People from the suburbs tailgated
in back of St. Peter’s Episcopal; their small change kept afloat the soup
kitchen, the home for young mothers, and even the congregation. Some years, parking
for games was one of the top sources of income for the church; a little
creative fix for an entrenched and impossible problem.
At a time in which most “solutions”
to Detroit’s entrenched problems are punitive and racially biased, three things
have remained positive in the nearly 20 years I’ve been visiting: culture,
religion and activism. This is the home of Grace Lee Boggs, of Allied Media
Projects. It’s the home of St. Peter’s new pastor and longtime activist Bill
Wylie-Kellerman, who rebuilds park benches the city tears down, because he wants
to make sure the newly minted “historic district” of Corktown still offers
somewhere for its many indigent to sleep.
Politics has failed the city.
The democratic process, writ large, has failed. The city, economically, has
failed. So people make up their own solutions – temporary, imperfect and
small-scale. I hope these solutions don’t get lost in the reshuffling of the Detroit’s
larger structure and finances.
As Boggs told me when I met
her a couple years ago, “Detroit is a city of dual economies.” There is the
economy that is in the newspapers, and that continues to deteriorate and
oppress. And then there are micro-economies that pop up in a neighborhood, on a
block, or even in a single building, where residents take on the basic services
a city normally provides, like policing and mediation, water, education, and
garbage. Some of these micro-economies serve entire neighborhoods; some exist without
knowing others like them are out there.
What Do Artists Know?
In addition to my family
visits, I’ve been making a trip every year for the last five, to teach professional
skills workshops to Detroit artists who’ve received a Kresge Fellowship. Every time
I’ve taught there, there’s been a discussion about whether Detroit’s new cultural
visibility, weighed against the continued dysfunction on governmental and
economic levels, will propel it forward or set it back yet again. Cultural
renewal takes a long time on its own. It does not equal civic engagement, and
can easily become instrumentalized (witness many other major metropolitan
areas).
This year the questions were
especially poignant. The workshop started on July 19, the day after the city
declared bankruptcy. There weren’t any hotel rooms within 8-Mile Road because
so many officials and business owners with a vested interest in what happens had
filled them all. We were all in the city at the same time, which made the
divide especially poignant to me. I wanted the financiers all to take a break
from the numbers, and stop by our workshop, because I was amazed, as I always
am, by the adaptability and generosity with which artists I meet in Detroit deal
with so many entrenched and massive problems.
Some of them were relatively
recent arrivals who felt the call to be there, wanted to live off the grid in
an urban setting; maybe they romanticized the metaphor and then fell in love
with the actual place. One started a farm, lives on $6,000 a year and feels
like she has enough. Another has a bookshop that’s been open since 1982, and
also formed some legendary and rambunctious creative collectives in the
meantime. Another made paintings in secret while working a regular job for 30
years, and then opened up his garage studio to the world one day. Yet another has
a day job in restorative justice and started writing speculative fiction
because, “So much of that writing is about apocalypses, and we’ve already been
through our own.”
Now, I know that on a bad week
artists can be as dysfunctional as anyone; I know we can be corrupt and
scheming, competitive, even cruel. I know many of us can’t do a budget to save
our lives. I know that there has to be an official component to any renewal
that happens – a restoration of services, of deliberative democracy, of
streetlights and ambulances, schools and cops.
I also know that artists
make something out of nothing, and, generally, they know when they have enough.
Maybe the extreme circumstances of Detroit make that kind of skillset even more
necessary to hone than other places.
The way Detroit’s problems have
been addressed on an official level has largely been about impositions of
policy over people who have already lost their civic voices, the vast majority
of them people of color. Even the notion that what will save Detroit is to lure
“creatives” there so that they can start up new businesses misses the point.
The creativity is already here. It’s so far advanced and so far removed you
just might not recognize it as such. This is a post-market city. This is the
city we can both help to re-emerge and from which we can learn.
I don’t think Detroit can be
“fixed” by a single overarching solution that is seen as the lesser of two
evils – I don’t think the neo-liberal consensus-based approach will work here. In
part because it’s not working well most of the time anyway, and in part because
it doesn’t allow us to do the deeper work of examining why this place has
fallen apart so thoroughly, what ingenuity has arisen within the gap, and what
we could do differently, maybe in other places, too, moving forward.
As everyone converges to
figure out how to cut the losses (which, put another way, means figure out which
lives matter least enough to forsake), or how to cut up potential spoils, how
to twist the arm of a place already hobbled from bending to the latest slow
disaster, maybe people should stop and hear from activists, artists and
priests. They’ve been there the whole time.
What will happen if we both
start to address structural problems, and also understand the value of daily
miracles, even if some of them just work for a single block, and others might
be viable for miles? Here’s how you change the tone of capitalism, they could
say to us, here’s how create a beautiful light in the dust. Here’s how you use
your eyes, your ears, and your mouth. Here is how you make a new city. People
are doing that right now, and have been for years. We just may have overlooked
it because it doesn’t look like what we are used to calling America, or what we
are used to calling progress.
Further Reading
