I Call Her Detroit

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“A revolutionary must have a profound belief in the capacity of humankind. If we really believe that man/woman has great capacities, our job is to draw upon these capacities as a basis, to accept them, to evoke them. Our job is to enable people to feel their enlarged selves. Man/woman is a remarkable creature. He/she isn’t mean, even though he/she is acting mean. He/she is capable of sensitivity, heroism. But ordinary people in the United States have so diminished themselves that they haven’t the faintest idea of what people are and what they’re capable of being. The only possible way of moving anywhere is by being confident that people are capable of extraordinary dedication, commitment, and creativity. But we can’t just exhort them, can’t just try to inspire them. We have to bring about a confrontation within them between what they are and what they can be. We do not just open up to them a vision of the positive, but we force them to confront their own negativity. So we have moved now to a stage where we are not jus exploring the nature of man/woman but are asking man/woman to confront the negative in him/herself and in his/her present nature with the potential of his/her human nature.”
–James and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century

I Call Her Detroit

My path into politics was feminism, and like many women who first wake up to the ugliness of patriarchy, I raged against it. Young, naïve, and impatient, political action to me was marching in the streets. Criticizing every wrong I saw. Throwing rocks. Loud music. Anger boiling over, screaming “this is wrong!’ Often inarticulate and cliché in my approach.

This wasn’t sustaining to me and it was only marginally useful. Some of my experiences were exhausting, demeaning—some were very traumatic. I came to an impasse in my personal evolution and wondered what to do next. Thankfully, timing and velocity are powerful. When I needed it most, I was guided to a new place—physically, politically, emotionally, and spiritually. I call her Detroit. And amidst her chaos was healing.

The political landscape was different here. At first I was confused. Where was all the rage? There was certainly room for it. TONS of space among the burnt out buildings, half empty neighborhood blocks, wide, cracked car-deficient streets with potholes big enough to swallow my little red Hyundai. There were lots of ghosts here in the Motor City. But I couldn’t find the anger.

I couldn’t find it because my eyes were not trained to see it. Sure, it was at the community speak outs, the marches. It was sort of at the UAW rallies. But this was not the driving force of movement in this city. No, the anger here was transformed into something different.

It was found in housing takeovers, as people efficiently moved into empty homes and turned on the water and the electricity, brought their friends and families to stay.

It was found in the old warehouses abandoned slowly and completely through the years of automation, converted into galleries, studios, and learning centers for artists and young people to have creative space to do their work.

It was in the polluted and empty lots, remediated and reclaimed as community gardens, feeding families whose only source of food in the neighborhood was the liquor store on the corner.

It was found in murals and public art in the neighborhoods and on the sides of abandoned buildings. Often solitary structures, they loomed above the landscape, reminding you that sometimes you had to look beyond the obvious for the life inside.

It was in the young people finding their voices through hip hop music, raging against the failure of the public school system. Telling their stories and demanding you to listen. They refused to be statistics or fall into the stereotype of violent inner city youth that there were told they doomed to become.

It was found in the upright bass, smooth alto vocals, 50-year-old drumsets, and guitars that were played so hard, the strings would break mid-song.

And Detroit poets—Detroit poets can do amazing things with anger. Taking hardships, injustice and agony, spinning them into sweet honey verses that soothed your senses into a calm silence; only to be woken up again by the explosive storm of what was coming, what was here, and what had always been. You felt it then. In the room. You could feel the resolve strengthen as everyone tried to catch their breath amazed at the power they had just witnessed.

When you are in a city perpetually perched on the edge of disaster, anger has to look different. When you’ve been backed up against a brick wall, you have no where else to go but forward, back into the chaos from which some of you have thus far narrowly escaped. You have to find a way through—there is no other choice. You use it to bring you to a new place of hope that will carry you further down the road of human evolution than you ever thought possible.

And that—THAT is the rage that I found there. That was the healing that I learned from her. The promised land. Detroit.
She should know.

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Filed under Detroit, Grace Lee Boggs, healing, hope, movement, revolution and evolution