The Detroit Riots of 1967 and its Meaning on the Fiftieth Anniversary

 

Detroit — “Half of the eight mayoral hopefuls on Detroit’s primary ballot next week have been convicted of felony crimes involving drugs, assault or weapons, a Detroit News analysis shows. Three were charged with gun crimes and two for assault with intent to commit murder. Some of the offenses date back decades, the earliest to 1977. The most recent was in 2008.” Detroit News, August, 4, 2017

As the SNL Church Lady would say, “Well, isn’t that special.” Then again for Detroit, where the typical lead story for the local evening news show is a gristly homicide or two du jour, this Detroit News piece is just another “dog bites man” story that should hardly raise a concern. “What,” you say, “the next mayor might be a convicted felon?” Who cares? … is the correct answer. Not much is left in Detroit to steal, and what difference at this point does the mayor, crooked or otherwise, make with the prolonged unfolding of this nightmare of a place that long ago stopped being a city in any normal sense? Besides, you have to “accentuate the positive,” as the old tune goes; to find four political aspirants in Detroit who are not convicted criminals, I suppose, is a victory of sorts. 

It’s not as if a felon in the Detroit mayor’s office isn’t without precedent, quite a recent one, in fact. His Honor, Kwame Malik Kilpatrick, (pictured above) who plundered his home town from 2002 to 2008, resigned as mayor in 2008. This big lovable lunk was convicted on felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice. Sentenced to four months in jail after pleading guilty, he was released on probation after serving 99 days. In May 2010, he was sentenced to 18 months to 5 years in state prison for violating his probation and sent back.  

Leave it to a hack political consultant and and NAACP activist, aka race careerist, to attempt to decorate this pig with lipstick. Greg Bowens, a former press secretary to Dennis Archer, an inconsequential Detroit Mayor of yesteryear, “said there are candidates with past hardships in every election cycle. It’s not something unique to Detroit or the political arena in general, he said. ‘Black marks on your record show you have lived a little and have overcome some challenges,’” said Bowens. (my italics)

With “black marks” our consultant may have committed a serious micro-aggression, but for obvious reasons, he gets a pass. But wait a second; are these black marks really supposed to mean that “you have lived a little”? Yes. We are operating in an alternative PC universe, and so we have, it seems, a new, improved definition of “convicted felon.”  “Overcoming some challenges” is a very nice touch as well. It sounds infinitely better than “a long rap sheet.” While you might be tempted to think that by “past hardships” Mr. Bowen should be referring to the harm suffered by the victims of our four candidate-felons, don’t forget, this is Detroit where everyone is celebrated as a victim of some sort.  

Let’s take a look at one of the mayoral aspirants because, well, it’s good to know what counts as “living a little” for an up and coming Detroiter and possible next Mayor. 

Again, from the Detroit News. “First-time contender Donna Marie Pitts, 58, has multiple felony convictions dating back to 1977, according to court records in Wayne and Oakland counties….   In 1977, Pitts was convicted of receiving and concealing a stolen 1977 Oldsmobile. She was sentenced to a year of probation. A decade later, she was charged with two counts of assault with intent to murder and two firearm offenses in connection with two separate shooting incidents on March 24, 1987, Detroit Recorder’s Court records say.” (italics added) The list of the “challenges” Ms. Pitts has somehow managed to “overcome” goes on a bit longer, but I think this is enough for you to get the picture. 

“Intent to murder.” Now this certainly gives generous scope in a unique Detroit sort of way for understanding how far “living at little” can take you, if you are so inclined – trying to make a certain someone you don’t like into a certain non-someone, that is, someone who is “not living, period.” “Murder” is, perhaps, too strong a word. Once again, we are flirting with micro-aggressions. Somewhere around the year 1950, Detroit had a peak population of approximately two million people. It now tops out at around 700,000, its diminution, perhaps, due in part to the flight of a lot of folks hoping to avoid the intentions of the “live a little” sorts like Ms. Pitts in between their bouts of auto theft and armed robbery.

How did we arrive here? How is it that career criminals are allowed to compete for public office and have their predations insanely glossed over by an assigned spokesperson as some sort of a valuable “learning experience?” More importantly, how is it that in the course of about sixty-five or seventy years one of the great American cities is now a  squalid, crumbling shell of its former self, a shrunken slum run by sleazy kleptocrats, sucking its basic resources for survival from the Feds and those Michigan tax payers fortunate enough not to live there? Much of the rest of the state would be happy to deed this mess over to Canada and move it across the river. Without Detroit, Michigan’s crime statistics would resemble those of Sweden, pre-Islamic invasion. But, of course, the Canadians wouldn’t dream of it.

One explanation is the 1967 riots, a defining moment presaging the coming collapse. I observed the lawless chaos first hand in downtown Detroit fifty years ago last month, one of my most indelible early adult memories. On a lovely, sunny July afternoon I was with three college friends in a car in downtown Detroit, Livernois avenue. We were coming back from a baseball game at Tiger Stadium, a doubleheader with the Yankees.

Heading into the downtown, we had no clue about what had been happening there for the last twelve or fourteen hours. We were just passing through. At first, everything seemed normal for downtown in the Motor City. However, strange things then began to happen. For no apparent reason, traffic came to a halt. We were sitting at a light that kept changing from green to red, then back to green. No movement. My friend driving the car was the first to notice, and initial disbelief at what we were seeing gave way to horror; cars on fire; the sidewalks with mobs in motion, not single individuals. A Detroit cop standing in the street helplessly watched scores of people streaming out of shops and stores (they were closed; it was Sunday) with their windows broken out, loaded down with TVs, liquor bottles, clothing and other loot. The looks on the faces of the looters were unforgettable – happy people no longer bound by silly laws; they were “helping themselves” to free stuff, enjoying the Sunday romp. This was a good thing for us, I guess, since they left us alone in the car.

It, of course, turned out to be something other than a romp. That day in Detroit began one of the worse riots in American history. Detroit police and the Michigan State Police were unable to contain the mobs who were looting stores, torching buildings and in some cases sniping at fire fighters. Governor George Romney pleaded with Lyndon Johnson for federal assistance. As we finally drove out of the city after hours of congested traffic, we witnessed on the incoming roads the Michigan National Guard ordered by Governor Romney, bumper-to-bumper in their military transports. Shortly later, the 82^nd and 102st Airborn Divisions arrived, courtesy of LBJ. Five days later the riot officially ended with 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed. Only the 1863 New York City draft riots during the American Civil War and the 1992 Los Angles riots were greater.

This was the beginning of the end for Detroit as a great city. A lot of the stores and businesses that were destroyed in the riots belonged to Jews and other non-black ethnic people. They were not rebuilt in Detroit. The owners moved away. In 1974 Coleman Young was elected mayor reigning for the next twenty years, Detroit’s first black mayor. Young didn’t bother to hide his animus toward white people, and most of the city’s remaining whites moved out beyond Eight Mile Road, the boundary that separated an almost completely black and increasingly poor and violent Detroit from the white Detroit suburbs. 

Young functioned for Detroit as a Robert Mugabe prototype, a crypto-communist lusting for racial revenge. Put in charge of a rich and vast social-cultural-political asset that took hundreds of years to create, he managed in just twenty years to turn it into a crime-ridden, third-world hell hole that became a world-wide symbol of political corruption, urban blight and destitution. (See: “Take him to Detroit”) The productive, tax paying, property-maintaining Detroiters left, in moved the drug-dealing gangs who laid waste to the neighborhoods – robbery, assault, arson and murder part of the daily routines. Vast tracts of the city became uninhabitable, and ultimately uninhabited, blocks and blocks of abandoned homes. Young infected the dwindling residents with his poisonous racial resentment rendering them indifferent to his accountability for the rampant waste and corruption that engulfed the city, content to play the role of victim, blaming white, racist America for the city’s poverty and misery.   

Detroit became a massively subsidized, highly dysfunctional urban jungle from which most anyone who could would escape. A collapse of such epic and tragic proportions, of course, requires at least some explanation. The one too hard to resist? White racism. Over the last fifty years this explanation has moved from the status of a hypothesis that could be examined, questioned, tested and modified into a rigid, official orthodoxy that defines what race in America is all about. As with all orthodoxies held in place and enforced by the central organs of power, punishment falls inexorably and severely on the doubters and non-conformists. To raise the slightest doubt that any and every manifestation of racial inequality or differential in status is not the result of racism is itself a racist gesture, and being labeled a “racist” in contemporary America does not help one succeed in those basics like employment, education and social recognition.

With this explanation firmly embraced fifty years ago, prodigious amounts of attention, energy and resources were applied for remediation. Whites needed to step up, attone, and make things right. By reducing racism and providing more opportunity for black Americans, Detroit and other urban centers would become better places. Fifty years later, a fair question would seem to be: How did it all work out?

Prior to the Bolshevik revolution, its architect, Vladimir Lenin, supposedly had said, “the worse the better,” meaning, the more wretched the social conditions, the better the chances for a successful revolution. The identity politics of the cultural Marxist left turned this Leninism on its head; “the better, the worse.” By almost all objective measures, the barriers of racial prejudice and discrimination have significantly fallen over the last decades. Jim Crow and its vestiges of racial segregation are long gone. Fifty years ago the equalizing of black and white America became “mission central” with the legislatures, federal, state and local, creating and the courts enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the areas of housing, employment, government contracting and education. Massive federal aid came to the heavily black-populated cities. Affirmative Action and EEOC, came into being with strict compliance requirements for universities and employers to make room for members of “underrepresented” groups. Schools and universities across the south desegregated in a rapid dismantling of the “separate but equal” legacy of Plessy v Ferguson. Schools and universities across the country focused their pedagogy on the evils of racism, the history of slavery and segregation and the moral imperative of equality. Blacks moved into prominent positions in every region of American culture and life, including the American presidency, Secretary of State and Attorney General. Utterance of the “n-word” for whites became a career-killer.

With all of this in the rear view mirror, Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, like Detroit a half a century earlier, were burned down by their black residents, the rioting blamed on the excesses of white, racist policemen. The goal of ending racism in spite of all of the legal and political forces moving toward it, the cultural support of the media and the entertainment industry, and the educational-academic establishment firmly in place, turned out to be a colossal fool’s errand. Cities across America – St. Louis, Newark, Birmingham, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore – are now Detroit-like with high levels of criminality, poverty, illiteracy, and corruption. Black rates of incarceration are staggering. Racial tensions and resentment are rising daily.

The orthodoxy, however, remains impregnable. White racism is now, supposedly, even more insidious, pervasive and ineradicable than ever before imagined. “Racism” has become much too generic to be useful in explaining racial disparities, and it must be uncovered and exposed in its innumerable recondite forms such as “systemic racism,” “institutional racism”, “covert racism,” “economic racism,” “environmental racism,” etc. To combat racism in 21^st-century America is like being drawn into a frustrating, never ending game of “whack-a-mole.” Beat down one and a different one pops up elsewhere. In effect, racism is ubiquitous, as President Obama told an interlocutor, it is in our DNA, a long time before it will be “cured.” This, of course, is vintage Obama on race. There is no “cure.” Racism and white responsibility for it are forever in the future – time to stop resisting “white privilege” education and get with the program.

In the 2016 Presidential election, racism was central message of the campaign, specifically Trump’s racism. Perhaps the most memorable moment of the contest was Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” denunciation of Trump supporters as “racists,” people in her words, “irredeemable …. not part of America.” Would any thoughtful person, even the most pessimistic, reflecting on the future of American race relations in late 1967 have imagined that a half a century later, a Presidential candidate of a major party would be routinely characterized by the entire main stream media and the opposition party as another Hitler, a 21^st-century, pogrom-planning fascist, broadly supported by voters (62 million people) motivated entirely by racial prejudice and hatred?

Over the last fifty years “racism” has been transformed into the left’s most potent and versatile political weapon, and in no conceivable way will they ever relinquish it. Why would they? As an instrument of moral blackmail it always works to their advantage. No one can or ever will be able to prove he is not a “racist.” In fact, denial merely reinforces confirmation. Just the threat of the accusation brings surrender. “I am not a racist. How can I show you?” Surrender it has been, and how has it worked for the betterment of black Americans? Look at Detroit and Donna Marie Pitts. There is your answer. 

 

 

Stephen Paul Foster's newly published novel

 

 

 

American Muslims, White Cops, and Jumping to Conclusions

On July 18th, 2015 a twenty-four year old man in Chattanooga, Tennessee named Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire, shooting seven people, including four Marines who died that day.  A navy recruiter later died. Five people were slain and two more injured by a guy who just happened to be named Mohammad, and, who just happened to have spent seven months last year in Jordan, and who, according to Reuters and the New York Times, just happened to have sent a text the night before the killings to a friend linking to a passage of Islamic text - Hadith 38 - containing the verse: “Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, I will indeed declare war against him.”

From CNN: “Authorities in the U.S. and abroad are working to figure out what might have motivated the 24-year-old to shoot up a recruiting center in a strip mall in Chattanooga and then drive to a Navy operations support center about 7 miles away and stage another attack. He died in a gunfight with law enforcement.” Hmmm … yes … the illusive motive. What could it possibly be? Not even a hint?  The “authorities”, of course, will leave no stone unturned until as CNN so cautiously puts it, they “figure [it] out”. Most people may have already a good idea, but the White House and the mainstream media all must exercise infinite patience. No conclusions are to be jumped at because someone somewhere might conclude that not all manifestations of Islam show it to be a “religion of peace.”

Some months earlier in Ferguson, Missouri a white policeman named Daren Wilson shot and killed a black 18 year old named Michael Brown.  No caution or forbearance from the White House or the mainstream press about Daren Wilson’s motive. Jumped at immediately was this conclusion: Michael Brown, unarmed, hands up in surrender was gunned down execution-style by a white cop who hated blacks. It was obvious. Months later, after mobs looted and burned down portions of Ferguson, with the President of the United States, the Justice Department, and the mainstream press all doggedly insisting that Michael Brown was an  innocent victim of white racist policing, a grand jury declined to prosecute Daren Wilson since the facts showed this conclusion was, well, a little off the mark. Michael Brown, having just robbed a convenience store and assaulted the store clerk, was shot after attacking a policeman half his size and attempting to get his weapon.  Obama sent three White House officials to Michael Brown’s funeral, the funeral of a criminal. No White House representatives will likely be seen at the funerals for the Chattanooga victims, Marines who served their country. 

The contrast in the way the aftermaths of these two events with intense national media coverage happened to unfold points to something quite ugly that has taken hold in America. It is the work of ideologues preoccupied with the politics of grievances and their efforts to portray American institutions and their history as nothing but sundry modes of exploitation and domination.  Their ideology is shaped and animated by a false and pernicious doctrine that the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell long ago and fittingly called, “the doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed” (DSVO).  Simply put: membership in a group of people (Group A) oppressed by a different group of people (Group B) means that people in Group A are  morally superior to those in Group B. Why? Group B-people are responsible for the suffering of the Group A-people and thus eternally culpable and forever morally deficient. The suffering of the oppressed group coupled with the depravity of the oppressor group means that the moral and legal comportment of any member of Group A must be judged differently (always more leniently or favorably) than that of any member of Group B. It is important to note that the culpability of the oppressor group is passed down from generation to generation. The grievances and the guilt are eternal. President Obama recently said that racism “is in our DNA” and “White Privilege”, a corollary of DSVO, is rapidly being embedded as an essential element of civic education.

The current boundaries for use of N-word illustrate perfectly how the DSVO works. The N-word used by anyone from the White-oppressor group is completely verboten. There is no word in the English language for a White person more poisonous, and the social and career penalties for speaking it are severe.  For Blacks?  Just watch an episode or so of the popular cable show “The Wire” set in urban Baltimore and highly touted for its gritty realism to grasp just how reliant upon, and fond the historically oppressed group represented in this series, are of this six-letter word.  President Obama in a recent interview uttered this racial slur eliciting shock and incredulity from white commentators. The black commentators were favorably impressed. Would they have been so if it came from George W. Bush, not that it ever would have, or even the “first Black President,” Bill Clinton?  Of course not. President Obama deployment of the N-word simply reinforces his status as the most illustrious member of an oppressed group and, of course, is justified by his possession of that unique virtue bequeathed by his membership.

  

The elites who govern us, mediate our news events and who shape the curricula of the schools and universities are also in large part the ideologues devoted to the “truth” of DSVO.  They invariably filter through the prism of their grievance-centered ideology events of violence and conflict, such as the two noted above. The interpretation must always be consistent with a DSVO story line. That is, the moral and legal culpability, the motivation and the damage that ensues from any given conflict between an oppressed-group individual (e.g., Black, Muslim) and an oppressor-group individual (e.g., White, Christian) must always reflect the historical picture of domination and exploitation no matter how much history may have changed the status of two groups or what the particular facts of the case might be.  Ideology trumps both historical change and facts. Racism and Imperialism remain the two crosses of guilt permanently reserved upon which to nail those of European-Christian heritage.

When the facts don’t fit the ideologically correct story line, they are either ignored or “adjusted” so that the “oppressor-oppressed” motif remains fully intact.  Thus, in November of 2009 after U.S. Army Major, Nidal Malik Hasan, known and feared for his Islamic zealotry, shot and killed thirteen military personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, the Department of Defense classified the massacre as “workplace violence” and the Army did not charge Hasan with terrorism.  Here then is one of the most egregious examples of reality sacrificed to ideology and the inviolateness of DSVO.  Muslims are a historically oppressed group, victims of Western imperialism. The thirteen people Hasan murdered and the thirty or so he injured, oppressor-group members, cannot be victims of a Muslim (an oppressed group member) acting in anyway remotely as a Muslim, even as a Muslim fanatic.  They must be “just some random folks”, as President Obama likes to express it, in the wrong place at the wrong time.   Reality is not allowed to interfere with ideology.                  

The fact that many more Black Americans are assaulted and murdered by other Black Americans than by White Americans is a fact the President, his Race-Professional associates like Al Sharpton, and the “Black Lives Matter” people seem to have little concern with and no interest in talking about.  Why?  For them it provides no political leverage and contradicts the ideologically scripted version of American race-relations that always requires an oppressor/group-oppressed/group story line.

The fact that cities such as Detroit, Baltimore and Atlanta where huge numbers of Black Americans die violent deaths and endure the very worst public school systems have for decades been ruled exclusively by Black Democrats is another fact that seems to arouse no ire or warrant serious scrutiny by the ideologues who incessantly call for a “national conversation on race.” Because this nasty reality conflicts with the required DSVO story line it is ignored. The strenuous efforts of Democrat politicians to perpetuate the DSVO perhaps can help us penetrate what perhaps may be the greatest enigma in contemporary American politics: why do Black Americans so consistently and overwhelming vote for the political party that takes them for granted and does so little for them?

When ideology and reality conflict the ideologues typically do what they always do to camouflage the contradiction.  They lie, abuse their critics, assassinate their characters and when they can silence them.  Democrats now reflexively slander Republicans as racial bigots, an irony in that the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow and the KKK (West Virginia Senator, Robert Byrd).   In the 2012 Presidential campaign Vice President Joe Biden told a largely Black audience in Virginia that Republican candidate Mitt Romney was “going to put ya’all back in chains.” In the magnitude of its vituperation, dishonesty and audacity, Joseph Biden puts himself in the company of that master of vile propaganda, another Joe, Joseph Goebbels.  No Democrat stepped up to dispute the Vice President or profess embarrassment for such a contemptible slander.  

In the 2016 Presidential election Americans will witness new lows in the efforts of the ideologues to paint America as a place of the worst racial hostility – irredeemable. Get ready.