doesn't fit your preconceived notions, but that's how it really is. I'm pretty sure the overt racists do a good job of keeping it to themselves or with others that they know are like minded. I don't doubt there are dive bars or places like that where you can hear that kind of talk somewhat openly but as a general rule it is definitely not appreciated in any public place I've been. Private homes, garages, basements etc - I don't doubt any of that, but overt racism is not tolerated in any public places that I've ever been. That shit is a big no-no.

Originally Posted by Detroitnerd

I've been to several white barbershops over the years and experienced this kind of talk.

Tell us which ones - stop holding out on us.

**Detroitnerd** · November-26-12, 09:00 PM

Originally Posted by JVB

If there is a room full of whites and someone starts saying racist things you wanna know what really happens? Everyone gets very uncomfortable and that person is essentially ignored and ostracized.

Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a long, long ride ... but JVB has finally arrived at Generalization Station.

Everybody else, keep your tickets for a transfer.

JVB · November-26-12, 09:03 PM

Originally Posted by Detroitnerd

Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a long, long ride ... but JVB has finally arrived at Generalization Station.

Please don't speak about generalizing - every post you've made is one big generalization. The title of this thread is a generalization.

Still waiting on you to out all of these racist barbershops you keep going on about...or was that just another made up generalization like "Frank Rizzo"?

**p69rrh51** · November-26-12, 09:12 PM

Originally Posted by Detroitnerd

I've been to several white barbershops over the years and experienced this kind of talk. Maybe you go to a nicer, more sensitive barbershop? That's cool. But it does happen, and it does exist. In fact, when I was in the Army, there were many barbershops that were posted off-limits to servicemen just for that very reason. Although that was Alabama, not Michisippi.

I do know that goes on in many barbershops in all ethnic communities. I am very fortunate that the patrons of my shop have better things to discuss.