Black Detroit, White Wall Street

I listened to President Obama talk about the Trayvon Martin trial. As usual, Obama said all the right things, sounded the right notes, but at the end of the day it’s unlikely that his administration can or will do a thing to change the dynamics that put Trayvon Martin in the ground long before his time.

Obama said we must give young African-American men options, pathways to opportunities to improve themselves. Ironically, a few days before the president’s speech, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy. Detroit is the poster child for urban deindustrialization, job flight, corruption, poverty, mismanagement, and crime, and the face of contemporary Detroit is black.

How many Trayvon Martin’s are trying to survive in Detroit?

The Detroit that lives in the American imagination perished a long time ago, destroyed by monetary, tax, and trade policies pushed by every administration from Reagan to Obama. Obama has continued the new American tradition of slavish fealty to finance at the expense of working people.

For African-American men to have opportunities, they must first have a shot at decent jobs at living wages -- the sort of jobs that existed in the old Detroit – otherwise they will never set foot on a path that leads out and up.

Flipping hamburgers and dunking French fries in grease for minimum wage won’t do the trick, and it’s ridiculous to expect large numbers of African-American men to become entrepreneurs, though some certainly could, given a helping hand. Obama said not a single word about manufacturing jobs or union wages, though it is manufacturing jobs that are needed, and not only in the African-American community.

We honor finance, the buying, selling and trading of pieces of paper with the same fervor that we dishonor our inner cities. If there is an urban policy in place in the Obama administration I have no idea what it is. Perhaps, like almost everything else, we’ve left urban policy to the whims of the invisible hand of the market god.  

Working people have felt the back of that hand for three decades, but for African-American men it has been more like blows from the back of a fist. Detroit is but the most glaring example of the downward spiral: jobs flee, companies close, non-whites decamp to the suburbs, the tax base erodes, infrastructure decays and public services decline; the big money boys swoop in like vultures over carrion, and turn whatever public assets are left into commodities. 

I don’t think this country cares much for people like Trayvon Martin. Fear the Trayvon’s? Yes. Stop and frisk the Trayvon’s? Yes.  Criminalize the Trayvon’s and lock them away at rate disproportionate to the rest of the population? Yes.

But if we cared about people like Trayvon Martin, the president and the Congress would be doing for black Detroit what they did for white Wall Street.