Charlie LeDuff on The Colbert Report Tonight 4/9 at 11:30 p.m.

[EastsideAl]

That being said, most white Southerners would agree that blacks were treated unfairly by them down there, which makes it much easier to move on. Older white suburbanites seem, in my newly formed humble opinion, to not shoulder any part of the blame. I was having lunch with an older [[60s) friend who now lives in Ann Arbor and she was like "Well, they wanted "whitey" to leave, so we left. That's on them." Well, yeah but did you ever think about why they wanted you to leave?

A surprise to see it come out of this thread, but this is one of the most perceptive things I've ever read here on our ongoing racial tensions in the Detroit area. Sometimes an engaged outsider's perception can be quite enlightening.

[TexasT]

A surprise to see it come out of this thread, but this is one of the most perceptive things I've ever read here on our ongoing racial tensions in the Detroit area. Sometimes an engaged outsider's perception can be quite enlightening.

I'm a former scientist and current lawyer, so I don't have much of a history or sociology background, but Detroit is still fascinating to me so it's easy to be engaged.

When I'm out and about in Detroit, I meet a lot of people from outside Michigan or former Michiganders who've returned home after a long time away. I think it'll do Detroit some good to get new perspectives.

[downtownguy]

I was having lunch with an older [[60s) friend who now lives in Ann Arbor and she was like "Well, they wanted "whitey" to leave, so we left. That's on them." Well, yeah but did you ever think about why they wanted you to leave?

While I agree that this sentiment does come up a lot from white folk, I am myself a white folk and having lived all but one of my more than half century of life within the city limits, I have never felt that anybody of any color wanted me to leave.

I also find it curious that so many white folk say the neighborhood went down when blacks moved in. Now, chicken or egg I'm still undecided on, but I'm fairly certain a black can't move in until a white moves out. So, didn't these neighborhoods go down because whites moved out?

[Django]

"So, Charlie, why did you leave New York to come to Detroit?"

I guess he can't answer that truthfully: "Well, Steve, my newspaper had to apologize for me after I got caught ripping off another writer's work. So my name was Mudd at the NY Times, and Detroit was my only option."

I didnt read it quite that way. I dont know much about the man but I do have the gut feeling that he is on our side as much as he is trying to make a living. I like his quirkiness as opposed to the regular stale reporting that the norm wants and I like his enthusiasm.

From the Wiki link it sounds like he left the NYTs on his own belief that he was being held back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_LeDuff

Im behind you Charlie, keep on keepin on.

[TexasT]

While I agree that this sentiment does come up a lot from white folk, I am myself a white folk and having lived all but one of my more than half century of life within the city limits, I have never felt that anybody of any color wanted me to leave.

You may be right. I'm still in the process of sorting out fact from fiction. For example, I've often heard that Coleman Young told white people to "get their white asses across 8 Mile." But when I read the actual statement, it's nothing of the sort. But I can't tell you how many times I've heard that statement attributed to him.

It's a complex issue that's difficult [[but fascinating) to go back and try to figure out after the fact. I still can't figure Coleman Young out...he's either evil or a black savior depending on who you ask. Hard to find an accurate portrayal, but I found "Detroit City Is The Place To Be" pretty informative, although briefly so.

[G-DDT]

First off, you want one element that always worked in slandering Detroit-the media. It disproportionately reports on crime within the city perpetrated or involving African Americans, while glazing over much of the white suburban crime. I'm a watchdog; I do my best to fairly and accurately observe and assess this. In the '90s, it was out of control, so many of us just stopped watching. The news shaped up a little in the 2000's, but didn't take long in sliding back to it's old ways. Growing up in Detroit, I watched events go down firsthand and then see later how the media distorted them. It slandered Rosedale Park, the independent music scene, the Techno scene, and when good events come around [[like Noel Night or the Jazz fest) in the actual city, they get ignored or take a backseat to something going on in Royal Oak.
Regarding-ahem-Leduff [[remember the guy posing on the cover of his book like an egotistical martyr?), I rather like the question Colbert made about the EM, Orr, being brought in by the governor without anyone's consensus-"So, what is it like living in a city without a democracy?"

[G-DDT]

I've met a lot of Southern African Americans who prefer the overt racism from Southern whites, than the covert racism that expresses itself in more sublime and far-reaching ways in the North. Like Robin William's [[R.I.P.) character said in Moscow on the Hudson: "at least in Russia I knew where I stand, here, in America, I never am quite sure."
The suburban-city-racism divide is common to one degree of polarity or another in every city I've traveled. In Boston, they swear they are not racist, but you see the segregation in Harvard [[no African/Latino-Americans) or portions of Chelsea, Roxbury, and Dorchester, and then it just expresses itself in strange ways when professors get harassed by cops, flag poles get shoved in people's faces, busing riots, or Charles Stuart. Here in Detroit, the polarity is stark but we acknowledge it as being more realistic than those who refuse to accept it exists in this country-it doesn't mean we should have to live with it or let the racism go unchallenged.

[Willi]

Charlie isn't """all-that and a bag of chips"" when you truly dissect his background.
Mediocre at best and most of the time he's skating on thin ice with his journalistic "abilities".

[erikd]

Agreed. I think someone else put it very well on this board - everything that some people blame Detroit's ills on have been faced by another city. Racism, suburban flight, loss of manufacturing. But no city has fallen the way Detroit has. The uncommon denominator I've noticed is the animosity between the the city and suburbs [[aka black and white). I've never experienced anything like it.

For example, I've noticed that some [[nice, rational, well-meaning) residents of surrounding cities bristle at being called the "suburbs." I've gotten corrected more than once when I referred to Birmingham as a suburb of Detroit. Perhaps these are isolated instances [[but I've asked other non-native Detroiters if they've experienced the same and it's been a yes) but I think they are indicative of the anti-regional mindset that plagues the Metro area. Metro Detroiters do need to "come together."

In any discussion about the reasons for Detroit's decline, the causes and effects are almost always conflated, which results in erroneous conclusions. This confusion of cause and effect happens for a number of reasons, but the biggest cause of misunderstanding and conflation in current times is most probably the overall disregard of the snowball effect and feedback loop that has amplified the symptoms of the initial root causes.

Almost everybody says that blight, bad schools, poor city services, the decline of domestic manufacturing/auto, and rising crime are the top reasons why people left Detroit. However, if you look back to the beginning of Detroit's decline, you will see that none of these things were problems at that point. At Detroit's peak in the early to mid 1950s, the city population had been growing for decades, crime levels were low, blight was rare, and Detroit was one of the richest cities in the world, which allowed for wonderful public and private amenities in the city. None of these things went into decline before the massive population loss in the mid/late 50s. It wasn't until AFTER the city lost some 300,000-400,000 people in a decade that crime started to increase, blight started to show up, and the services and schools started to decline.

This sudden massive loss of population resulted in a destabilization of nearly every aspect of city life in Detroit, which, of course, created a snowball effect that caused even more people to leave as the negative effects of the initial sudden population loss manifested themselves.

Any assessment of this history that confuses the symptoms and causes can only lead to confusion and a feeling of hopelessness, which is what most people feel when discussing the issues and challenges that face Detroit today.

I would agree that the city/suburb divide in metro Detroit is far worse than most places, and likely the worst of any large metro area in the country. I would also say that it is largely the result of a number of political and economic factors which lead to extreme provincialism and geo-political segregation in metro Detroit. I don't think that metro Detroiters are really any more racist than people in less divided regions, but we are more geo-politically segregated, and therefore less connected to each other.

Things are changing rapidly in American cities, so this example isn't quite as perfect as it was 10-15 years ago, but the racial divide between the upper east side of Manhattan and Harlem used to be just as stark as the racial divide between Detroit and Macomb County. 96th street was the NYC equivalent of 8 Mile in Detroit. While the socio-economic and racial divide was just as bad in NYC, the geo-political divide wasn't nearly as bad. The poor people in Harlem had the same mayor as the upper and middle class people in the upper east side. The poor people in NYC rode the same subway lines into the downtown/midtown job and shopping centers. Here in Detroit, we tore out all the mass transit, and moved most of the jobs and shopping centers way out of the city, which made them essentially inaccessible to any city resident without enough money to afford a car. In addition to this, many of the suburbanites lived in not only a different city, but also a different county, with completely different political governments and representatives. We even created different bus systems for the city and suburbs.

When there is no longer any shared public interest between socio-economic and racial groups, distrust and divisiveness is much more likely to set in and fester, leading to the type of situation that we see in modern metro Detroit.

I appreciate the sentiment behind the calls for metro Detroiters to "come together", but it isn't going to happen as long as we have a geo-political structure that discourages regional cooperation and encourages divisiveness and provincialism. The problem in metro Detroit isn't the people, it's the system.

[canuck]

You've really summed up very well the major reasons for divided a Detroit metro, erikd. I'm impressed.

What you say about ghetto divisions in NYC is also very true, you could add the starkly divided parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx like Bedford Stuyvesant, etc...

Detroit has suffered more from the political disconnect that you describe so well, the lack of alliances that come from this and an emptying out of not only a populace, but vast amounts of municipal equipment that other cities could only dream of owning 50 years ago. The political laissez-faire that allowed the cities and counties to live parallel lives in this puzzle is really hard to fathom and accept.