Join me on this thrilling ride up I-95 in Miami.
Ocean Drive
Takin' a little cruise down AIA in South Florida -- Palm Beach to Lake Worth. One of my earlier Flip productions.
Changing Minority Landscape
I remember in the nineties when demographers and futurists predicted the day would soon come when -- because of the growth in minority populations -- whites would become the "new minority." Combining all the minority populations -- African-American, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern and others -- would equal a number greater than that of European-Americans.
Although we're not quite there yet, that day is still approaching, and the pace of that growth is quickening due to the rapid influx of Mexicans into the U.S. in recent years.
Pundits in the nineties suggested that whites would lose some of their political influence because blacks, Latinos and other minorities would forge political alliances, becoming a unified minority population and outvote the whites on critical civil rights, social and economic issues. But the blending of minorities -- the social and political forging of black and brown -- has not been occurring as many had hoped it would. Nor are the new minorities of Middle Eastern or Asian descent creating significant alliances with blacks or Latinos.
In fact, rather than coming together, minority groups in America seem to be isolating themselves in their own communities, maintaining their own languages and cultural traits. The new Latinos arrivals, generally are not assimilating into American values and language. The government-led multicultural movement has facilitated this separateness by encouraging Spanish as a second U.S. language and the private sector has bolstered this with the rapid growth of Spanish and Arabic language radio and television programming. This isolationism is enabled further by our diversity ethos that celebrates separateness more than it does inclusion. These are generalizations of course, pointing to a trend. To be sure, many new arrivals, legal and illegal, are making sincere efforts to assimilate and become Americans at least in life-style.
Some tension is being felt between the black and Latino communities across the country, especially between newly-arrived Mexican immigrants and blacks. Mexicans are moving into previously all-black urban neighborhoods and the usual friction between black and Mexican youth and young men is occurring. In extreme cases, Mexican gangs are attacking and killing black gangs members and even killing blacks who are not involved in gangs as a way to intimidate. This may end up being just another episode in the long history of neighborhood youth gangs in America. But for now it is doing nothing to foster togetherness between black and brown people. Luckily, inter-ethnic gang activity has not emerged as a problem in Detroit as it has in Los Angeles, Florida and Virginia. Many blacks are now sensing that illegal immigrants -- especially Mexicans -- are taking jobs away from blacks. We're not talking about low-paying seasonal work picking fruits and vegetables. The jobs being filled more and more by Latinos are in steady work with contract landscaping companies, building and road construction, home improvement, and nonunion trade jobs. The new workers are willing to work for less than American workers, and many employers are candid about their belief that the (mostly Mexican) immigrant workers work harder than Americans -- white or black. I am not sure how much of this occurs in Metro Detroit. But I still see few blacks working on construction crews in a city that's 90 percent black (see below). Make no mistake, legal immigration is good for America. In Southeast Michigan alone, immigrants add 15-20 percent of our gross domestic product. The poor condition of our state and city economies dictates that legal immigrants from all countries with talent, education and skills -- and those will little skill but a willingness to work -- should be encouraged to come here and help us rebuild our communities. But I'm not yet seeing any coming together of minority groups to forge a political monolith to challenge white people on social and political issues. See related posts:
Dumping Parks Sounds Cold But Right Move
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the city's Recreation Department have proposed that the city sell or in other ways get rid of 92 of the city's 310 parks to bring into scale the ratio of the city's population to parks. This is a tiny but significant step in the right direction to bring the city's total services package more in line with the city's dwindling population. Fifty years ago Detroit's population was nearly two million compared to today's 900,000. We no longer need 310 parks. In order to survive and thrive in the future, the leaders of the city and the region must find ways to make Detroit physically smaller so that it will be a better fit for a smaller population. At its current rate of population loss, Detroit will be home to about 600,000 people by 2025, and without any changes in it geographic boundaries, it will still contain 120 square miles, the same size as when it held twice as many people.
That the closed or sold parks might wind up as simply more vacant space in a city that is already 30 percent open space -- a result of commercial and residential abandonment -- troubles Talk About Detroit. If we don't make the city physically smaller, parts of it will soon look like the middle of Kansas. Leaders of today and the future must find ways to shrink Detroit.
Related posts:
Liberal Narrative Drives Story about Blacks in Suburbs
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.
MGM Grand Detroit Opening Casino Hotel
I just lifted this off the wire.
Oct. 2, 2007, 11:08AM MGM
By JEFF KAROUB AP Business Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press
DETROIT — Casino officials and celebrity chefs showed off $800 million worth of Las Vegas glitz amid Motown grit Tuesday _ hours before MGM Grand Detroit was to open to the public with a flashy, fireworks-studded gala.
Billed as the first Vegas-style resort built in a major metropolitan area, MGM Grand includes 400 rooms and suites, a full-service resort spa and a 17-story hotel with electronic concierges in each room. It sits a block from the temporary casino it opened it 1999.
Celebrity chefs Wolfgang Puck and Michael Mina will operate three restaurants in the new facility.
The MGM Grand Detroit was to open to the public before midnight with fireworks.
Jim Murren, president and chief operating officer of MGM Mirage Inc., said the facility is not only a casino and hotel, but an "entertainment destination."
Detroit's other two casinos are working to complete their permanent sites.
Greektown Casino is spending $475 million to expand its existing facility and a 20-story hotel opens next year. MotorCity Casino is spending $275 million on a 17-story hotel to open later this fall.
The casinos are spending $1.5 billion to build sleek new hotels that are adding 1,200 luxury rooms and thousands of square feet of convention space. The three permanent sites will feature more than 220 tables and about 8,000 slots in 250,000 square feet of gaming space.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)