The Whitenizing of Detroit

I'm heading to Detroit next week for the annual meeting of the North Dakota Study Group. I used to attend every year for at least part of the meeting. But since it was moved from near Chicago to Motown, I haven't been able to make the trip. But withdrawal has been tough. I miss hanging out with some of the best progressive educators and public intellectuals in the country who are doing some of the best democratic education and social-justice work -- people like 98-year old movement hero, Grace Lee Boggs, who will once again welcome NDSG to Detroit. So it's back on the road. Hope to see some of you there.

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As everyone knows, Detroit has become the poster child for post-industrial urban devastation, corporate dis-investment (forced bankruptcy) and white abandonment. In Detroit and other hard-hit cities in Michigan, voters no longer have the power to elect their own local government and school systems have been privatized and handed over to corporate operators. I can still remember the chilling headline in the Detroit Free Press a couple of years back, which asked: "Is Detroit Public Schools worth saving?"

Detroit’s population loss may even leave Michigan without a black representative in Congress for the first time since 1955, a shift that would punctuate the erosion of African-American power in a region.

Michigan's Tea Part Gov. Rick Snyder

Now Michigan's Tea Party Gov. Rick Snyder is putting the finishing touches on his plan to whitenize (ethnic cleanse?) Motown by the further push-out of thousands of African-Americans and their systematic replacement, through a special visa program, with 50,000 white and Asian imported immigrants.

A New York Times editorial criticizes the localness of Snyder's plan but is generally okay with it. In one chilling scenario, the Times editors write:

One way to avoid the unwieldiness of a one-city visa program is to go big. Angelo Paparelli, a prominent immigration lawyer who grew up in Detroit, has suggested doing for immigrants what the “Race to the Top” competition has done for schools.

Race To The Top indeed.