Once Again, the Rest of America Is Ignoring Detroit

Why do so few people seem to care that the Motor City is a Covid hotspot? The TCF Convention Center on April 26, 2020 in downtown Detroit, Michigan.

When five-year-old Detroit resident Skylar Herbert passed away last month of complications from coronavirus, she became the youngest person in Michigan to die from the virus. Her death came as a bitter shock to many: Just weeks before she died, most scientists and researchers agreed children were more likely to spread the virus than suffer from it; if they did contract Covid-19, experts predicted, the symptoms would be mild. Herbert, a daughter of dedicated Detroit first responders, provided a tragic counter to that theory. She also put a face on the ailments facing her hometown — struggles that are too often ignored.

Data collected by the state government from March 11th through April 4th found there were 43,950 confirmed cases of Covid-19 across Michigan. The total death toll currently stands at 4,135 victims; as of Sunday there were 547 new cases and 29 deaths. Detroit alone has seen 9,394 infections and 1,097 deaths. Yet, once again, the city’s voice is absent on the national stage.

As America’s auto hub, it was here that industrial factories were turned into arms manufacturers to aid the Allied efforts during World War II. But the city was soon after torn apart, a victim of post-war suburbanization, racist housing policies, and discriminatory loan practices. By the end of the ’50s, a sharp divide had emerged between the “haves” and the “have-nots”; the haves, of course, were always White.

Compounding matters were the city’s many failed criminal justice reforms, perhaps most infamously the Detroit PD’s S.T.R.E.S.S unit (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy The Streets), a group that operated in the ’70s and whose brute force and search-and-seizure tactics were disproportionately focused on young, Black men. By 2013, Detroit had become the first U.S. city to ever file for bankruptcy.

Detroit has been left to fall apart, and now we’re seeing what we always do in the time of mass tragedy: It’s the Black communities that suffer the greatest.

Now here we are, at the height of a global pandemic, and it’s Detroit that Vice President Mike Pence wants to use as a testing ground for hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has been touted as a possible coronavirus treatment. Patients in Brazil who took the drug as part of an experimental study saw an increase in heart arrhythmias and a larger number of deaths; lab testing in China showed mixed results. Black people make up about 14% of Michigan’s population, yet they account for 41% of Covid-19 deaths. An urgent response is needed to address the health disparities which have made Black Americans particularly vulnerable, but Pence’s tapping of Detroit is no show of altruism. It’s an act of abject cruelty — he knows that if this mass experiment fails, at least it will have failed in Detroit.

Of the minimal coverage focusing on Detroit as a new Covid-19 hot spot, much of it focuses on the health care system’s shortfalls: the exorbitant cost of hospital bills, the lack of staff in clinics along with a deficit in medical resources. Those stories fail to take into account the city’s living and working environments, and how decades of anti-Black political machinations have made this pandemic even worse for the city. Consider that between 2014 and 2018, about 112,000 homes had their water cut off in Detroit’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. Or that the city’s own government policy is partially to blame for its decaying infrastructure. Detroit has been left to fall apart, and now we’re seeing what we always do in the time of mass tragedy: It’s the Black communities that suffer the greatest. This narrative and understanding has only come to life through the art of Black artists who put a lens on Detroit’s struggles.

When Gil Scott-Heron recorded his album Bridges in 1977, recently liberal America had lulled itself into a self-congratulatory reverie of liberty for all. Cursory glances at the wrongs of the past meant remembrance but no accountability for the violent racial oppression, now rewritten as minor grievances. Jimmy Carter started off the year taking over from Ford, television welcomed Roots, and for a while it seemed as though new memories were forming to replace the more unseemly ones. It was in 1977 with “We Almost Lost Detroit,” the sixth track on Bridges, that Heron reminded listeners about the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, located 30-some miles outside Detroit. The city was put in danger, but that wasn’t the point — there was a reason they built the reactor there in the first place. Heron tells of the near-disaster in the kind of voice your grandparents would use to tell it, repeating the words to convey the horror, to plead for you to remember.

Looking now at Detroit’s relationship to the rest of the U.S., it is difficult to see how easily the city has been both left to fall apart and tapped as our country’s perennial assembly line. What happened, then, is what always happens when Black people are systematically relegated to the bottom rung: They provide the backbone of our nation’s labor and they suffer greatest in times of tragedy. When armed demonstrators demand their “freedom” from Covid-19 restrictions, it’s not the people at the bottom of Detroit they march for.

It might take an artist for that sort of advocacy. Until that happens, the untimely death of a five-year-old girl is the only thing that might wake people.

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