Today Ta-Nehisi Coats posted his reflections, in words and pictures, on his recent first visit to the Palmer Woods neighborhood.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-detroit/8403/
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Today Ta-Nehisi Coats posted his reflections, in words and pictures, on his recent first visit to the Palmer Woods neighborhood.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-detroit/8403/
Wow, this is really interesting!!
Great stuff! It is also easy to read how difficult it was for the candidates of an african-american elite to access the material advantages of their hard work. While looking for info for another thread, I found this the other day;
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575875/
I always enjoy reading Coates, but this article is probably more useful for people outside Detroit, or who didn't grow up in the Golf Club area, or who are younger than I am, or all of those. On the other hand, I never heard of the Montreal Neurological Institute, so I found that pretty interesting.
The piece on Palmer Woods was originally meant to be one part of a much longer article. Coates posted the rest [[unedited) to his blog:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/...ur-name/72226/
His so-called "director's cut," which Cooper linked to above, is long and interesting. Don't miss that, plus the many thoughtful comments that follow. The Free Press forum it is not!
Good Atricle
Very good article.
This is the first column I can think of that mentions the large percentage of single family homes in Detroit vs. other major cities. I live in Chicago and I told one of my friends in Detroit that, no matter how bad somebody has it in Detroit, odds are they have their own four walls and not an apartment.
Yes, Detroit is really like "Cheers," especially the older you get and the longer you live here. That's been one of the best parts of moving back home.
Great article and blog post. His blog taught me something I didn't know about Detroit, Michigan, and homeownership as compared to other regions of the country. Sure, I know that people in NYC or the Bay Area don't necessarily own their homes, but with all the building going on in the McMansion Sun Belt, I was honestly surprised.
The long-form of the article mentioned above is much more interesting than what ran in the magazine.
The original article was good. The blog entry was great. The comments to the blog entry was best. Especially this part regarding "white flight" being a misnomer:Quote:
Originally Posted by Cooper
He absolutely nailed it.Quote:
Because it implies that whites were fleeing the blacks who moved into their neighborhoods. That's partially true, but when you look at a city like Detroit, it becomes very clear that the game was rigged. There was redlining, the construction of highways, block-busting and incentives to get people to move out to the suburbs. The point here is not that "racism" didn't play a role, or that there was no real fear of blacks. The point is that fear was significantly aided and abetted by government policy and private enterprise. It was effectively social engineering.
Of course this leads us to the question of what constitutes "society." But we really need to move away from this picture of blacks moving, and whites--out of simple animus towards blacks--deserting. Yes, there's that. But it's much more complicated.