For decades the experts have been saying that Metro Detroit is the most racially segregated urban area in the country. Maybe, but the statement oversimplifies our situation, and usually implies poor race relations and white suburbs that do not welcome blacks or other minorities as residents. It's part of the liberal narrative about white racism and black victimization. It also ignores critical historical facts about the area.
First, the city of Detroit's 900,000 population is 90 percent black -- no other major city above a half million population comes even close to a ratio of nine black persons for every one white or other minority person. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia -- all are cities with white majority populations. The auto industry's thirst for unskilled labor in its early years, the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the big cities of the North, plus 30 years of white flight following the '67 Detroit riot shaped the racial demographics of today's Detroit.
When Coleman A. Young was elected the city's first black mayor in 1971, the city was was approximately 60 percent white. Young's election was made possible because enough white liberals joined blacks to elect him. Within 15 years blacks comprised the city's majority. As the city grew "blacker," blacks gained a sense of ownership of the city and with it a sense of control over their own destiny. Blacks simply felt more comfortable in their own city than in they did in the white suburbs. This comfort level blacks have living in their own city has had as much to do with Metro Detroit's racial separation as any other consideration of the area's racial demographics.
A story ran yesterday in the Detroit News with the headline "Many Metro Blacks Feel Isolated in Suburbs" that left me bewildered. Written by Cindy Rodriguez, the front page piece features two black families -- one upscale and professional, the other working class -- who left their neighborhoods in Detroit for better ones in the suburbs. The story was trying to make the case, as its headline implies, that things are rough for minorities who choose to leave Detroit to move to its suburbs, and that Metro Detroit persists as "the most segregated place in the United States." I'm not so sure the story makes its case on either count.
According to the story, the driving forces in the decision to move for both families is a better education and a safer environment for the children. While I don't doubt the veracity of the personal experiences told to us by either family, it seems that to select two families and hold them up as the empirical examples of black life in the suburbs is purely antedotal and, although it might make good newspaper copy, is hardly definitive of what its like for all blacks living in Detroit's suburbs. According to the story:
The question is do we want to repeat the experience of the city in suburbia or do we want to figure out how to be enduringly integrated?" asked Gary Orfield, professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at the University of California-Los Angeles and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, formerly of Harvard University. He said many black and Latino parents move to inner-ring suburbs, looking for an integrated community, only to later find it was a community that was in sharp transition that wound up becoming majority minority.
Case in point, locally: Southfield, which went from being predominantly white and Jewish to majority black in the last 20 years. "Detroit Metro has been the most segregated place in the United States," Orfield said. "We're talking extremely stratified."
I don't know whether the statement "Detroit Metro has been the most segregated place in the United States..." can be substantiated. There are many ways to define segegration. But to me "most segregated" has always been a loaded phrase, connoting apartheid and white racism. Professor Orfield is an academic existing in a politically correct environment and his liberal narrative is apparent. I always looked at Metro Detroit as very racially separated with much of the separation voluntary on the part of African-Americans. A black person understandably can grow very comfortable living in all-black Detroit and lose any interest in pushing the racial envelope in the suburbs. We are now on our third generation of blacks (son, father, grandfather) who will have lived exclusively within the city limits of Detroit since the riot of 1967. Many of these folks have never given a thought to living anywhere else, and some still view the suburbs through that dated prism of the sixties and seventies when anything "across 8 Mile Road" was hostile territory. I fear for the moment we are at a detente. Whites aren't going to do anything to change where the majority of blacks and whites live in Metro Detroit. It's up to blacks, if they have the desire and the will, to strike out into that new suburban frontier and change the racial demographics of Metro Detroit.
