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The majority of black voters in Michigan have effectively lost the right to control their communities.
With Detroit set to get an emergency manager, more than half of the state's African-American voters will be under the authority of a consent agreement or state-appointed financial manager. Their votes for local officials have been made null and void through the fiat of a governor most of them never chose.
Sure, you can find quite a few blacks who'll say they don't mind, that they're willing to watch the men and women they voted into office shoved aside for an omnipotent gubernatorial appointee. They want streetlights to work. They want police to come when they call. They want schools that educate effectively. They want to stop having to be told, over and over and over, that their city is broke, their elected leaders are dumb and everything around them is broken and beyond repair.
In much the same way that scared Americans were willing to give up constitutional liberties as long as somebody promised to keep them safe from Osama bin Laden, there are many in Detroit and other reeling Michigan cities who are OK with surrendering local control for the prospect of more efficient services, improved schools and stable municipal finances.
I understand the thinking. No one wants to live in the dark and in fear and with the very real likelihood that their child's education won't amount to anything. But I also don't believe the governor and his crew really give a damn what poor blacks in Detroit or Highland Park or Pontiac want.
Gave democracy the bird
Yes, they are more than happy to repeat these folks' concerns as they lay the pretext for state takeovers of municipal finances. But they don't really care. This was a power grab that Snyder and his right-wing buddies were intent on executing at all costs, the voters' will be damned. They proved that much when they gave democracy the bird by pushing through pretty much the same emergency manager law that had already been voted down by a majority of Michigan residents.
No, I do not believe that a party that wants to roll back the Voting Rights Act and rig the Electoral College system cares about democracy among people who literally bled and died for the ballot. I don't believe that a party that balances its budgets on the backs of poor and working-class families in the name of safeguarding corporate profits really cares about uplifting poor people in Detroit, the same poor people that its ridicules and scapegoats.
And I don't believe an emergency manager will turn around Detroit's finances in 18 months any more than I believed Robert Bobb's outrageous claim that he would have the Detroit Public Schools operating in the black in two years while elevating the quality of education. He did neither, and I don't see how Snyder's appointee will be any more successful in tackling the even thornier and more complex problems that are Detroit's finances.
For all this talk about EM-driven turnarounds, Detroit's fate will likely be the same as it was ever going to be. The city is headed for bankruptcy, the same bankruptcy it should have declared long ago, the same bankruptcy that I believe Snyder's consent agreement (and now his EM) was intended only to delay, never to truly avoid.
The inevitable is unchanged
Hundreds of thousands of new taxpayers aren't going to move into Detroit in a year and a half. And even though Detroit gets a financial review team similar to the one installed to help save New York City in the 1970s, Detroit isn't going to get the multibillion-dollar federal loan that came with it. An EM will not change the inevitable.
Snyder, though, wants to protect Wall Street bondholders as best he can. The GOP as a whole wants to break unions and hand over as many government services to private entities as they can. And suburban power brokers who have been salivating over Detroit's water department for many many years want to make sure that this time they get it.
And why is nullifying the black vote critical to this? Because, no matter how some want to diminish this reality, these moves have real, meaningful and deleterious impact for the black people on the ground, for those who've stayed in Detroit and struggled to make it work in the face of mounting issues. When black people aren't allowed to control their communities, they too often get cut out of the municipal picture altogether. If the history of big-city politics in America has taught us anything about race, it's that if blacks aren't empowered to demand inclusiveness, there's a damn good chance we simply won't be included.
And hell yes, this matters, as much as lights and police response times and legacy costs and debt ratios.
Mind you, this isn't to say that there's no merit to the argument that a city exists to provide services, not to serve as a meal ticket for the labyrinth of public-sector employees, vendors and contractors who get paid to deliver those services. There is real truth in this.
And there's also plenty of truth in the criticism that elected local leaders -- many of them black -- let many problems fester for far too long:
- When they should've been charging a fee for Belle Isle, they didn't.
- When they should've been folding redundant departments into each other, they didn't.
- When they should have created land banks and 50-year plans for the city's future, they didn't.
- When they should have been looking to get the best deals on services instead of callously lining the pockets of friends, family and themselves, they didn't.
But another truth is that, EM or not, the city will still use vendors, will still strike up contracts for services, will still need department heads and middle managers. That's how cities function -- and that's how many working people (of any color) eat.
Thing is, in Detroit, more than in many other places, African-Americans have provided many of those services for decades. Teachers, fire fighters, police officers, lawyers, landscapers, analysts, accountants, janitors — for decades, these people have been the vital vertebrae in the spine of the city's upper and middle classes. And many of them have built their professions and businesses doing work with the city.
Key question: How much access?
Detroit will still need these services so it's pointless to pretend as if what these folks do isn't important. But for some, the question now is, how much access will they have? How much of cutting the so-called "fat" in city government really just amounts to replacing their deals with contracts for Snyder's cronies? Do city services become more efficient because blacks will be cut out of the game?
Just yesterday, I was talking with a good friend in the local financial industry whose black-owned firm handled millions in investments for the city for long years. These guys aren't screw-ups. They aren't thieves. They've made far more money for the city than they ever lost. We're not talking Bobby Ferguson here.
But ever since the consent agreement took effect, they can't even get a call back, let alone do any deals on the city's behalf. "The white guys won't even give us chance," he told me.
And no, it doesn't matter if the emergency manager is black or not. It's about who he or she answers to, whose agenda is pursued.
Robert Bobb, an African-American man, ballooned the DPS budget deficit because he began bringing on boatloads of consultants and cronies to chase a crappy neoliberal vision of education. Along the way, he cut out vendors like Safeway Transportation -- a black-owned school bus company with an impeccable safety record -- to hand over big deals to dubious companies such as the controversial First Student Inc.
School bus safety didn't improve. Kids didn't get to school faster. All Bobb did was take Detroit taxpayer money out of the hands of a company that employed drivers and mechanics from near its east side headquarters and give it to a multinational corporation with no ties to the city and no interest in making sure that Detroiters work and eat. He wasn't held responsible. He wasn't answerable to anyone.
This is what losing local control means.
The groundwork for this has been decades in the making:
- It was underway when racist "covenants" and biased federal housing policies let whites flee the city while relegating blacks into certain areas and keeping them out of many others.
- It was underway when freeways destroyed Black Bottom.
- It was underway when Hudson's and other major retailers left down and when the auto industry began relocating.
- It was underway when residency laws were repealed and revenue sharing was cut out and Republicans in D.C., beginning with Ronald Reagan, decided that investing in cities was a waste of time and resources.
Snyder's moves don't come in a vacuum. They come with the promise that, after decades of dysfunction and despair, everything in Detroit is ultimately going to be alright. Snyder wants Detroiters to believe that, as the governor of the state's largest city, he's in this mess with them and he's here with the single-minded intention of helping them out of it.
And if he has to diminish the black vote to do it, surely that's a small price to pay, right?
