Few people outside of Michigan realize it is the most racially segregated state in the country; if you are black in Michigan there is a 99% chance you live south of Eight Mile, in Detroit proper or in one of her inner "black" suburbs, or within the confines of Saginaw, Flint, Benton Harbor or another economically ravaged industrial city in the south. If you are white you almost certainly live anyplace but. You may live in a rural area or a small town, a northern city or most likely in one of the white suburbs that range in affluence and ring each black crumbled urban core.
If you are black you no doubt live somewhere with few jobs, poor schools, abandoned buildings, overgrown parks, few places to shop and a decimated infrastructure. The shuttered factories are in your neighborhood; the "high-tech" opportunities are in places you cannot reach on public transportation. Integration never happened in Michigan, save for precious few neighborhoods in a college town or two, and racial tensions are palable whereever integration exists without affluence.
I grew up in Detroit when the city was 70% white although carved up cleanly into white and black neighborhoods. In 1967 from my white front porch we watched black Detroit burn on the near horizon while my father laid out garden hoses and my brother loaded his shotgun. My father took our family and fled post-haste to a white suburb just ahead of the wave of real estate "block busting" that left Detroit 99% black and struggling. When the white people left the stores soon followed, then the jobs and with them the tax base and city services.
Detroit and Michigan had it's own "old uncle" -- Coleman Young, the first black mayor of Detroit, an old Tuskegee Airman who for two decades as mayor did as much to divide the races and promote racial distrust as the white backlash from the summer of 1967. He gloried in thumbing his nose at white convention and blaming the white man. When he died white people shook their heads and snickered; Detroiters lined up around three city blocks five times in the rain to view his casket.
My own immigrant father was not bashful in his racism and I grew up with my more comparitively humanistic mother warning me about the "boogie man." The only blacks I saw until high school were the garbage men, the people who cleaned the tables in Hudsons, the people who smelled funny (of pomade and cleaning agents) when they passed me on their way to the back of the DSR bus and the people I saw out the window of the bus as it passed through Herman Gardens, the nearest "project". No doctors, no policemen, no professionals of color; even the bus drivers, in their limited authority, were white men to the man.
I dispised my father's attitudes from the first minute I recognized them for what they were and internally raged at him. I felt safe only in visibly rebelling by withholding my laughter from his racist jokes. I vowed long before puberty never to be like him -- much easier vowed than done.
Regardless of how much I might wish for different psychological software, I still am not myself around black people, but not in the ways black people might think. Yes, black men set off a fear in me I can't abort, they make me more conscious of my purse and my surroundings, but within a flash more so they set off an internal tirade against myself damning my automatic responses. I constantly fight painfilled self consciousness around black people -- am I being friendly enough? too friendly? Will some stupid comment escape from my mouth before I can stop it? will my next social faux pas be racist? Can you see how I was raised behind my earnest attempts to overcome and hate me for it?
And thanks to Obama I now feel safe in saying black people have not been making these struggles all that easy for me. I've been called out I don't know how many damn times for some truly innocent remark that if anything came from ignorance or a misspoken word blown up beyond reason. I've been accused of racism for criticizing a black boss and a black dean that truly deserved it, for failing a few black students who no one in their right mind could pass and after my best efforts to prevent it, for living out in the country when it really is about birdies and trees and not white flight.
If I am stained with the sins of my father and my mind is trained to first racially stereotype, does it matter at all how doggedly determined I've been all my life to change myself? Does it matter how consciencious I've been not to pass any diseased thinking onto my children? Does it matter that I have dedicated myself to working in social justice to atone for who I was programmed to be?
And then I saw it, in a parking lot. Obama opened my eyes, not for the first time certainly, but to a much deeper place. I recognized the black people around me, getting in and out of their cars, struggling with carts, dodging the rain, hurried, relaxed, casual, over-burdened, families and handymen, as at once no different from me and yet so profoundly unlike me in how they are ghettoized and marginalized. Compared to my local store the vehicles were older and less impressive, the carts were not as full, the voices were louder and perhaps more urgent. Being black in Detroit is to always be walking upstream.
It hit me as I sat there that in this neighborhood in particular few of these folks had jobs outside of the service sector, money had to be tighter, opportunities had to be fewer. And of course yes the aspirations were the same -- to do the best for the children, to care well for the loved ones, to create a safe and pleasant home, to earn and watch money and have some time left at the end of the day to relax -- but against a torrent of obstacles moving against you.
Yesterday Obama the man spoke about the obvious and the unspeakable, and Obama the phenomenon moved something in me and perhaps in many others black and white. Here in Detroit, in my limited observation, the tension seemed ratcheted down more than a little. The smiles across the racial divide seemed more genuine, the struggles just a little more shared. With one foot planted on either side of the division, refusing to deny either, Obama asks us all to honor our old uncles and intolerant fathers while opening our eyes to each other.
That said, Hillary Clinton is speaking in downtown Detroit this morning. I thought about driving downtown to see her but instead took the time to write this. I still think her better qualified, I still long for a female president, I still don't appreciate the vitriole coming from the Obama camp at times. I still struggle with which of them is more electable.
But I appreciate Obama the man and the healer much more and thank him for opening my eyes. And I would ask my fellow "Clintonistas" and all "Obamatons" to search their own hearts before typing. We are actually blessed to have one another. Lay down the swords. Open your eyes.
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