It Can't Be Racist If You Are Black

SEARCH BLOG: DETROIT

We'll be heading back to Michigan tomorrow, so I was proud to see the ethical, moral, and astute leaders of the great city of Detroit had made news promoting racial harmony. As The Detroit News article stated:

Nowhere is Michigan's brain drain on greater display than in the Detroit City Council chambers.

My hopes for Detroit's future faded as I watched the tape of last Tuesday's council meeting, the one that considered the Cobo Center expansion deal.

It was a tragic circus, a festival of ignorance that confirmed the No. 1 obstacle to Detroit's progress is the bargain basement leaders that city voters elect. The black nationalism that is now the dominant ideology of the council was on proud display, both at the table and in the audience.

Speakers advocating for the deal were taunted by the crowd and cut short by Council President Monica Conyers, who presided over the hearing like an angry bulldog; whites were advised by the citizens to, "Go home."

Opponents were allowed to rant and ramble on uninterrupted about "those people" who want to steal Detroit's assets and profit from the city's labors.

A pitiful Teamster official who practically crawled to the table on his knees expressing profuse respect for this disrespectful body was battered by both the crowd and the council.

When he dared suggest that an improved Cobo Center would create more good-paying jobs for union workers, Conyers reminded him, "Those workers look like you; they don't look like me."

Desperate, he invoked President Barack Obama's message of unity and was angrily warned, "Don't you say his name here."

Juxtapose the place and the faces and imagine a white Livonia City Council treating a black union representative with such overt racial hostility. The Justice Department would swoop down like a hawk, and the Rev. Al Sharpton would clog Five Mile Road with protesters.

But in Detroit, dealing with the council's bigotry is part of the cost of doing business. As is dealing with its incompetence. (I'll pause here and excuse from that indictment Sheila Cockrel and Brenda Jones, who supported the Cobo deal, as did Kwame Kenyatta, who although he's an avowed nationalist, most often votes in the city's best interests.)

Emmet Moten, the developer who just opened the Fort Shelby Hotel downtown, was at the meeting and found it appalling. Moten went to Lansing in 1983 on behalf of Mayor Coleman Young to successfully lobby for a regional tax to support Cobo.

"And now we're saying, 'We don't want your money,'" Moten says. "If Coleman were alive today, he'd be outraged. It hurts, it really hurts."

Now, Moten says, "we Detroiters gotta be outraged."

Outraged enough to go to the polls in November and elect a brighter, more responsible council. Moten and others I talked with this week are encouraged that mayoral primary voters picked Dave Bing and Ken Cockrel Jr., the two most rational candidates on the ballot.

The test now will be whether it's those primary voters or the angry council crowd who represent the real Detroit.

As Moten notes, "You can't fix this for us. We have to fix it ourselves."

Nobody can help Detroit if voters again elect a City Council composed of separatists, clueless dowagers and the apparently insane.

Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The News. Reach him at nfinley@detnews.com or (313) 222-2064.

I wrote to Mr. Findlay:

Your column in today's TDN highlights a very real problem in Detroit: the stupidity of the residents leads to stupidity in the government. It doesn't have to be that way: http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2008/03/can-blacks-govern-detroit-or-anywhere.html, but it probably will be that way: http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2009/02/detroit-on-verge-of-hope-and-change.html

I believe the only real hope for Detroit is dissolution and reorganization. The city is geographically too large for its population which is shrinking daily. It cannot provide services or public education or decent living environments for its residents. Property and home values are almost non-existent in many parts of the city. The government has devolved into personal fiefdoms for the politicians who pander to the "racial pride" of the residents. Rather than having a city of which to be proud, the residents are satisfied with a city that reflects a violent, immoral, unethical, anti-intellectual sub-culture in its political leaders. A lot of them still believe Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was the best thing that could have happened to the city... before and after he went to jail. Perhaps that is why the half of the population that finds that repugnant has left... blacks, whites, and others.

As I have always told my sons and tell my readers every day: stupidity has its own rewards.

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