"My heart aches today knowing that my beloved home town of Detroit now has the notoriety of being the largest American city to officially file for bankruptcy,' writes Keith B. Richburg, the China correspondent for the Washington Post who grew up in Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan.
Richburg writes lovingly about Detroit, where many relatives remain, but he pulls no punches in his analysis of the causes of Detroit's demise: white flight, racial polarization, crime, de-industrialization and the paranoia of the black political class, an issue that is dealt with gingerly by local commentators.
"Detroit has really been broke, broken and in decay now for decades — a shell of a city, with a small downtown and some scattered neighborhoods dissected by miles of abandoned storefronts and vacant lots," he writes.
"The Detroit I remember ceased to exist a long time ago. But it was kept alive by a pride, a nostalgia for its former glory, and an illusion that revival was just around the next corner. We who love Detroit — even people like me who abandoned it long ago — were all complicit. I could visit for a week or a weekend, set the rental car stereo to the Motown oldies or classic Detroit rock songs from a bygone era, take in a Tigers game, have a hot dog and a Vernor’s ginger ale at Lafayette Coney Island downtown, and comfort myself with the fiction that this was still the same city I knew growing up as a kid.
The city’s black political class sees conspiracy theories everywhere, Richburg writes, even in the investigation of disgraced Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. The governor’s appointment of an emergency financial manager, once it became clear that Detroit cannot manage its own fiscal affairs, is again seen as a hostile, racist takeover by the state over the city’s elected black leadership.
"Racial politics, and that racial prism, long ago ruined Detroit, and now they hamper any chance the city has at a modest recovery. As a longtime friend, one who has stayed in Detroit and worked to help the city, once put it to me succinctly: “Some people would rather be the king of nothing than a part of something.”
