It May Be No One Should Be Opened

February 8, 2012

milkeemountainmama: i been wondering this forever.

flint has just as many beat up run down decaying houses that detroit does. in fact, flint has had many of the same proposals surrounding it to “deal” with blight that detroit has—downsizing, 1$ houses, etc.

and yet—when it comes to the whole “zomg i luuuurv abandoned houses!”—the narrative focuses almost exclusively on Detroit. the “once great city.” the “former glory.”

flint is also a “once great city” and has a lot of “former glory”—tons of wealth, lots of beautiful old buildings/architechture…

so what’s the difference here? why is the gaze on detroit so fucking focused?

i can only think of two things.

first; michael moore’s movie, roger and me, detailed exactly how violent the process of resource withdrawal really is. families being kicked out of their homes, families going hungry—empty houses in his movie (and many of his follow up documentaries) don’t carry that same mystique that houses shown in ruin porn do. in short, he contextualizes what ruin porn deliberate fails to. that the houses aren’t just randomly abandoned—that many times (probably most or all), *eviction* happened—making it a violent, demeaning, shaming, frightening experience—the ghost of frightened children and terrified mothers hang around michael moore’s houses.

second: because ruin porn *deliberately* decontextualizes the houses, viewers are able to write their own fantasies onto the blight. one of the fantasies I saw on the detroit ruin porn flowing around tumblr involved a person crying, then flipping over piano and playing it while smoking a cigar (or something, I was so grossed out, I didn’t read it very closely). Viewers of ruin porn repeatedly value terms like “haunting” and “once great” and “so sad” and “heartbreaking.” —and yet, to see a (black) family removed from their house (as you see in Roger and me) can often be described using the same terms. the haunting image of the little boys face as he watches his mother scream at his siblings….

but i get a feeling that THAT is not the haunting image people are recalling as the looking at Detroit ruin porn. because detroit ruin porn decontextualizes the houses, viewers can do the same thing they do when racism or white supremacy stairs them in the face—ignore it, turn away from it, or pretend like it doesn’t exist.

detroit ruin porn, in a sense, allows viewers to reinforce the fantasy that there are no consequences to white supremacist heteropatriarchy—there are no consequences to capitalism. houses, like the titantic, just accidently hit a magic ice burg. everything would’ve been fine if the captian had slowed down like he’d been told. or if there had been enough lifeboats. it’s not that exploitation, violence, resource hoarding, pollution, segregation, violence against workers, and a corporate greed created a new more extravegant way to hoard money and reinforce violent structures of control—it’s that the captain didn’t listen to the warnings to slow down.

…

I think there’s also something going on with working class white folks *from the south* (i.e. hillbillies, rednecks, etc—or: whites that are easily written as being *inherently* violently racist by upper class white folks) being a big community in flint—whereas in Detroit that community exists, but for most of it’s history, the “face” of detroit whiteness was either white collar management or white immigrants (i.e. polish, esp.).

but right now…i’m tired and i still have a long day of work ahead of me.

so fair the well, tumblr.

rgr-pop: I think there’s a lot to be said about this, I’d like to hear what Blair thinks. I think you’ve got something with the last bit, though. Detroit’s legacy is remembered as cosmopolitan, but Flint was just a bunch of po white trash that got lucky. There was a migrant channel from Arkansas directly to Flint, both black and white—newspapers from the 20s through the 50s mentioned “Little Arkansas,” especially the area that we now call “Burtucky.” Spend some time poring through census maps and housing documents from post-war Flint and you will find a lot of “origin: Arkansas.” It pops up all the time in sit-down strike interviews, too: “so-and-so? he moved up here from Arkansas in 1920-whatever.” Genora Johnson Dollinger talks a lot about those southern migrants here. I think Flint had a reputation as white trash with pocket cash, you know?

There were a lot of structural factors that kept even the once-majestic Flint from being seen as quite as grand as Detroit was—mostly, Flint went from nothing to almost exclusively an autotown within about a ten year period, much more quickly and in a more concentrated way than happened in Detroit. GM (and Buick before it) slapped together makeshift houses to accommodate all these black workers and poor white southerners (and Eastern Europeans, as well, especially Croatians and Serbians). Those people became economically middle class pretty quickly—especially the white ones. But those neighborhoods were still set up for what Dollinger called “boarding house” culture. There was really only like a less-than-20-year period where there was a big population of well-to-do white people actually living in the city, because white flight started in Flint by the mid-1960s. Basically: Flint was never “grand” because it was composed of poor white trash who either stayed poor white trash or moved up and out of Flint, and black people, poor or otherwise. And our houses weren’t as faancy.

(The research project I did a few years ago showed that in the mid-1950s, the ratio between black wages and white wages in Flint was much closer than that in Detroit at the same period—around $0.80 to the white worker’s dollar, if I remember correctly—giving Flint probably the highest black wages in the country for a few years. But Flint’s segregation was much, much more severe and entrenched, so those black workers weren’t given access to the fruits of that money.)

I think that Michael Moore definitely achieved if not a demystification then a deglamorization of that legacy. I mean, Flint is nothing if not “pets or meat,” you know? It’s not just that these white suburban kids don’t wanna fetishize the real fruits of poverty, it’s that those fruits are ugly. Those fruits are “white trash,” those fruits are “ghetto.” We had Michael Moore and Detroit had Jack White, those constructed very, very different images.

Man, though, Flint right now is the ruinest. I think of that photo that circulates, the one of the Detroit house that’s almost collapsing into itself. I don’t know how the raw stats on abandoned houses in Flint and Detroit compare, but I know that in some neighborhoods (even pretty centralized ones) in Flint right now, there are more burned down houses than occupied ones. Blair and I got mad when those dudes came to the Trumbullplex in Detroit and called it “postapocalyptic,” ‘cause that shit just ties into the glamorization of poverty and ruin that Detroit natives have to live with. But, like, I have been to still-bombed-out East Germany, and there are parts of Flint right now that are worse. Since the fires, it really has been a warzone. The last thing I want is for people to trudge through that city with their cameras to document my community’s loss, but shit do we have some “impressive” ruin to offer right now.

I feel a little more trusting of flint expats, and they aren’t trying to pornify the ruins, so I feel comfortable sharing some of these links with you guys.

negationparty: blight porn is the colonial gaze. it is a part of a discourse which aims to reduce detroit to this blank black land, ruined and empty and awaiting white intervention. so cut it the fuck out.

(Source: marshmallowmegamama)

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