Case in point - this is the church I've been attending since I moved to Detroit in 2002. It's on the southwest side of town, over by Mexican town. It's not in a great area, having 2 junkyards and a large abandoned building as neighbors, but it's a good church and I like the fact that it's not insulated from what life in Detroit is really like. Anyway, this is where I play ball on Saturdays, when I can make it. There's a halfcourt on the second floor that has 2 rims, perfect size for playing 4 on 4. Most of the guys who play don't attend the church, but I like to think that where we play affects how we play.
This past Saturday we finished up and I was walking to my car when a red car drove by in reverse down the driveway in front of the church. This driveway connects to a back alleyway and another lot so it's rare to see another car use it. Plus, most of the guys who play park their cars along the driveway. At first I thought the red car had clipped one of the parked cars, but there was a guy running after it, yelling in English and Spanish. Another guy was following behind, yelling at the guy who was yelling at the car. What followed was one of the weirder things I've seen since I moved here.
The first guy, we'll call him Crazy Guy, was crazy. I have no idea what is problem was, but he was really upset about something and was ready to fight someone about it. First he climbed onto the hood of the red car, which was halfway pulled out onto the street. Then when the driver got out of the car, he climbed off and got in the kid's face. At this point there were about 5 other guys in the mix, all yelling mainly in Spanish. I'm fluent and the thing still made no sense. At that point I had crossed the street, started my car & had my phone out in case the fight escalated. No one could go anywhere because there was a car and people in the street. A city bus was trying to turn down the road running by the church but couldn't. There were probably 5 or 6 cars of guys I played ball with all waiting, plus the nearby intersection was all clogged up because the bus couldn't turn.
Finally the guys involved were able to separate Crazy Guy from the driver of the red car and he got out of there. The other guys then started to disperse, but Crazy Guy was still stalking around in the middle of the street, yelling at the guy who had already left. The bus tried to complete its turn and Crazy Guy walked up to it and kicked the front of the bus, still yelling and cussing. He finally got out of the way, and it sounded like he apologized to the driver, so I figured it was all over and started to head home. Unfortunately, Crazy Guy wasn't done being crazy and stood in front of one of the cars trying to leave the church. There were three or four guys in the car and they all got out. They weren't antagonistic, but they asked the guy to move. I think the fact that Bud was right there helped Crazy Guy decide that he was done trying to fight everybody (Bud is about 6'8" and looks how Greg Oden would look if he had braids). So Crazy Guy left and that was that.
Let me stress that while it was an intense situation, I never really felt in danger and I was basically sitting in my car holding my phone, waiting to see if I needed to intervene or back up one of my friends. This is where street smarts come into play. After having lived in Detroit for a number of years, I acquired enough of this brand of common sense to know how to act. The guys I play with are all from Detroit and they know how to divert a potential confrontation, so they were never in much real danger either. But someone from the suburbs without that street knowledge would've been in greater danger because he or she wouldn't know the right way to act, and the risk of saying something inflamatory is much higher with someone like that.
Enter situation #2. I ran in the Cork Town 5k on Sunday, about 13 hours after the incident in front of the church and roughly a mile away. The above pic is from the 2012 race (they had better weather), but you get the idea. Roughly 10,000 people run, many coming in from the Suburbs for the race and parade. The race started on Michigan Avenue in front of Roosevelt Park, hangs a right one block shy of Campus Martius, then looped back around to Michigan Ave and ended where it began.
The hour before the race started I was walking around Roosevelt Park, checking things out (the Beignets 2 Go truck was there!), stretching & warming up. While I was texting with various members of my family, I overheard something that got my hackles up a bit. A woman, speaking with her husband, said something like, "Well, you made it into Detroit this year. Want me to take a picture with you and the train station?" This may sound fairly innocuous to the uninitiated, but to most people on the urban side of Detroit's urban/suburban dynamic it speaks volumes.
The train station she was referring to is the abandoned Michigan Central Station, probably the most photographed location in Detroit over the Renaissance Center, the Spirit of Detroit statue, Joe Louis's fist, Belle Isle, and the Ambassador Bridge. The train station is a monument to urban decay, and the owner of the building - a billionaire named Matty Moroun, who seems to enjoy sticking it to the city of Detroit - has refused to maintain it, sell it, or tear it down. Moroun is a monument himself, to the slum lord-style of ownership that has led to so many vacant, ruinous buildings in the city. My feelings about the building are complicated. I can appreciate the beauty of a structure that was once magnificent and has since begun to crumble. At the same time, I feel sadness to see something that so clearly represents the lost greatness that was once Detroit, Paris of the West. And then I get pissed off because Matty Moroun has been rubbing this in the faces of the residents for decades.
When I heard that woman utter those two sentences, my brain started leaping to a whole load of conclusions:
Probably from the suburbs north of the city, maybe WAY north, like Rochester Hills or something.
Visits the city infrequently with a sense of fearful excitement, like braving a rollercoaster or bungee jumping.
Views Detroit in a condescending sort of way, like how a visitor from a 1st-world nation might critically view a 3rd-world nation. Likely there's a racially prejudiced aspect to this viewpoint. At the very least it's classist.Whether fair or not, that's where my brain went. I overheard a couple of fairly harmless sentences and automatically assumed some level of bigotry and voyeuristic schadenfreude on the part of the speaker. These viewpoints I've heard a lot from the white, ex-Detroit suburbanite crowd, often accompanied by unvarnished racist comments (usually assuming that because I'm white, it's safe to say the N word in my presence).
I recognize that it's not exactly fair to the woman who spoke that I assumed all those things of her and her husband. But when I hear that type of comment, I start bracing myself to hear something ACTUALLY offensive instead of tangentially. I think, This may be a real thrill for you, but some of us actually LIVE here. I wonder if the speaker is even aware of his or her own responsibility for the current state of affairs. I wonder what they might have thought if they had been confronted with a situation like I was the evening before.
***
Fourty minutes later I ran my race. I finished much better than expected, with a time of 26:36 (8:34 pace). It was only my 2nd outdoor run since I ran the Lansing Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving. I got my medal, stretched and refueled, picked up an order of beignets and chicory coffee, and walked out to where my wife and daughter were waiting to pick me up.
Michigan Ave was all blocked up for the parade and from all the traffic, so I had to cross a pedestrian bridge over the Jeffries Freeway to get to where they had parked. That neighborhood isn't particularly good, with maybe 1 out of every 3 houses abandoned, burned-out hulls. As I was walking down the ramp from the bridge, two young guys from that neighborhood were heading up, probably to check out the parade. One of them noticed all my running gear (I was still wearing the medal, my race bib, tights, shorts, etc.) and cracked, "Man, my heart is already beating fast!" I laughed and nodded to him and his friend as we passed.
If I could put a challenge to the crowd who occasionally invade Detroit from the suburbs to marvel at the destruction and disfunction, keep in mind the people who have to live there. Try to have a real interaction with someone instead of gaping at the torn down buildings, like people on some kind of urban safari. Stop blaming the victim, and I'll stop assuming you come here to reestablish your sense of racial superiority.
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