Motor City Madness:
Tales of the Real Black Hand  

6,873 words

Paul Kersey
Escape From Detroit: The Collapse of America’s Black Metropolis
Antelope Hill, 2025 (CreateSpace, 2012)

Well, you know what they say about Detroit; it’s all fun and games ’til they shoot you in the face. – Roger Sterling, Mad Men (S06E12)

Every lie told about equality and race dies with Detroit. – Paul Kersey

***

Having been born and raised in Detroit and having spent roughly half my life in and around the Motor City, mostly during what I think of as its Spenglerian autumn, or Indian Summer of greatness, I certainly agree with Paul Kersey that it was “arguably the greatest city in America as recently as sixty years ago.”[1]

And one must agree as well, that “it would be difficult to convince any foreigner visiting Detroit in 2012 that a massive aerial bombing campaign did not occur there.”[2]

An August 2004 article in Playboy, quoted here, sets the scene:

If Detroit were a character in a novel, it wouldn’t be believable. What madness could possess a civilization to construct such a grand and magnificent place and then, within half a century, to obliterate so thoroughly what it had created? [When] talking about the state of Detroit, one is tempted to compare it to a natural disaster – some earthquake that laid waste to the landscape. Except there’s nothing natural about what has happened to Detroit in the past 30-plus years. Humans built this city, and humans – an unholy and unconscious alliance of fat-cat businessmen and street-corner criminals – destroyed it. [3]

Dissecting this all too human madness has been the task Paul Kersey has pursued, daily and almost single-handedly, for nearly twenty years. He christened the madness afflicting urban America as “Black Run America” (BRA),[4] and he documents its nature, origins and effects at a blog he calls, with his characteristic wit, Stuff Black People Don’t Like (SBPDL), currently hosted at The Unz Review. [5]

Periodically, he’s also reprinted these blog posts in book form, as one does, but over the years they have been variously banned and deplatformed. The folks at Antelope Hill are to be congratulated – nah, hoisted on our shoulders and toasted with wine! – for bringing the work of Paul Kersey back into circulation.[6]

So, what is this BRA?

In Black-Run America (BRA) we are taught to reflexively celebrate the accomplishment of one individual Black person as representative of the entire Black race; conversely, those rules don’t apply to white people. In BRA, we are taught not to notice individual Black failure. Reporters won’t even mention Black people in crime stories, nor would they consider it representative of how Black people behave. Those are stereotypes. For whites, the reverse is true: any negative action of a white person – especially if it is in dealing with a minority group member – is representative of the entire White population of America.

In certain circumstances, mainly urban, BRA metastasizes into ABRA, “Actual Black Run America.” In a process not unlike decolonization (a la Haiti, Congo or South Africa),[7] BRA results in black crime rising to unacceptable levels; whites begin to flee, and Blacks make up an increasing percentage of the remaining population, until a tipping point is reached – perhaps as low as 40% — and Black rule becomes all-encompassing: the Black Metropolis is born, where blacks occupy every position of power, and cannot be removed; once you go black, you never go back.[8]

Although BRA is nation-wide (indeed, endemic to the West), and Kersey covers many such Black Metropolises, it is Detroit where ABRA is most visible, both materially and symbolically.

No other city in America has come to represent Black America and its potential then in Detroit, where one can see what happens to a metropolis when Black people assume complete control of a city’s destiny.

The key to understanding BRA is Detroit. The key to unlock the madness that our modern era is entirely based upon resides in this one city. It could topple the egalitarian nonsense that dominates conventional wisdom that is mandated by disingenuous White liberals.

Someone has observed that blacks tend to riot during, not before, periods of prosperity and success; for example, the 1968 nation-wide riots happened only after the victories of the supposedly non-violent Civil Rights Movement. In Detroit rioting had already begun in 1967, when Detroit was arguably the best place in the world to be black.

The city was at its peak of affluence and influence; in a sense, Detroit was postwar America. American Motors president George Romney (yes, Mitt’s dad) was now running the state, Ford president Robert MacNamara was overseeing Kennedy’s “best and brightest” at the Defense Department, Sen. Phil Hart had joined Rep. Emanuel Celler to “reform” immigration, and Detroit now had its own Kennedy, Jerry Cavanaugh. [9]

Wikipedia describes the sweet setup given to Cavanaugh and the city’s blacks, first quoting Fortune magazine on race relations:

The most significant is the progress Detroit has made in race relations. The grim specter of the 1943 riots never quite fades from the minds of city leaders. [10]As much as anything else, that specter has enabled the power structure to overcome tenacious prejudice and give the Negro community a role in the consensus probably unparalleled in any major American city. Negroes in Detroit have deep roots in the community, compared with the more transient population of Negro ghettos in Harlem and elsewhere in the North. … more than 40% of the negro population own their own houses.

Unlike Richard J. Daley, who resisted forced implementation of the American civil rights movement, Jerry Cavanagh welcomed Martin Luther King Jr. to Detroit, and marched with him in June 1963 down Woodward Avenue in the 100,000 strong Detroit Walk to Freedom.

Then the National Observer is called in to document Detroit’s economic health:

The evidence, both statistical and visual, is everywhere. Retail sales are up dramatically. Earnings are higher. Unemployment is lower. People are putting new aluminum sidings on their homes, new carpets on the floor, new cars in the garage.

Some people are forsaking the suburbs and returning to the city. Physically Detroit has acquired freshness and vitality. Acres of slums have been razed, and steel and glass apartments, angular and lonely in the vacated landscape, have sprung up in their place. In the central business district, hard by the Detroit River, severely rectangular skyscrapers—none more than 5 years old—jostle uncomfortably with the gilded behemoths of another age.

Accustomed to years of adversity, to decades of drabness and civil immobility, Detroiters are naturally exhilarated. They note with particular pride that Detroit has been removed from the Federal Bureau of Employment Security’s classification of ‘an area with substantial and persistent unemployment.’

Although we see that “the Negro community” had already been given a political role “probably unparalleled in any major American city,” not only did they explode into the massive 1967 riot, but the subsequent Kerner Commission, assembled by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon “America’s First Jewish President” Johnson, to find “the causes,” concluded that, “The most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans towards black Americans.”

We could say, paraphrasing Oliver Stone’s JFK, in that document lay the foundations of BRA: they dindu nuffin.[11]

The document offers the blueprint that our entire society has been based upon, going so far as to blame undesirable nature of the jobs available to Black people as the cause of poverty instead of their limited average intelligence.

We see here the beginning of a two-stage process, rather like Hemingway’s description of going bankrupt: slowly at first, then all at once.

1. 1945-1967: Black percentage of Detroit’s population continues to grow (the aforementioned economic factors make it a sweet place to hang out, despite all the presumed “racism”); the resulting increase in crime, violence and general unpleasantness lead more and more Whites to move out to the surrounding, newly developing suburbs. White flight becomes a torrent after the ’67 riot, which is blamed on Whites themselves. The beginning of BRA.
2. 1973-today: The black/white imbalance becomes large enough that Coleman A. Young (ex-Tuskegee Airman) is elected mayor by a few thousand votes, beginning an unchallenged twenty-year reign, rather like an Africa big-man, solidifying BRA as ABRA.

The Visible Black Hand (aka the Black Undertow) combines with Black Run America to subvert Adam Smith’s invisible hand; tolerating and compensating for the black bloc starves any individual efforts (black or white) at reconstruction.

In response to this, we usually find two arguments, or rather, copes, that serve to reassure whites who are still afraid of being “racist.” First, it’s “an indictment of liberalism and/or socialism.” This is a favorite of conservatives, from the otherwise intelligent, like Thomas Sowell (who obviously has a dog in the fight) to the talk radio/Fox News blowhards, such Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

While it’s true that a city like Detroit, Chicago, or Atlanta can be seen as, to use one of conservatives’ favorite terms, a “liberal plantation,” given the propensity of blacks to vote Democrat as a bloc, being rewarded with the gibs of liberal “big government,” there are just as many cities and states that serve as counter-examples: thoroughly liberal, sometimes outright socialist, yet peaceful and prosperous; Vermont, for example. Cities might vote for Democrats under the illusion that this will solve their problems, but the problems are caused by the BRA and The Visible Black Hand.

The second, perhaps more common among liberals, Leftists or “progressives,” the Mother Jones-reading, NPR-listening crowd, though not exclusively, is the decline and collapse of the American auto industry, which was so obviously integral to the prosperity of the “Motor City” that “Detroit” became synonymous with the industry itself.

But again, one need only casually look around to find counter-examples, cities which lost a major or sole industry, only to recover and perhaps thrive. Kersey’s favorite example is Pittsburgh; he’s how Peter Bradley, reviewing the first edition for Vdare.com, summarized the Pittsburgh rebuttal as Kersey presents it:

The steel industry in Pittsburgh was hit much harder than the auto industry in Detroit in the 1970s and 80s. Yet the loss of its main industry did not cause Pittsburgh residents to riot and burn down their city. In fact, Forbes recently named Pittsburgh “The Most Livable City in America.” The Economist called Pittsburgh “The Best City in America.” Of course, Pittsburgh is one of the whitest big cities in America while Detroit is the blackest. Whites are 65 percent of the population in Pittsburgh while blacks are only 25 percent. Whites comprise nearly 90 percent of the greater Pittsburgh metro area.

Whites fleeing black crime were able to move to the suburbs while keeping their jobs in the auto industry (indeed, Ford and Chrysler had long since moved their headquarters as well) thanks to the postwar highway system; as the industry collapsed, they simply found new jobs or started their own businesses. Whites are like that.

Capitalism did not fail Detroit, for it is capitalism that has allowed the White suburbs to thrive. Blacks in Detroit failed capitalism.

Each chapter of Escape From Detroit is one of Kersey’s almost daily blog posts, pulling news items on crime, movies, or cultural outrages, which illustrate or are explained by the axioms of BRA, while noting the inadequacy or worse of the official explanations offered by government, the media or the residents themselves.

Detroit is ideal for this kind of coverage because as the longest-running instance of ABRA, it’s like a hit sitcom, whose wacky cast of greedy halfwits keep audiences entertained week after week, tuning in to see what new scheme for money-making or self-improvement will blow up in their faces; Amos and Andy as a reality show.

Take Detroit Public Schools President Otis Mathis, facing the challenges of a city where 47% of adults are functionally illiterate. It’s especially challenging, since Pres. Mathis is himself illiterate, as Fox News reported:

Otis Mathis, who oversees the academic future of 90,000 public school students, told the Detroit News that he’s a “horrible writer” after reports surfaced that he sent a Feb. 29 e-mail to the financial manager of Detroit Public Schools that was rife with spelling, punctuation and usage errors.

“If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats,” the e-mail read, according to the paper. Mathis, 56, of Detroit, has had difficulties with language as early as fourth grade, when he was placed in special education classes. His college degree was also held up for more than a decade due to repeatedly failing English proficiency exams required for graduation from Wayne State University, the paper reported.

Remember, in BRA, the last paragraph gives the facts that make Mathis qualified for the job: like a Model T, any color, as long as it’s black. And the subsequent sense of tenured entitlement probably explains this oopsie:

Vice President Anthony Adams today released a two-page letter from Gueyser accusing Mathis of fondling himself during a meeting this week. She called it his “usual habit” during one-on-one meetings. She said she tries to ignore it. “On many occasions, I have asked him not to touch himself,” she wrote in the letter dated Wednesday.

Gueyser’s letter describes in detail an incident during a meeting about her employment agreement. Her contract is to be reviewed tonight. “President Mathis continued to fondle his genital area for approximately 20 minutes, or the entire time I was talking,” Gueyser wrote. “At one point, I lifted some papers from my binder above my eyes to separate my peripheral view in order to avoid watching his activity.”

And why not, since criticism would be, I guess, racist? Let’s ask a clerical colleague about black standards of behavior:

Board member Reverend David Murray called the allegations “a terrible thing” but said he doesn’t believe the 55-year-old Mathis should quit. “It happens to a lot of young men. They engage in behavior they feel is harmless and it’s offensive to certain people,” Murray said. “…It could be deemed offensive, but some women are more sensitive to those types of things than others. I feel bad for him because he probably felt that it was something she would probably like or she got humor out of it.”[12]

Or consider what he calls his “favorite news story of all time,” and it’s indeed a banger: Rachel Maddow bemoans the closing of Catherine Ferguson Academy, “a high school that is home to more than three hundred matriculated girls who are either pregnant or new mothers.”

This story has everything that liberals love: a school named after a slave, poor black people, and the illusion of success at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

As for funding, Kersey quotes a 2004 article informing us that “While Detroit public schools are bleeding students and dollars, prompting the recent announcement that the district will close 40 schools and cut 4,000 jobs to shore up a $200 million two-year deficit, Catherine Ferguson, somehow, every year, obtains about double the funding per student of the average Detroit public school.” What that funding buys is a student/teacher ratio half that of the Detroit average, along with such relative frills as free lunches, free dental care, and a three-week summer program in Canada. Maddow’s 2011 report also shows us a campus replete with gardens and horses.

What it also buys is the illusion of success: the GreatSchools website ranked it at one on a scale of ten, measuring academic achievement based on state tests and compared with other state schools. “Something fishy is going on in Detroit,” Kersey concludes; how could this school claim a 90%graduation rate and 100% college acceptance rate? Only a DOGE-style audit will be able to reveal what’s been going on at Catherine Fergeson, but for now, the Visible Black Hand of economic incompetence has made it impossible for Detroit Public Schools to keep the grift going.[13]

“Reverend” Murray asked us to take humor into account, and Kersey has a deadpan wit that helps him avoid becoming another Noam Chomsky, who seems to have spent the last forty years making the same points over and over, in the same nasal whine, with a heavy layer of irony intended to finally drive them home into our thick skulls.

Not so with Kersey, who seldom fails to entertain, or at least raise a chuckle, as he does here:

In a hilarious review of Robocop 2 from a People magazine dated July 2, 1990, Ralph Novak laments the racial undertones of the movie: “The movie is also a vile insult to Detroit. The character of the city’s black mayor, played by Willard Pugh, borders on racist: He’s so inarticulate, panicky and given to running away that you half expect him to say, ‘Feets, do yo stuff.’” Knowing that nearly 50 percent of the city of Detroit is illiterate, and that the Black mayor of Southfield, Brenda Lawrence, touts something called Revolution Read as the key to that city’s future prosperity, the character of Willard Pugh is perhaps the most honest casting of a Black person in the history of cinema.[14]

Or here:

At least most of the Black male students received the proper training in how to go through security, since the odds are most will wind up in prison at some point in their life. If they go into public service in Detroit, the odds are even higher they will face jail time. But do not cry for the students in Detroit, though, as every one of them receives a free lunch courtesy of the tax-payer.

This also provides a deflationary tone that prevents the risk of saccharine sentimentality:

The Detroit that Black people inherited after the Black Riot of 1967 – the same Detroit that White people fled — was a veritable symphony, the magnificent collective glory of Whites. The crescendo was “The Paris of the West.”

With the election of Coleman Young as the first Black mayor of post-riot Detroit, the majestic White symphony became a grotesque cacophony – a ghetto jazz band riffing on the ruins of White achievement. And then they stole the instruments.

What is to be done? Kersey does not leave us with no hope of reversing the decline of Detroit – and eventually America itself – from ABRA. In his final chapter, he offers, as the title says, “Restrictive Covenants [as] the Only Hope in a Multiracial Nation.” He takes us back to the beginning, when first the auto industry, then its transformation into the “Arsenal of Democracy,” led the black population of Detroit to increase from 1% in 1900 to 9.1% in 1940. Racial tensions of course increased as well, mostly focusing on the need to keep blacks within their own confines. Efforts by the government to build housing projects only led to greater problems (surprise!) which culminated in the 1943 riot, where 34 died and over a thousand were injured.

By 1950 the black percentage rose to 16%, and Whites began to organize a response: neighborhood improvement associations, which promoted the use of restrictive covenants:

A restrictive covenant is a specifying legal agreement that property sold can’t be owned or rented by a member of a designated minority group – often times legally-binding for forever, or for multiple decades or a century – which helped establish segregated neighborhoods in Detroit.

Of course, blacks and Jews resented this application of freedom of association, but a series of Michigan Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court rulings upheld their constitutionality. But by 1948, the postwar push for “civil rights” led the Supreme Court, which had voted 9-0 to uphold such covenants in 1926, to flip over and rule unanimously in Shelley v. Kraemer that restrictive covenants violated both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Kersey tabulates the results, as of 2012:

Now, sixty-four years after this ruling, 89 percent Black Detroit is home to 12 of the 20 Zip Codes in America with the lowest property values. Detroit is the most dangerous city in America, though only ten to fifteen miles away, some of the safest, and Whitest, suburbs in the nation are found. The violence is so bad in Zip Code 48205 that the federal government has launched an initiative to curb high rates of crime there that comprise a disproportionate percentage of all crime committed in Detroit.

Police no longer respond to 911 calls and have been replaced by mercenaries: vigilantes patrol neighborhoods too poor to afford private security firms. Amazingly, blacks refute Robert Putnam’s theorem – very popular on the Right – that a homogenous community will have high social trust and social capital. So, Kersey asks:

Looking upon the actions of those White people who engaged the new Black migrants to the city of Detroit in 1943, and knowing how the future of Detroit would turn out under Black political rule, were their actions misguided? Were restrictive covenants not the most important legal tool needed to keep the city safe and neighborhoods intact?

But there is hope! In a rather dialectical development, the low rents and home prices caused by ABRA, along with tax breaks for new businesses, are attracting “urban pioneers” who are, unlike the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers, not “inner city children of promise but without the necessary means for a higher education” but relatively well-heeled, well-educated artists, entrepreneurs; the kind of people – SWPLs, in other words – who can rebuild a city destroyed by SBPDL.

Enough white people have moved back into Detroit to create an environment of hope in Black sea of despair. Whole Foods is moving in, the clearest representation of whiteness you can find. Property value will begin to rise in this area; hope will return.

This, however, depends on one thing:

Restrictive covenants are the only way to ensure that this “urban pioneering” settlement is maintained. It’s the only way to save America. There exists no greater freedom than that of Freedom of Association. From this, the allocation of all other freedoms can be discussed and established as they best serve to safeguard the future posterity of a community.

When, some years back, I first read an online essay – I think by Kersey – arguing that it was Shelley in 1948 that set off the civil rights “revolution,” not the more famous Brown v. Board in 1954, since it was Shelley that stripped whites of the right to keep blacks out of a neighborhood (rendering Brown’s “separate but un-equal” moot), I thought, like Col. Kurtz: “The genius of it!” Of course, Shelley is the key.

But how likely is it that the Court would reverse itself again, and restore freedom of association? The Shelley court itself harked back to even older precedents, the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866; and the later Civil Rights Act of 1964 created the vast legal framework that essentially created BRA.[15]

Nevertheless, I still like the focus on freedom of association. It may be legally problematic to target Shelley but it serves as a kind of salient point, an easily understood and arguable issue the people can rally around.[16]

Kersey apparently still holds the faith and urges we take that path; here he is last week, celebrating the closing of the “Freedom Rides” museum[17] by Musk’s DOGE:

The Civil Rights Movement was the worst, most consequentially negative social movement in the history of the country. Brick by brick, we must work to end the celebration of this era of American history. This is but one small step in the direction of sanity. The way forward is erasing most of the 20th Century and it starts with re-assessing the reality of what the Civil Rights Movement birthed.

Simply put, nothing worth celebrating but lamenting what was lost. Our civilization.

***

The publishers give us a bit of the book’s own history:

Originally published in 2012, Escape from Detroit has since fallen out of print due to deplatforming, and is now being resurrected and preserved by Antelope Hill Publishing in this newly-edited edition.

As for being “newly-edited,” the copyright page tells us:

This work is a compilation of articles originally published on SBPDL Blog at The Unz Review, except where otherwise noted, 2009 to 2012.

This seems to imply that nothing has been added to the 2012 edition, and a comparison with my pdf of that one seems to bear that out: occasional references to items such as “low Trick- or-Treating rates” in majority black areas, or Frankie Goes to Hollywood, are deleted for no apparent reason; however, several references to Portland as a Whitopia might have been updated or cut, since it no longer serves as a counter-example to the “it’s the liberals” cope.

Also, youngsters or those of us with failing memories might need some explanation of references to “relying on Superman to save the day.”[18] Meanwhile, non-residents, and some current ones, would be puzzled by a pun on the name of the STRESS policing program (Stop The Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets) that occurs before the chapter explaining what STRESS is/was; in the same way a call out, “Right, Sheila Cockrel?” is unexplained until several chapters later (she was the last white person to serve on the City Council). Several minor typos of the “our” for “are” variety have also been carried over from the first edition.

The only real changes seem to be to the layout, which is more like a standard “book.” Thus, endnotes are now footnotes, which some may find more convenient, although these only contain titles and authors, so you still need to refer to the bibliography at the end for dates and places of publication (although dates of each blogpost have been added, which is convenient for researchers or historians).

More importantly, while the original, perhaps reflecting its origin as blog posts, appeared in short, often one-sentence bites, the text is now re-written into longer paragraphs (although not approaching Hegelian lengths), with spacing adjusted accordingly. A larger and more attractive typeface accounts for an increase of about fifty pages in length.

The main difference is in the cover. The new cover contrasts a top photo of a Mad Men-era family – Mom and Dad, Buddy and Sis, as Tom Wolfe might say – contemplating what is likely their new, suburban ranch-style house, with a contemporary photo of riot cops engaged in some kind of Mogadishu-style battle on the streets of Detroit.

While just fine, indeed, excellent, in itself, I prefer the earlier cover, which also employed the then/now contrast. As the first edition itself says:

The top image on the book cover is of “The Spirit of Detroit,” a statue that was dedicated in 1958. In its left hand, the large figure holds a bronze sphere emanating rays to symbolize God.; in the right hand, is a family group that symbolizes all human relationships.

Detroit was roughly 70 percent white when this statue was dedicated. It rests outside the city’s municipal center, which has subsequently been renamed for the first Black mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young.

The bottom picture is of the Joe Louis Statue, a giant Black fist that has come to symbolize “Black power” in a city that is 89 percent Black in 2012.[19]

In 1912, Detroit was less than 2 percent Black.

Excursus: The (Little) Paris of the (Mid)West

The cover description just quoted goes on to say “The cosmopolitan attitude cultivated in Detroit, with architects building towers that jettisoned into the sky at heights previously unseen in the entire world, earning the city the title of ‘The Paris of the West.’” This phrase also occurs almost a dozen times in the text.

Now about this “Paris of the West” business. I have never heard Detroit called that, although you can find it used on the internet, and at least once as “Little Paris of the West.” What I have always heard is “Paris of the Midwest”; I distinctly recall seeing it called such in a Wall Street Journal article in the late 80s or 90s – that is, sadly recalling that it once had been known by that name — but it must be lost behind some paywall now.

Logically, Paris, of course, is the Paris of the West; and Detroit would be the Paris of the Midwest.

Today, of course, it is used ironically, with or without sadness, but why one might ask was it ever seriously called this? The answer is quite simple. Detroit was founded as a French trading post (by Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac, no less), due to its convenient location at the strait (de troit du Lac Érie); at the conclusion of the French and Indian War it was ceded to the British. Unlike, say, New Orleans, it seems to have rather quickly been de-frenchified, with place names retained but anglicized: “Detroit” itself, of course, and streets like St. Antoine, Beaubien (“Bow-be-in”) and Gratiot (“Grah-shit”). And of course the proximity to Canada (which is south of Detroit, by the way) kept a vestigial connection through trade with Quebec. Otherwise, the French Connection went the way of most ties to the Old World in the USA, bits of nostalgia to mine for the names of cars and buildings.[20]

Except: the city burned down in 1805, but being a prosperous trade center, it was gratually rebuilt in what would eventually be the then-current midcentury (19^th that is) architectural fashion, which fortunately, and I guess coincidentally, resembles the Paris rebuilt by George-Eugène Hausmann, including the broad “boulevards,” radiating out from a central plaza, along with plenty of statuary (not unlike Washington D.C., designed in 1791 by another Frenchman, Pierre L’Enfant, although his inspiration was suburban Versailles).

With the rise of the auto industry in the early 20th century, another layer was added on, this time taking inspiration from the Art Deco period: for example, the Guardian Building (aka “the Cathedral of Finance”), now a National Historic Monument. Hence, my suggestion for anyone wanting to get the similar “this seems like a really modern, prosperous city but it isn’t overshadowed by soulless 80-storey glass boxes” vibe of Detroit in its prime, but can’t go to Paris, is walk around the quieter parts of New York’s Tribeca or the Meatpacking District.

Of course, today, after the improvements mandated by the EU, Paris is now “The Detroit of Europe.”

***

I’ve dealt with the way Kersey’s deadpan and ironic wit largely obviates the danger of “repetition.” Reviewing Kersey’s similarly serialistic Whitey on the Moon, Mark Gullick compared the style to “the reiterative, rhythmic feel of samizdat,” and made the excellent point that “there’s nothing amiss” with “the repetition of central points,” since “If you are going to make an important point, stating it once and once only diminishes its importance,” giving the examples Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Melville’s Moby Dick.[21]

Well, before this gets as stuffy as a philosophy seminar room at Wayne State (back when a female student who complained about the effects of all the chain smoking was “accommodated” by giving her a chair in the hallway), let’s return to practical matters: everyone reading this should immediately buy this book. If you already have it, consider getting this as a highly recommended upgrade (though I’d keep the cover around; maybe frame it, if you don’t have any woke busy bodies around).

And if any of you disagree, you can hit Eight Mile! [22]

Notes

[1] Constant Readers will recall that I’ve frequently claimed that the years from 1965-1972 were Peak Detroit, and thus Peak USA and Peak White Civilization. While the Left might think the election of Nixon was the end of some Golden Age (see the famous “Wave” speech from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which I analyzed here), I would argue that the Nixon years were the Golden Age, and his defenestration from the White House the beginning of America’s decline; a period when unprecedented postwar wealth made Faustian dreams possible, both nationally and personally. That this coincides with my own “yoot” in an era when money was plentiful and possibilities endless, is either purely coincidental or typical Boomer narcissism from the period. To make a start on verifying this “objectively” take a look at the year per capita income peaked, never to recover despite several Wall St. “recoveries.” Presumably this is the run-out from what the French call the Thirty Glorious Years (Les Trente Glorieuses); see Alain de Benois, The Populist Moment (forthcoming from Counter-Currents).

[2] Jerry Cavanaugh, the “Boy Mayor” and Kennedy-esque Wunderkind elected just prior to the riot that ended his political career, “surveyed the scene of fleeing white businesses owners from Detroit and said, that he planned trips to ‘Detroit’s sister cities—Nagasaki and Pompeii.’” Back in the eighties, a visiting German student at Wayne State was asked why he selected Detroit. Gesturing across the front windows of the Metro Café on Cass Avenue, which intersected the university and led to nothing less than the GM World Headquarters in the New Center area, a cultural center funded by GM in the 50s, he said, “Because all this reminded me of the bombed out cities I grew up in.” GM has now moved into the Renaissance Center abandoned by Ford, and the Metro Café seems to have disappeared.

[3] Frank Owen, “Detroit, Death City,” Playboy, August 2004, pp.61-62. As Kersey notes, they really did have great articles.

[4] Part of a gallery of related tropes, such as the black undertow, the visible black hand that subverts the free market, and the black footprint (the real carbon footprint).

[5] Kersey says back in 2011: “This site has evolved from a spoof of Stuff White People Like into one of the most original Web sites on the Internet for reading forbidden ideas about what I call Black-Run America (this concept is defined here). We send it out daily here at SBPDL. I coined the terms Black-Run America (BRA) and Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL), though my favorite is Crusading White Pedagogue (CWP), but the first two terms are beginning to appear frequently on other sites around the web.”

[6] Antelope Hill has also reprinted Black Mecca Down: The Fall of the City Too Busy to Hate (i.e., Atlanta, reviewed here) and Whitey on the Moon: Race, Politics, and the Death of the US Space Program, 1958–1972 (reviewed here); a “Paul Kersey Bundle” of all three titles is also available on their website at a 15% discount.

[7] “One doesn’t need to travel to Africa to see what happens when “colonization” ends, though. Detroit is an example of what happens when a White civilization is colonized by Black people. We can bid adieu to Western Civilization anytime you enter the perdition known as modern Detroit, a city not destroyed by liberalism, but by a consistent application of Black power in every sphere of public and private life.” Perversely, as Kersey notes, Black Detroit officials now try to retcon Detroit’s history as heroic blacks throwing off white colonialism.

[8] This is a cruder, more concrete form – sheer numbers – of the same process that happens in liberal democracy in general: what starts as “protecting minorities” inevitably becomes minority veto or minority rule.

[9] The Roger Sterling epigraph comes from a Mad Men story arc involving ad agencies competing for the Holy Grail, the GM account. As a fan of both Detroit and Mad Men (see my collection, End of An Era: Mad Men and the Ordeal of Civility [San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015] and later essays here), it was delightful to see these New York snobs (some of whom can’t even drive) desperately sucking up to GM executives, although of course the latter are portrayed as rich barbarians: Roger’s snarky comment refers to Ken Cosgrove losing an eye when forced to go on a hunting expedition with GM brass. And no, it’s not based on Dick Cheney: “But this hunting incident isn’t entirely fictional. In 1959, retired General Motors President Harlow “Red” Curtice shot and killed retired GM Vice President, Harry Anderson, in a duck-hunting accident.” See Auto News here.

[10] It is little recalled today, that in 1943, when blacks amounted to a mere 9% of the city, due mainly to wartime employment, tension were already so high that whites had their own riot, centered around the Belle Isle vacation spot. Kersey discusses this riot in his last chapter, on the need for restrictive covenants.

[11] Col. X to Jim Garrison: “Lyndon Johnson signs National Security Memo 273, which reverses Kennedy’s withdrawal policy and approves covert action against North Vietnam, provoking the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In that document lay the Vietnam War.”

[12] Oopsie indeed! Good thing I checked to see if he’s black. He is, but not a clergyman: “Murray legally changed his first name to Reverend years ago,” according to a Free Press article on 2018 board candidates. Though obviously a nut, his qualifications include “Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, as well as a master’s degree in teaching from Wayne State University. Bachelor’s degree in social work and a master’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Detroit-Mercy. Master’s degree in social work from the University of Michigan,” so there’s that.

[13] Hard to believe? Consider this, ripped from today’s headlines: Connecticut student (black, of course) graduates with honors and receives scholarship, despite being unable to read or write; sues school for 3 million.

[14] Kersey knows whereof he speaks here as well, being the author of Hollywood in Blackface
Black Images in Film from Night of the Living Dead to Thor (2011), which I believe is also out-of-print and/or banned, but we can hope Antelope Hill has its eyes on a reissue.

[15] See Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), reviewed here.

[16] “The senses “prominent” and “pertinent” are relatively recent, and derive from the phrase salient point, which is a calque of the Latin punctum saliēns, a translation of Aristotle’s term for the embryonal heart visible in (opened) eggs, which he thought seemed to move already. – Wikipedia.

[17] The “Freedom Rides” were a bit of Alinsky-style performance art, staged by Northerners, mostly Jews or Jew-adjacent, in which blacks and sympathetic whites and Jews pretended to be interstate travelers just trying to use segregated bathrooms or lunch counters, so that their arrests would become Federal concerns. This podcast contains some interesting contemporary newsreel footage, including New York Jews explaining the chicanery.

[18] Wikipedia: “Waiting for “Superman” is a 2010 American documentary film written and directed by Davis Guggenheim and produced by Lesley Chilcott. The film criticizes the American public education system by following several students as they strive to be accepted into competitive charter schools….”

[19] See Kersey’s chapter “Black America Fists Detroit.”

[20] In my tweens, the hip crowd produced and read The Fifth Estate, now America’s oldest anarchist periodical, and as a result of their being plugged into the latest French Marxist fashions, I – being a bit precocious myself – was familiar with Debord and Baudrillard before entering high school (local anarchist guru Fredy Perlman translated and printed Society of the Spectacle in 1967); they later moved into primitivism so I already knew about John Zerzan decades before the New York Times breathlessly informed its readers of his influence on Kaczynski’s thinking..

[21] I’ll see that Kant and raise a Schopenhauer: “The interpretive flexibility [required to understand Schopenhauer] is familiar to every non-philosopher in everyday conversation…. Indeed what makes Schopenhauer so delightful to read is precisely that he writes in a colloquial manner – as if he were trying to verbally explain something to the reader in person…. [He] is delightfully verbose: repeatedly recapitulates and summarizes – using different words and constructs – what he has already said.” Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics (Alresford, Hampshire, UK: iff Books, 2020), p, 5

[22] Perhaps more recently, though vaguely, remembered as the title of Eminem’s autobiographical film, Eight Mile, Coleman Young’s New York Times obituary provides the original context: ”’I issue an open warning to all dope pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers,” [said Coleman Young at his first inauguration]. ”It is time to leave Detroit. Hit Eight Mile Road. And I don’t give a damn if they are black or white, if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.’

“The reaction to Mr. Young’s speech illustrated the depth of the racial divide between the city and its suburbs. Blacks heard one thing in his inaugural remarks while whites heard something completely different. Blacks applauded the new Mayor, understanding him to say that Detroit would get tough on crime and address their concerns about brutality and harassment in the largely white police department.

“But because Eight Mile Road is the border between Detroit and its northern suburbs, the Mayor’s statement angered many white suburbanites. They saw the warning as an invitation for the city’s criminals to enter the suburbs and wreak havoc, and it troubled many white city residents, who saw it as an attack on the police.”

Mayor Young’s attitude (or delusions) about the suburbs can be seen in his reasons for breaking ranks with his Democrat peers and opposing stricter gun control laws, as Kersey cites them from the mayor’s own self-consciously Maoist “Quotations from Mayor Coleman A. Young”: “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them collect guns in the city of Detroit while we’re surrounded by hostile suburbs and the whole rest of the state who have guns, and where you have vigilantes practicing Ku Klux Klan in the wilderness with automatic weapons.” I guess Coleman was “based” before it was cool. I think that last part is a reference to the Michigan Militia, one of several such paramilitary patriot groups formed in the mid-nineties and rapidly declining after the Oklahoma City bombing (Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had attended early meetings).