Detroit can save itself, if we actually listen to the residents tell us what they want and don't want from us

For the one-year anniversary of the Vanguard Discussion series, Carolyn Ferrari invited all the former panelists back and centered the discussion on race relations, particularly in the city of Detroit.

Specifically, our discussion centered on the commentary in the Focus: HOPE documentary “In Pursuit of Hope,” which features city residents’ reflections on the few-day-long 1967 Detroit riot, including what led up to it and what people in Detroit are doing now to help assure it doesn’t happen again.

The stark picture painted by the residents’ narratives really brought home the eerie similarities between the inner city and the reservations that the U.S. government forced Native Americans onto—Habitable patches of land from which the investment money, resources, and education that could help residents create viable businesses and prosperous communities have been removed, and given to the people in the surrounding areas which were deemed more deserving of them.

One point that really stuck out for me from the documentary was that all the attention (and judgment of Detroit as a failure) has focused on the people who fled the city, leaving abandoned, scary neighborhoods, burned-out buildings, and closed schools. Little attention or credit has been given to the people who stayed, and have been working to stabilize and help their communities prosper.

Focus: HOPE is one organization that has been empowering Detroit residents to help themselves rather than conditioning them to rely on “hand-outs” from “white saviors,” a term UrbanDictionary.com defines as “western people going in to ‘fix’ the problems of struggling nations or people of color without understanding their history, needs, or the region’s current state of affairs.” (For an informative analysis of this devastating socio-political phenomenon, please click here.) Another example is the Artists Village centered on Lahser and Grand River, which I’ve made a couple explorations into (and blogged about here).

The more dialogues I have with people who grew up in and/or still live in Detroit, the more I realize that Detroit is capable of restoring itself if we just let it.

By this I don’t mean cut all ties and just “let them figure it out on their own” in isolation; what I mean is that we need to let the people who live in Detroit have a chance to determine their own fate, rather than more affluent outsiders assuming what should stay and what should go in the city. What many people are lauding as Detroit’s supposed “comeback,” after all, is not so much a self-restoration that could truly be considered a comeback; much of what they’re actually referring to is gentrification—bringing in real estate, dining, retail, and entertainment that most long-term residents of the city can’t even afford to partake of.

That’s not saving Detroit, that’s taking it away from its residents.

All that being said, one thing that can help make discussions about interracial and intercultural reconciliation more productive is to stop insisting on the ideas of “blame” and “fault,” which have always gotten us nowhere.

If, because I'm mostly “white” (my Native American ancestry being invisible to most people), I treated myself like some kind of villain, or allowed other people to view me as a villain because the system favors “my kind” and not “their kind,” then I’m not going to come to any productive conclusions that will do anything other than make me feel defensive, ambivalent about my social position, and uncomfortable talking with anyone who isn’t in the “white” box.

On the flipside, I can say that, as a person who has something that many other people don’t, I have a social responsibility to share.

This mindset encourages me to think, What ways can I help my neighbors or friends who don’t have what I have? How can I encourage them, change my ways of thinking and behaving to help bring about a culture-shift that helps them prosper? What legislation can I support? What greed-based businesses can I boycott? What local businesses can I patronize and promote?

The way to finding these answers starts with dialogue, and sharing what we’ve learned from our conversations. That’s what I strive to do here, and I’ve got more to come next week.

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Image: "One World Heart" by Karla Joy Huber, 2017; Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, white gel pen, gold gel pen

There's no such thing as isolated incidents in history...

My November is turning out to be just as inter-culturally and inter-religiously diverse as October was: Last weekend I attended the final 2017 meeting of the Michigan Professional Communicators with interest in religion and cross-cultural issues (MPC), a panel discussion about race relations in Detroit, and a panel presentation by two Filipino adoptees about their experiences growing up in white American households and then going on successful quests as adults to find their birth families in the Philippines.

The first of these events I’ll dive into is the MPC meeting, which was held at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. This choice of venue was lauded by participants as very timely and apropos given the recent national rise in anti-Semitism, and in ignorant people’s sentimentality for (and defense of) Confederate, Nazi, and other oppressive symbolism from our not-so-distant past.

For the first hour of our gathering, the docent gave us an abridged version of the standard tour, presenting us with an excellent, concise accounting of the main points about how the Nazis were really able to develop enough power to do what they did—for years without anyone really interfering.

I was astounded that, nearly three-quarters of a century after the end of World War II, our society still lives with eerie parallels to the experiences of Germany and its neighbor-states leading up to the rise of the Nazis—and how ignorant most people are of these alarming warning signs.

We fail to see them only because of the surface-level differences: It’s so easy to say that our nation is too powerful (in contrast with the defeat and destabilization that left Germany wide-open for an authoritarian political coup in the years after World War I) or enlightened to ever allow such people to come to power again in the West; but the truth is that there’s nothing random about our current increases in authoritarian religion, authoritarian politics, mass shootings, terrorist infiltrations, human trafficking, institutional-level anti-Semitism, and so on.

Such people have never sprung up in a vacuum, and there’s nothing “senseless” or “pure” about their evil.

In her book My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, Jennifer Teege makes the point that dehumanizing Nazis—or any genocidal hate group for that matter—means we deny responsibility that humans could even be capable of such cruelty. As a misguided form of self-defense, we try to rationalize such experiences instead of think critically about what collective karma contributed to this, and thus identify ways to help prevent that thinking—and those actions—from coming back again.

Instead, we have been taught to disregard and dismiss Nazis as freaks and move on, instead of acknowledging their movement and their actions as symptoms of a much-larger and still-existent problem. We contribute to their re-creation every time we choose such dismissal over honest reflection about the true state of our society—every time we label current politicians and mass shooters and berserk police-officers as random freaks, who should be ignored or quarantined in the hopes that the larger problems they represent will just go away.

After contemplating what I learned last Friday, one thing I realized is that whatever I was taught about the rise of the Nazis and the resulting Holocaust when I was a child was not enough, and I clearly wasn’t old enough to truly understand it as part of the larger context of human experience.

Childhood education gives the impression that large historical narratives such as the rise and fall of the Nazis were isolated incidents in history, instead of as part of a continuum of living history, that hasn’t just abruptly ended to create a new volume of humanity’s evolution.

Recent events have shown that we’re still in the same book we were 70-plus years ago, if not in the same chapter.

Education about long-term historical movements should not stop with grade or even high school, which is why I’m so glad there are such institutions giving tours like this, and organizations such as the Interfaith Leadership Council (IFLC) hosting diversity-and-inclusion educational events for adults. Now that we’re old enough to understand it in its context, my vision is that, this time around, we finally own that because we as a species created this kind of evil, we have the power to stop it.

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Image: "Interfaith Collective 2" by Karla Joy Huber, 2008 and 2015, Prismacolor and Sharpie marker

From Harry Potter to Diwali: Another fascinating convergence of neo-Americana and interfaith adventure in my efforts to be a world citizen without leaving Michigan

Part of my mission for this blog has always been to create a narrative reference guide for otherwise-unknown cultural and spiritual ideas, actions, and groups in our local area that are helping to contribute to unity in diversity. I realized recently that it has also served as a magnet, attracting more and more people into my life who agree with these cultural shifts and are glad to finally meet other people who are doing something to help slowly push them into mainstream consciousness.

One of the marvelous factors of this phenomenon is that I’m meeting these people not only at events focused on interfaith and intercultural exchange, but while doing more every-day or secular things, such as writing in my journal at Starbucks, going walkabout with my best friends in Detroit or Royal Oak, attending performances, talking with vendors at art fairs, or while attending a Harry-Potter-themed event at a tea house in Rochester.

The latter was certainly not an every-day thing, and I had simply expected to have a magical-themed good time there with my best friend Dan, who was treating me to the event as my birthday present. Dan was invited by Tonia Carsten, the owner of Tonia’s Victorian Rose Restaurant and Tea Room, whom he met several months ago after searching for a local tea house near him. He’s been an almost-weekly regular there ever since, and throughout his conversations with Tonia he realized that she is a kindred spirit, whose personal and cultural interests go beyond her own upbringing and running a local eatery.

Tonia too has a personal stake in interfaith and intercultural harmony, being from a Christian background and married to a Hindu man from India. Before she was a restauranteur she worked with an agency helping recent Indian immigrants with their transition to residency in the United States, which is how she met her husband and their circle of friends. I just read on her Facebook page that she has traveled to eleven countries, which is another great demonstration of her commitment to living a life with broader and more inclusive horizons than what’s in her immediate vicinity.

One of Tonia’s visions for her tea room is a variety of different themed parties, based on particular media interests, historical people, or eras that would fit well with the restored Victorian décor and style of her venue—including the several “Muggles & Wizards” dinners she’s hosted so far. She has a Oscar Wilde-themed dinner coming up this weekend on November 12, and Christmas High Tea events scheduled for December, and she mentioned a few other ideas to us. She’s also open to Dan’s idea of considering a Steampunk night, which we know for a fact would be popular in this area.

After the dinner, Dan extended Tonia’s invite to me to join her, her husband, and their friends for their Diwali party. Diwali is a festival originating in India, commemorating a particular victory of good over evil from Hindu Scripture, and also serves as the Hindu New Year festival. Historically, the main decorational tradition of Diwali is the lighting of clay lamps, and many other candles to signify the driving out of evil (darkness) by the light (good). In modern times, while people still light candles, they also light sparklers and firecrackers, and in India the fireworks celebrations rival big-city Fourth of July events in the United States.

We arrived at the house ahead of Tonia (who still had cleanup to do after the Harry Potter event), and were greeted warmly by her husband and their friends. Even though this was the first time Dan and I had actually met any of them, they greeted us as friends and we had free-flowing conversation about both Diwali (giving Dan and I an overview for our first-ever experience of it), and miscellaneous topics of both spiritual and secular interest. After some delicious Indian food (which we had just enough room for after our delicious meal at the Victorian Rose) and good conversation, the parents summoned the children to join us and we all went into the backyard to light sparklers and firecrackers.

If you’d like to read more about Diwali, you can on the Hindu American Foundation’s Diwali Toolkit Web page, a page of “fun facts” about Diwali from CNN.com, and a recent USA Today article about Diwali.

This concludes my three-part series about my colorful birthday-weekend adventures, and in my next post I’ll have something to say about the November 10 Michigan Professional Communicators interfaith networking meeting to be held at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Stay tuned, and, as always, thanks for reading.


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Illustration by Karla Joy Huber, 2011; Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, Sharpie pen