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    The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit
    The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit
    The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit
    Ebook203 pages2 hours

    The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit

    By Scott Kurashige

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    On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the world fixed on Detroit, as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. Mainstream observers contended that the “riot” brought about the ruin of a once-great city; for them, the municipal bankruptcy of 2013 served as a bailout paving the way for the rebuilding of Detroit. Challenging this prevailing view, Scott Kurashige portrays the past half century as a long rebellion whose underlying tensions continue to haunt the city and the U.S. nation-state. He sees Michigan’s scandal-ridden "emergency management" regime, set up to handle the bankruptcy, as the most concerted effort to put it down by disenfranchising the majority black citizenry and neutralizing the power of unions.
     
    Are we succumbing to authoritarian plutocracy or can we create a new society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy? The corporate architects of Detroit’s restructuring have championed the creation of a “business-friendly” city, where billionaire developers are subsidized to privatize and gentrify Downtown, while working-class residents are being squeezed out by rampant housing evictions, school closures, water shutoffs, toxic pollution, and militarized policing. Grassroots organizers, however, have transformed Detroit into an international model for survival, resistance, and solidarity through the creation of urban farms, freedom schools, and self-governing communities. This epochal struggle illuminates the possible futures for our increasingly unstable and polarized nation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateApr 25, 2017
    ISBN9780520967861
    The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit
    Author

    Scott Kurashige

    Scott Kurashige is Professor of American and Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington Bothell and coauthor with Grace Lee Boggs of The Next American Revolution.

    Read more from Scott Kurashige

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      Kicking them when they’re downIt is one thing to have read of the decline of Detroit as it happened, and quite another to read a summary of the totality of it all. The Fifty Year Rebellion is a fast moving summary of negligence, neglect, incompetence, corruption and out and out crime that leaves the head spinning. Fortunes were made on Detroit’s bankruptcy, the dismantling of its school district, and of course eventual gentrification, with new, more acceptable (and whiter) people. The losers, also of course, were the residents, civic workers and retirees, who lost again and again. If not from the mortgage scams, then from the denial of basic services. Much like airlines and their customers, and like healthcare and its patients, it seems Detroit barely tolerates its longtime residents.Between 2005 and 2014, 36% of properties – 139,699 of them - went into foreclosure. Houses could be purchased for four figures. Farming became possible right in town. Misinformation spread, blaming unions and privileges for it all – and it became common knowledge. That the people of Detroit did it to themselves was accepted fact. As transit degraded, municipal services vaporized and firms went under, it became nearly impossible to live there. Then the pressure of privatization made everything much worse.Kurashige cites forcing residents out with mass domestic water shutoffs as the low point and the turning point. All kinds of grassroots groups are organizing and pressuring governments and agencies to stop the stripping out of Detroit. Because from charter schools to emergency management, everything being done in Detroit seems to have the single goal of expulsion of the natives. “Children have no right to literacy and no recourse to the courts, according to the state’s official position” on schools, as it abandons its own institutions and lavishly subsidizes private developers.Kurashige’s frightening argument is that the State of Michigan is employing strategies and players that replicate the disasters that led to the 1967 riots that were the beginning of the end. Yet with all the police killings, evictions, dislocations and suffering, possibly the saddest thing is that the architect of it all is promoting this as the proven solution. Based on his fabulous success in Detroit, he now wants to apply it to Puerto Rico.David Wineberg

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    The Fifty-Year Rebellion - Scott Kurashige

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