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NEWS & VIEWS
Feedback
Readers respond to our new music issue. BabyTron is the mf best. —@ bacartiparty._, Instagram
Stop trying to make Baby Tron a thing... The hood aint never heard of this dude. — Tony Rice, Facebook Why does it seem like every rapper these days is young, little, or baby? C’mon now be original... —David Wiesman, Facebook There are other genres besides rock, indie, and hip-hop. Just saying. —Eric Abbey, Facebook
Nice to be featured in the Detroit Metro Times talking about my early days in dance music, my inspiration to start DJing, and what I’m up to currently! My interview is a part of a bigger piece highlighting next-gen talent keeping the legacy of Detroit music alive! I’ve been a fan of the Metro Times since forever, so it was really cool to be included in this! The volume is oating around Detroit in print, so save me a copy if you see one! Thanks, Leyland “Lee” DeVito for the words! And thanks, A Ann-Marie Teasley for taking me out back in those early days lol. —Ashleigh Teaskey, aka Ash Lauryn, Facebook Have a comment? Of course you do! Sound off: letters@metrotimes.com.
Vol. 42 | No. 24 | April 6-12, 2022
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metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
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NEWS & VIEWS Left behind
Ex-Detroit Tiger struggles to get by after giving life to baseball By Steve Neavling
Ike Blessitt gave his life to baseball. But his commitment to America’s pastime has cost him a lot. At 72, the former Detroit Tiger lives in a cramped house in desperate need of repair on the city’s east side. His health isn’t much better. In the past four years, he’s had a heart attack, a triple bypass, and a bleeding esophagus. An infection and diabetes claimed his right foot. “I’m hurting,” he tells Metro Times in a gravelly voice. “My kitchen went down on me. My countertop caved in. I have diabetes, and I’m living off of hot dogs and burgers because I can’t use my kitchen.” Unlike many former professional baseball players, Blessitt never made a lot of money. In fact, he’s among an estimated 179 former players who weren’t on a major-league active roster long enough to qualify for a pension or health care from the billion-dollarindustry. For all the years he played in the minor leagues, Blessitt got nothing. He gets by as a hitting instructor for teenagers, teaching them how to swing a bat and measure up a fastball. He built a batting cage in his backyard and plans to use his garage to hit ground balls to aspiring infielders. Born and raised in Hamtramck, Blessitt has played baseball since he was 7 years old. He also was a star in football, basketball, and track and field. In 1967, the Tigers drafted him in the 15th round when he was 17 years old. For the next five years, he cut his teeth in the minor leagues, playing for teams in Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, and Ohio. With a rare combination of speed and power, he posted impressive numbers in the minors. He hit 22 home runs and stole 29 bases on a Double A team in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1971. He was playing for the Toledo Mud Hens in September 1972 when he was called up to play in the majors. “My manager said, ‘Ike, you’re not going to play tonight,” Blessitt recalls. “I said, ‘Why, coach?’ He said, “You’ve been called up to the big leagues.’” It was the last month of the season. Blessitt only played in a handful of games, but he earned a spot on the
Former Detroit Tiger Ike Blessitt stands in his backyard next to a batting cage.
“It’s a shame the way baseball has gone. There’s only a few of us still living that don’t get pensions. With all the money that they make, they could give us some money. It’s not going to break anybody’s pocket.” roster for Spring Training in 1973 with a chance to prove he was ready for the big leagues. What happened next, Blessitt says, cost him a spot on the active roster, and it wasn’t his on-field performance. According to Blessitt, storied Tigers manager Billy Martin, known as a skilled coach but a quarrelsome drinker, was with a white teenage girl at the Leland
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House hotel in Detroit and wanted Blessitt, a 22-year-old Black man, to take her home to her parents’ house in suburban Birmingham at 1 a.m. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Damn, if I give this girl a ride, he might keep me in the big leagues the next year,’” Blessitt says. “I get there, and the girl is under 16 years old. Like I’m going to drive a white girl to Birmingham in the early
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’70s at 1 o’clock in the morning.” Instead, Blessitt got her a cab. He was furious with Martin. “I went back there screaming at him,” Blessitt says. “That’s the worst thing I did because the next year I paid for it in Spring Training. I’ve been through hell since my fight with illy Martin. I lived with it all these years.” Blessitt also dealt with racial discrimination. Only a handful of the players on the Tigers’ 40-man roster were Black. Instead of competing against white players for a spot on the team, he says the Tigers only matched him up against lack players in left field. “The American League was prejudiced,” he says. “There were a lot of Blacks who could not play, and they were good.” In the 1973 season, Blessitt says Martin demoted him to Double A. For the next four or five years, lessitt bounced around the minor leagues, but he never got called up again.
Blessit points out his younger self in a photograph of the 1972 Tigers.
He spent his 20s pursuing the big leagues and never had time for another job, missing out on opportunities to gain experience outside of baseball. He played year-round. “In the long run, it hurt me because I didn’t get a job like everyone else in the winter months,” Blessitt says. “The
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Tigers sent me to winter ball from 1967 to 1972, so I couldn’t work.” After spending his 20s in the minors, Blessitt played baseball in Mexico for the next 15 years. Prior to 1980, players weren’t eligible for benefits unless they played for four years. But that changed in 1980, when
the players union negotiated a new contract with Major League Baseball that allowed players with at least one day of service to receive medical benefits and players with at least 43 days of service to get a pension. But the pact wasn’t retroactive. In 2011, pre-1980 players with more than 43 days on the active roster began receiving a modest annual stipend. Blessitt, who paid union dues at the time, was on the roster for just one month. He received nothing. “It’s a shame the way baseball has gone,” Blessitt says. “There’s only a few of us still living that don’t get pensions. With all the money that they make, they could give us some money. It’s not going to break anybody’s pocket. Baseball went from being a pastime to the almighty dollar.” After becoming a retired player, Blessitt never gave up on baseball. It’s all he knew. He became a hitting instructor and worked in Tigers Fantasy Camp, where grown-ups suit up and play baseball with former Tigers during Spring Training. “If it wasn’t for Fantasy Camp, I don’t know where I’d be,” Blessitt says. “They really help me out.” On a recent weekend, Blessitt limps across his backyard, where he set up a batting cage for young ballplayers. Just
beyond the edge of his yard is a pile of abandoned furniture and garbage from who knows when. “We’re going to try to get the city to move that,” Blessitt explains, his brown eyes shaded by the bill of his Detroit Tigers hat. “There’s a lot we can do back here.” Baseball may have forgotten Blessitt, but he’ll never turn his back on the game. “I never got out of baseball. I’ve been in baseball all my life,” he says. “But I had a hard time. I don’t know how else to go out and get money, so I taught baseball. He wants to get young Detoiters playing baseball again. Most of the baseball diamonds around Detroit are long gone because many Black kids don’t have the money for equipment or traveling teams, which Blessitt says can cost $5,000 for each child. “We’re trying to do something for the city,” Blessitt says. “Baseball isn’t like it used to be. White players have the money. Black players don’t. We have to do something about that.” Blessitt says he has one goal. “When I take my last breath, I want to be able to say I’ve made a dent in baseball history in Detroit,” Blessitt says. “It’s my game, I love it. I eat and sleep baseball.”
metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
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NEWS & VIEWS Best of the Rest
Detroit’s People Mover is coming back this April By Randiah Camille Green
Detroit’s old-school public transportation method is getting
ready to make a comeback. The People Mover will resume service this month, after being on hold for nearly two years during the pandemic. Rides will be free for the first 120 days of service. While an exact opening date has yet to be announced, officials have said it will be sometime in April, Michigan Radio reports. The elevated rail will only offer limited service at nine stations at first, and each stop will have sanitizing stations set up. The People Mover runs 2.9 miles around downtown Detroit, and rides are typically 75 cents one way. Whether you use it to get around downtown or just for the chill vibes, the People Mover is a quirky part of Detroit that’s been missed by many (even though the rides could be rough sometimes).
Detroit’s QLine extends free rides, creates rewards program
Detroit’s QLine streetcar will remain fare-free for passengers, at least for now. After being down due to the pandemic, the QLine introduced free rides last September when it resumed service just ahead of the Dlectricity festival. The free rides were slated to end at the close of 2021, but contributions from the Penske Corporation and the Kresge Foundation allowed the farefree rides to extend through April 2022. Thanks to contributions from those same organizations, the QLine will not only remain fare-free for the foreseeable future, but will also begin a rider rewards program to boost support for local businesses along the route. “The fare-free pilot and rider benefits program provides people an incentive to see firsthand that the QLINE is a reliable and comfortable way to move throughout the Woodward corridor,” streetcar operator M-1 RAIL’s president Lisa Nuszkowski said in a press release. “M-1 RAIL took significant steps during
Rides on Detroit’s relaunched People Mover will be free for the first 120 days.
the pandemic pause to deliver better service and with more improvements on the horizon, our team feels optimistic about the future.” Some participating retailers in the rewards program include House of Pure Vin, who’s offering a $10 credit with a purchase of a $25 drink ticket, and Carhartt, who’s offering 15% off the Carhartt at Work Program for all riders. Instructions to enroll in the rewards program are located inside the QLine streetcars. For more information on the QLine, see the updated website at qlinedetroit. com. —Alex Washington
Last-minute court order saves homeowners from tax foreclosures
A judge last week accepted Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree’s request to halt tax foreclosures for many owner-occupied homes. Sabree petitioned the 3rd Circuit Court to prevent foreclosing on houses that owe delinquent taxes from 2017 to 2019, citing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Delinquent homeowners now have until March 31, 2023 to make good on their taxes. “Our number one priority remains keeping people in their homes and too many Wayne County taxpayers are still suffering significant economic hardship due to the COVID-19 crisis,” Sabree said in a statement. “We also know that while many have applied for property tax relief from certain programs, they needed more time to compile appropriate paperwork. So, we continue to make some allowances considering the
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pandemic.” About 1,800 owner-occupied houses were on the foreclosure list for delinquent taxes between 2017 and 2019, and most of them are in Detroit. The judge’s order does not impact homes where homeowners are delinquent on taxes prior to 2017. Sabree’s office has been encouraging delinquent taxpayers to take advantage of the Michigan Homeowners Assistance Fund (MIHAF), which provides relief to people who have a qualified financial hardship. Anyone who is eligible and fills out the paperwork will have their homes removed from the foreclosure list. “It’s important that individuals still apply because through MIHAG, it can not only eliminate back property tax debt, but also halt the accrual of interest,” Sabree said. “Our hope is that a significant number of Wayne County residents will qualify for this relief.” —Steve Neavling
Ralph Godbee exits congressional campaign for 13th District
Former Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. has suspended his campaign for the newly drawn 13th Congressional District, saying there are too many candidates who could split the Black vote. “In an election cycle as truncated as this one is proving to be, I have enough support to split the African-American vote or siphon off votes that could be codified behind a consensus candidate,” Godbee said in the statement. Godbee said he hopes other candidates “will consider putting the need to have Black representation above their
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own ambitions.” Godbee was among 10 Democrats vying for the seat that covers much of Detroit, Hamtramck, the Grosse Pointes, and northern downriver communities. A recent survey by Public Policy Polling last week shows that Godbee ranked sixth among potential candidates in the race, with 5% of the vote. John Conyers III, the 31-year-old son of the late U.S. Rep. John Conyers, led the survey with 19% of the vote. Former Detroit City Councilwoman Sharon McPhail came in second at 9%, followed by state Rep. Shri Thanedar at 7%. Detroit schools board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo and state Sen. Adam Hollier both garnered 6%. FOCUS: Hope CEO Portia Roberson had 4%. Also running are Adrian Tonon, a businessman and the city of Detroit’s first nightlife ambassador, and attorney Michael Griffie. “When I announced my candidacy for the 13th District Congressional seat, I did so with the noblest of intentions,” Godbee said. “Noble intentions must however be paired with a level of maturity to understand whether your presence can add value to a campaign or be divisive.” Godee serves as chief of staff for Triumph Church. He said he plans to endorse a candidate in the future. The 13th District is open because incumbent U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, decided to run in the newly created 12th District, which includes parts of west Detroit, Dearborn, and Southfield, following the redrawing of congressional boundaries. The primary is set for Aug. 2. —Steve Neavling
metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
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NEWS & VIEWS Informed Dissent
Fox News is gaslighting America effre
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What I most clearly recall from the media ethics class I took as an undergrad — yes, there was such a thing, and yes, this was two decades ago — was the idea that the media can’t tell you what to think, but it can tell you what to think about. (There was also a block about the outrageous profits newspaper companies made, but that no longer seems relevant.) To put that another way: Journalists are gatekeepers of which issues are deemed important and which perspectives are presented to the public — which is why we should seek out underrepresented voices rather than, say, camping out at a diner in rural Michigan to ask about cancel culture, but I digress. On second thought, that’s not a digression. Throughout the last century, powerful publishers and television news producers too often failed to elevate the perspectives of those who didn’t look or think like them. (That’s why alternative newspapers propagated in the 1950s and ’60s.) But the gatekeepers could also sideline kooks and conspiracy theorists and charlatans — which, when I’m doomscrolling Twitter, seems not so bad. The landscape changed when Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996, and then with the internet’s democratization of media and the proliferation of social media. Journalists’ gatekeeper function is limited. A big e or imes story can drive the national conversation, but so can some idiotic dreck from the il ire. So, my point? On Sunday, political scientists from Yale and UC-Berkeley published a remarkable — and disturbing study about the effects of partisan media. They took regular Fox viewers and bribed them to watch CNN for a month, during September 2020. “Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views,” they write.
Researchers bribed Fox News viewers into changing the channel. You won’t believe what happened next.
“How can a voter hold a politician accountable for an act of malfeasance if they do not know it occurred?” And here’s the kicker: “Partisan media does not only present its side an electoral advantage — it may present a challenge for democratic accountability.” No shit, you say. But the experiment showed why partisan media is so pernicious and effective. Contrary to common perception, people — even hyper-political people who watch cable news — can change their minds when exposed to new information. If those who are consistently fed white nationalism (Tucker Carlson) or dead-eyed propaganda (Sean Hannity) watched responsible, fact-based reporting for a period of time, at least some of them would rethink their positions. During the experiment, CNN focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, including Donald Trump’s lackluster response to the crisis. Fox, on the other hand, barely covered the pandemic, and when it did so dismissed its severity. Instead, Fox obsessed over racial issues and “provided extensive information about [Joe] Biden and other Democrats’ supposed positions on them and about outbreaks of violence at protests for racial justice in American cities,” the researchers write. Think about that: Two months before the election, conservatives were being told that the most pressing issue the country faced wasn’t the virus that
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was killing thousands of people a day while the president denied it was a big deal, but outbreaks of vandalism at Black Lives Matter rallies. (The reason people were marching didn’t seem as important.) This messaging, which is designed to appeal to racial animus, is then reinforced by social media feeds that allow users to avoid engaging with anything that looks like an opposing view. And we wonder why conservatives are suddenly foaming at the mouth about critical race theory and trans kids in schools. For conservatives, Fox News is the agenda setter. Unfortunately, its agenda serves a strictly partisan purpose. It’s not just that Fox gaslights: “Even though Fox News never explicitly stated that Biden supported cutting police funding, it strongly implied this, and [experiment participants] who were assigned to continue watching Fox were more likely to believe this.” Fox has also engaged in what the researchers call partisan coverage filtering “selectively reporting information attering to its ideological side.” To be clear, MSNBC does this, too, though MSNBC is nowhere near as in uential among Democrats as Fox is among Republicans. The researchers argue that CNN did as well, generally
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reporting things less favorable to Donald Trump — though I would counter that, in September 2020, most objective reporting would be unfavorable to Donald Trump. I’ve thought a lot lately about how the right often seems to be living in a parallel universe — how conservatives believe the economy is in ruins and schoolteachers are indoctrinating children into interracial orgies or whatever — just as I marveled, during the lowest moments of the Trump administration, at how otherwise intelligent people could buy the snake oil he was selling. As the researchers note, this presents a problem for our democracy: “Fox News largely did not inform viewers of Trump’s failure to protect the U.S. from the COVID-19 outbreak, whereas CNN extensively did so. … How can a voter hold a politician accountable for an act of malfeasance if they do not know it occurred?” The rub, as always, is what to do about it. Bribing millions of people not to watch Fox probably isn’t feasible. The researchers tease the prospect of government regulation, but the First Amendment likely has something to say about that. And moral outrage and even advertiser boycotts won’t matter so long as Fox commands the kind of ratings that allow it to command huge sums from cable companies. So now we’re stuck with a powerful gatekeeper that profits from abandoning any pretense of journalistic responsibility. et more t illm
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NEWS & VIEWS
A Black woman with impeccable credentials was nominated to the Supreme Court — and that institution’s gatekeepers nearly flipped the table. Sound familiar? LLOYD DEGRANE, WIKIMEDIA CREATIVE COMMONS
The Incision
KBJ and CRT By Abdul El-Sayed
Ketanji Brown Jackson
graduated among the top of her class at Harvard University. Not once, but twice. She practiced law for two decades and was nominated to the federal judiciary and approved by the U.S. Senate. Not once, but twice. Beyond the intellectual credentials to occupy a seat on the court, she’s unique in having demonstrated the moral credentials. She spent two years as a public defender, defending not only those too poor or too odious to have paid representation, but our very constitution. After all, federal public defenders are government employees who put action into the words of the Sixth Amendment — the right to “have the assistance of counsel” for their defense. Since President Biden nominated Jackson, it’s been clear that she’s had the votes to be approved for a seat on the highest court of the federal
judiciary. And yet Republican senators wouldn’t let her pass without humiliating, interrupting, and jeering her throughout the three-day ordeal of her nomination hearings. There was Josh Hawley who brought his obsession with child pornography to the hearings, cherrypicking her opinions to accuse Judge Jackson of being soft on child predators — despite the fact that her sentencing is in line with her peers on the bench. Even the conservative National Review thought Hawley went too far, writing, “the implication that she has a soft spot for sex offenders’ who prey on children”’ because she argued against a severe mandatory-minimum prison sentence for the receipt and distribution of pornographic images is a smear.” There was Lindsey Graham who used the hearings as an opportunity to label Judge Jackson a terrorist sympathizer for daring to do her job as a federal public defender and represent detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In one telling exchange, Graham interrupted the judge several times to say that he thought that Guantanamo detainees should “die in prison” — endorsing a policy of indefinite detention in contravention to international law and basic
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human rights. Finally, there were Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn. Ted Cruz took his time to review several books about anti-racism that he clearly never read. At one point he asked Judge Jackson if she thought that babies were racist. Marsha Blackburn asked if it was Judge Jackson’s “personal hidden agenda to incorporate [critical race theory] into our legal system?” There’s a brutal irony to all of this. The proto-fascist right pans critical race theory to mean that all white people are racist. They leverage this caricature to foment and justify racist policy. As I’ve written in the past, critical race theory isn’t about individuals — it’s about institutions and policies. It’s about how racism too often excludes Black and brown folks from access or equal treatment. In that context, consider the spectacle that the GOP and its apologists created around the nomination hearings of the first lack woman ever to be nominated to the land’s highest court. Her credentials were questioned. An all-white crowd of senators questioned her loyalty to our country, asked if she had a “personal hidden agenda,” and dragged her reputation through the mud.
If critical race theory is about Black folks being denied from institutions of power, the GOP did more to prove the central tenets of CRT than anything Judge Jackson has ever said or done. These histrionics were calculated specifically to dial into a niche set of grievances pumped and promulgated by the extreme right that don’t even bear repeating. Yet in making such a spectacle of their opposition, Republican senators inadvertently exemplified what they claim to oppose. A hypercapable Black woman was nominated for access to one of the country’s most powerful institutions, and the gatekeepers of that institution did all they could to deride her and keep her from entry. It serves a powerful message both about why Judge Jackson’s inevitable seat on the Supreme Court is so crucial — and about how institutions operate to keep people like her out of them. In that respect, Republican senators may have done more to make the argument for critical race theory than any of the books they waved around. Originally published Mar 30 in The Incision. Get more at abdulelsayed. substack.com.
metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
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FEATURE
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The message is loud and clear: Detroiters overwhelmingly demand them. Now what? By
Eli
Day
The most popular choice on Detroit’s 2021 ballot
wasn’t the candidate you probably expected. In fact, it wasn’t a candidate in the traditional sense at all. It was an idea. When they hit the polls last November, Detroit voters overwhelmingly approved Proposal R, which will now establish “a reparations committee to make recommendations for housing and economic development programs that address historical discrimination against” Black Detroiters. With 72,490 yes votes (80.1%), Proposal R edged out Mayor Mike Duggan’s 69,353 (75.6 %), making it the top vote-getter in an otherwise sleepy election. But as governments across the nation begin to weigh how private and public sector discrimination have looted Black communities while enriching white communities — from Asheville, South Carolina and Evanston, Illinois, to the states of New York and California, whose task force just decided that only “Black Californians who can prove a direct lineage to enslaved ancestors” will be eligible for reparations — it’s no surprise that the country’s Blackest big city has also found its way to the conversation. “Folks are ready for reconciliation and atonement,” says Denzel McCampbell, a community advocate, aide for U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and former Detroit Charter Revision Commissioner who unsuccessfully ran on the November 2021 ballot for City Clerk. Ready, he says, “for the city’s institutions and the folks who have been in city government” to finally come clean and repair the
A protester in Detroit marches with a sign in support of reparations. MARC KLOCKOW
damage done by creating such “a racially segregated region.” Several questions now loom over Proposal R’s victory. Why reparations? What would they accomplish? Are cities the best vehicles for achieving those things? And if so, what is the path for racial and economic justice in Detroit, a city whose history of fiercely enforced segregation is now colliding, and weaving together, with the spiraling inequality of its so-called revival? The moral questions at the heart of this debate echo much older and newly electrified ones about the foundations of both this country’s and city’s prosperity: What, and most importantly who, was destroyed in order to achieve that prosperity? And what do we owe to those still living through, as Malcolm X put it in his speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” “an American nightmare”?
The basic case for reparations In their recent book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen argue for reparations based on “three phases of injustice: slavery, American apartheid (Jim Crow), and the combined effects of present-day discrimination and the ongoing deprecation of Black lives.” We can illustrate these phases with a simple timeline:
metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
15
It’s a simple and powerful idea: something terrible has happened and we should do everything in our power to fix it. slave labor camps ruled the South for 250 years. Following that, and outside the brief glow of genuine multiracial democracy during Reconstruction, the freedom that followed was almost worse than nothing. The Confederacy was officially beaten, but by 1877 Southern slave aristocrats were back in power as if the war had never happened. Newly freed Black people weren’t only abandoned by the federal government. They weren’t even left to figure things out on their own, which would have been a sad improvement on what actually happened. Instead, they were terrorized into submission through 100 years of lack Codes and Jim Crow tyranny. Historian Douglas Blackmon has famously called the system of sharecropping and convict leasing that reigned during those years “slavery by another name.” It was only after the civil rights movement muscled the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress that the United States could even halfseriously be called a real democracy. But as the authors argue, even that may be too generous. Mountains of research show that discrimination and exploitation of poor, working-, and middle-class Black people continues to touch every aspect of American life, soaking into policing, housing, health care, and corporate offices everywhere. Put simply: it’s still open season on Black people and their pockets. As Nathan Robinson points out, these inequities in wealth, health, housing, and education have “lasted continuously from the time of slavery to the present day,” showing that elite white Americans have basically “exchanged Black lives for a pile of gold.” Detroit, with its Black majority, is one of the many places where the “three phases of injustice” all crash into each other. “Taken collectively,” Darity and Mullen write, “they are impossible to ignore.”
Why Detroit? Darity and Mullen make a powerful case that Black Americans, wherever they are, deserve reparations based on these three criteria. Detroit is an illuminating example. We don’t have to look hard to see how each phase slams into the next, and how devastating the impacts have been for the population. To start with the obvious, first phase: Black Detroiters are overwhelmingly descendants of the forced laborers who built the foundations of this nation’s
incredible wealth. And most of us are only one or two generations removed from the second phase, Jim Crow and Southern apartheid. Toward the end of that phase, between 1910-1970, millions of ordinary Black people undertook hopeful and uncertain journeys on the Great Migration northward. Importantly, this isn’t ancient history, or even the distant past. Many of our parents and grandparents hopped on the first trains they could to escape the nightmares of Southern agriculture, only to be boxed into cramped, deteriorating slums when they arrived North. I recently spoke with Willie Smith Jr., an 81 year-old Arkansas native who moved to Michigan at 18 to find work. Smith is the son of former sharecroppers, a word that hides a brutal system of debt bondage that entangled mil-
Smith grew up in “the Emmett Till era in the South,” he tells Metro Times. “We knew where we stood. Any treatment that you might think of … we experienced it.” But he also doesn’t have any glowing nostalgia for the North. “I saw just as much discrimination in Flint as I did in Pine luff,” he says while recounting his Michigan years. “I heard the word nigger more there than I did in Pine luff That’s why I was not reluctant to come back to Arkansas.” Smith’s story is illuminating on multiple levels. First, it shows that targeted reparations for the descendants of oppressed people is doable, and in fact, has already been done. Second, it serves as another reminder that we’re talking about very recent events and their ramifications. Plus, it underscores
White wealth towers above Black wealth, with the typical white family worth about eight times the typical Black one. lions of Black farmers deep into the 20th century. After his mother remarried, she and Smith’s stepfather became independent farmers. Decades later, in 2010, Smith and his siblings received what could be called a small reparations payment because of discrimation his family, and countless others, faced from the federal government. For Smith, it began in 1998. He had just retired from Consumers Energy after 35 years, and decided to move back to Arkansas. “I bought a farm and I worked on that farm for the pleasure of it,” he says. He also wanted to spend what precious time he could with his mother. “My mother came to me and asked me if I’d heard that money was available for Black farmers for discrimination. I told her no, and she said ‘I’d like for you to check into it.’” After navigating a dizzying verification system, Smith and his siblings eventually received a $25,000 payout from the U.S. government as part of the landmark Pigford v. Glickman settlement, a class-action lawsuit alleging that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) discriminated against African-American farmers as it handed out loans and assistance between 1981 and 1996.
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that when it comes to Black welfare, the alleged differences between Northern and Southern life have mostly been utter delusions. To this day, Black Detroiters face a totally lopsided terrain of residential, employment, health, and economic pain. In 2020, then Council President Pro Tem Mary Sheffield sponsored a reparations resolution echoing this painful history. “The Detroit City Council,” the resolution states, “strongly supports reparations for centuries of human enslavement and post-emancipation systemic discrimination and racism.” A follow-up report from the City’s Legislative Policy Division hammered this point too, citing “enslavement,” along with “Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement … as well as national policies like redlining through mortgage discrimination, de facto segregation … and today’s racial injustices continuing right up to the present moment after the murder of George Floyd, the Flint River scandal and water shut offs in Detroit.” It’s the combination of these second and third phases — the recent and ongoing robbery and persecution of Black communities — that add enormous
weight to reparations claims in places like Detroit. So we should look a little more closely here, beginning with housing. Throughout the 20th century, residential segregation was national policy. In the post-World War II boom, public housing agencies gave out generous mortgage guarantees in white communities while denying them in Black ones. In order to seal the deal, racial zoning and restrictive neighborhood covenants kept white homes in white hands. These communities clung to their benefits fiercely. Vigilantes in “sundown towns” like Warren, the Grosse Pointes, Birmingham, and others zealously guarded their borders for decades. If a Black family tried to cross the invisible but nearly immovable color line, riots, shootings, and bombings were known to follow. With “no other choice, no other place to go,” as one advocate put it in a 1973 Congressional testimony, private developers, realtors, and bankers were free to exploit poor and working-class Black people. Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor details this and more in her book ce or ro t: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. The public sector rightfully gets a bad rap for advancing housing segregation. But as Yamahtta-Taylor explains, housing officials were following the blueprint of the private real estate industry, which ran realtors who broke the color line out of business and made a killing offering atrocious housing at insane prices to desperate Black families in a vast “conspiracy to defraud poor Black buyers.” Yamahtta-Taylor cites a Free Press article from 1972, in which one eastsider described appalling living conditions, from “rat infestation to holes in the ceiling.” As Steve Neavling has covered extensively for Metro Times, these neighborhoods “became magnets for industrial polluters, where factories continue to spew harmful emissions.” And like other Black cities across the country, historic and cherished Detroit communities like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were decimated by interstate highway construction in the 1950s and ’60s. As Rev. JoAnn Watson, a Professor at Wayne County Community College District and former councilmember, put it in an email to Metro Times, “350 Black Businesses catalyzed prosperity, ownership, employment
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Supporters of reparations protesting in Washington, D.C.
and commerce in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley until the Eisenhower Freeway Expansion uprooted businesses, residents, and land ownership.” Cheered by many in seats of power, the freeway represented an “economic/cultural upheaval that decimated Detroit’s Black Economy,” Rev. Watson adds. “Reparations should provide recompense and acknowledgment of a debt long overdue.” To be clear then: Detroit’s once chalky-white suburbs, and the highways that led there, were really just an enormously effective welfare program that Black people were excluded from. The outcome was devastating: Black families were locked into crumbling ghettos with pitiful city services, and robbed of both decent housing and the wealth building opportunity that housing supposedly represents for generations. And on top of this, as political scientist Ira Katznelson explains in e rm ti e ctio s ite, Black people were shut out of many of the New Deal’s admirable and vital social welfare benefits despite being taxed like everyone else. Plainly put, this was
SHUTTERSTOCK
Black Detroiters are overwhelmingly descendants of the forced laborers who built the foundations of this nation’s incredible wealth. And most of us are only one or two generations removed from the second phase, Jim Crow and Southern apartheid. a massive heist of Black wealth. Importantly though, the nightmare didn’t stop just because the 1968 Fair Housing Act ended official segregation. Remember the Great Recession? One of Yamahtta-Taylor’s key insights is that these Black neighborhoods’ poor condition “became the basis on which new lenders … could still continue to treat lack homeowners differently.” lack neighborhoods blocked from developing housing wealth and robbed of what little savings they had in the 20th century became the infamous “subprime” neighborhoods of the early 2000s. This was done deliberately and enthusiastically. Former Wells Fargo employees revealed that the bank’s
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loan officers referred to lack families as “mud people,” and tricked them into subprime lending they called “ghetto loans.” During this time, a Center for Responsible Lending study found that Black borrowers with a credit score of 660 and up were more than three times as likely to get a subprime loan than white borrowers with the same score. The housing bubble and the crash that followed blew up the global economy. And because of the racist con games of banking and real estate “vampire squid,” as Matt Taibbi once called them, Black communities were more combustible than others. According to researchers from Brandeis University, “half the collective wealth of African-
American families was stripped away during the Great Recession.” Decades of already thin progress were pounded to dust. This was especially agonizing for places like Detroit, where one-third of properties have been foreclosed on since 2008. Since 2000, “a wave of foreclosures, and an increase in vacancy” has wiped out “a substantial amount of wealth across the city,” according to a recent Detroit Future City report. The systemic problems persist. On Saturday, Jan. 22, more than 700 people attended a Virtual People’s Forum hosted by the Coalition for Property Tax Justice. It’s an unbelievable turnout, until you realize how horrifically
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real and widespread the pain is that brought them together. As law professor Bernadette Atuahene details in a study rightly titled “Predatory Cities,” one in four Detroit properties were foreclosed on between 2011 and 2015 after failing to pay “systematically and illegally in ated” property tax bills, equalling more than 100,000 homes and incalculable human suffering. In response, the Coalition for Property Tax Justice is demanding a Compensation Ordinance that forces the city to “right the wrongs of its past” and “pay back” the “illegally in ated property taxes that have robbe d Detroit homeowners of $600 million.” “We know that the city can put something together and give us back what they took from us,” Sonja Bennet said at the forum. Bennet is a Community Legal Advocate with Detroit Justice Center, and got involved after learning that her own foreclosure was unconstitutional. “We’re not here today just to talk. We are here to make sure that the city makes it right.” It’s a simple and powerful idea: something terrible has happened and we should do everything in our power to fix it. The argument is so clear and morally undeniable that Mayor Duggan was forced to respond at a press conference days later. Within hours, the coalition was ready with their own. Citing data that property values across the city rose 31% last year, the mayor argued, “A lot of families are far better off than they were ust a few years ago. One end of the city to the other, we saw property values grow.” He added, “Home values in nearly every neighborhood are rising and helping to build new wealth, without significant tax increases. These numbers show that while there is still a lot of work to do, the city’s revitalization has reached nearly every corner of our city.” Duggan was in apparent disbelief that anyone could view rising home values with anything but enthusiasm, despite the fact that this means little to the majority of Detroiters who now rent, and the tens of thousands who were illegally evicted and will never get to swim in the money pool of the mayor’s imagination. Calling out the mayor’s “bold-faced lies,” Bernadette Athuahene, a professor of law at Chicago-Kent College, responded that publicly available data shows that Detroiters still face “a situation … where the lowest value homes are being illegally assessed.” She also described Duggan’s use of average home values as “fancy footwork” to make the mayor look good and distract from the underlying reality. “Averages look good, but that’s because the higher values are being under-assessed
Mayor Mike Duggan touts new development at his 2022 State of the City address.
“It’s reparations or bust for me now,” says Lauren Hood, a native Detroiter and a member of the unofficial steering committee for Proposal R’s public outreach. and the lower values are being overassessed,” she said, adding, “this is what we call regressivity,” which is inconvenient for the political and business elite aggressively branding the city’s so-called comeback as one that lifts all boats equally. “These kinds of disingenuous moves had me heartbroken, because the people of Detroit deserve more,” she said. So it isn’t hard to see how racism continues to strangle Black well-being. Wealth tells the story pretty clearly. White wealth towers above Black wealth, with the typical white family worth about eight times the typical Black one. (And as the People’s Policy Project points out, that wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the very richest white people. Translation: this bleak situation requires “tackling both racial and class inequality simultaneously.”) Meanwhile, Black poverty and unemployment have doubled the national average for generations. And it’s
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even more grim in Detroit, where a third live in poverty and at least 11 percent of Black residents remain unemployed. In more human terms, 48 percent of Detroit’s families don’t have access to enough food. And most sinister of all, the neighborhood you live in can subtract decades from your life. Residents in some Detroit neighborhoods can expect to live 20 years less, on average, than residents 20 miles northwest in posh West loomfield ones, 67.8 years compared to 87. At the same time, the city’s leadership continues to faithfully shovel massive tax breaks to corporate giants and private developers, leaving little for the general welfare of everyday Detroiters. During the pandemic, while thousands of Black Detroiters have died who wouldn’t have in a more equal country, the city’s wealthiest oligarch has seen his net worth rise more than $40 billion. Nowadays, one of two explanations is given for why Black communities can’t
CITY OF DETROIT, FLICKR
catch a break. In the first version, racism is terrible, of course, but Black cultural dysfunction is what’s really devouring Black communities from the inside out. You can hear this story from conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Andrew Sullivan, and softer but still quite disturbing traces of it from liberals like Joe iden. If lack pain is the result of the community’s moral slide to hell, the country can conveniently shake its head and whisper “what a shame.” But what if that misfortune is what happens when a slave empire transforms into an agrarian apartheid hell? And when the most important decisions in a deeply segregated and unequal country, in which the easiest way to get paid is by exploiting the least powerful, are made by profit-driven corporations and their trusty sidekicks in office If this version is correct, then the voices above are either horribly misguided or lying. And it points undeniably and unmistakably toward reparations. Lauren Hood, a native Detroiter and a member of the unofficial steering committee for Proposal R’s public outreach, highlights the importance of “starting with an acknowledgment … having government and institutions say we did something wrong,” she tells Metro Times. “And that’s why your neighborhood looks like it does. Not because you’re lazy, or incapable, or, you know, inherently bad. But because
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“The comeback story is really focused on the landscape, new businesses and new buildings,” Hood says. “Reparations forces us to consider what’s happening to people.” we did that.” Hood, who is also chair of the City Planning Commission and Director of the Institute for Afro Urbanism, has thought a lot about how unmasking the right culprit forces us to redraw our maps to a better world. As uprisings swept the country following George Floyd’s murder, it dawned on Hood that her work on neighborhood planning studies for “equitable development” were “not going to cut it.” She puts it bluntly: enriching a few Black developers is “not a worthy response to what we just saw happen … It’s reparations or bust for me now.” Driving the point home, Hood draws a clear line between the happy-go-lucky recovery story told by the city, and what real improvement for average Detroiters requires. “The comeback story is really focused on the landscape, new businesses and new buildings,” Hood says. “Reparations forces us to consider what’s happening to people.”
The history of the reparations movement Calls for reparations began before the South even surrendered. As Darity Jr. and Mullen lay out in From Here to Equality, Black people didn’t imagine the promise of forty acres and a mule. Almost the opposite. All throughout the Civil War, and epitomized in a January 1865 meeting in Savannah, Georgia, between Union General William T. Sherman and 20 Black leaders, Black people were demanding some version of land and wealth redistribution from the collapsing slave empire. Led by Reverend Garrison Frazier, the group put it plainly: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn and till it by our own labor,” Frazier told Sherman. After all, unpaid Black labor had been the main engine of U.S. economic prosperity, enriching not only the slave labor camps in the south, but also Northern businessmen, investment bankers, and railroad barons who depended on cotton and unpaid labor to make their fortunes. For free and enslaved Black people, as well as the abolitionist movement and Radical Republicans in Congress, it made obvious sense that some slice of confiscated Confederate lands should be handed over to the
people who made them profitable in the first place. And it happened. Sherman’s Field Order No. 15, which specified roughly 5.3 million acres of land for Black resettlement, but only allotted roughly 400,000, lasted about two seconds before it was snuffed out by President Andrew Johnson. If you blinked, you missed it. But it’s important to note that a form of reparations was in fact dangled, promised, and snatched away by the federal government. This was one of many “critical forks in the American historical road” they write, where “the wrong path was taken.” In the more than 150 years since, Black people, through civil society and mutual aid organizations, have doggedly pursued reparations through every imaginable means, including pleas to white church and civil institutions, class action lawsuits, and local, state, and federal legislation. This history marched right up to the doorstep of Black Detroit. Or rather, Black Detroiters marched on history. In spring 1969, civil rights activist James Forman and the militant members of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers chose Detroit as the place to introduce their “Black Manifesto,” taking over, as Historian Robin Kelley put it, “a liberal community development conference” to present their demands for $500 million in reparations. In the decades ahead, famed Detroit realtor and reparations champion Raymond “Reparations Ray” Jenkins helped co-found the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), which is still active today. Rev. Watson — the former co-chair on N’COBRA, whose own lengthy record on pushing for reparations could be the sub ect of his own profile tells Metro Times that Ray’s colorful nickname “was given” to him “by yours truly, when he called into a talk show I hosted” — Wake Up Detroit! on 910 AM Radio Superstation — “every day, 5 days a week, discussing only one topic: reparations.” Jenkins and N’COBRA are widely known for pushing the late Congressman John Conyers to sponsor H.R. 40 in 1989, which he introduced in every Congress that followed for nearly 30 years. With some key differences, H.R. 40 is basically Proposal R’s nationally focused elder. Passed through the Judiciary Committee last year and basically frozen there, H.R. 40 calls for exploring
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reparations at the federal level.
What happens next? It’s the question that haunts every plea for reparations. “You’ve shown me that it makes sense, but how do you propose we do it?” Luckily, everyone from scholars to activists to policy experts have thought hard about this. Darity and Mullen devote the final chapter of their book to examining the soundness of various reparations designs. In the end, they settle on a federal program to close the colossal racial wealth gap as the best option. Using the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, one estimate they cite finds that the mean household gap between Black and white families of four is “about $795,000,” for a “total reparations bill of $7.95 trillion.” In a later piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer, they estimate a price tag of “at least $11 trillion or an allocation of upward of $360,000 to each of 40 million eligible recipients.” This is an unfathomable sum to the average person, but pretty reasonable for a fabulously wealthy nation. For perspective, this is just half the U.S. national income of $21.2 trillion (defined as the amount of money earned within a country in a given year). It’s also worth remembering how easily cannons of money are fired upward in this country. During the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve handed more than $1 trillion to investment banks overnight. And throughout the current plague, they’ve forked over more than $8 trillion in backup to financial giants (twice what went to ordinary people). “Black reparations are not only morally ustified, but practicable,” Darity and Mullen conclude. Critics of reparations like to pretend that advocates don’t have the foggiest idea what they’re doing. In reality, the problem is that there’s an abundance of ideas, but American political leadership lacks the courage to do anything with them. Darity and Mullen go on to offer several ideas for how the money could be distributed (and to whom) under “a portfolio of reparations.” There’s no shortage of options: from direct payments and education endowments to trust funds where money is set aside for eligible Black people to apply for grants to various projects. Importantly, they stress that “for both symbolic and
substantive reasons, an effective program of restitution must include direct payments to eligible recipients.” This is where a clear line can be drawn between federal and local designs. Only the federal government can direct the massive (but manageable) sums of cash we’d need to deliver real reparations. Cities are significantly more restrained in what they can do. For example, the most direct blueprint for what’s possible in Detroit comes from Evanston, Illinois, where the local government became the first in the United States to approve reparations. Passed last March, the plan provides housing grants up to $25,000 with funds from cannabis sales to qualified residents. While many residents and national media have been understandably excited about the program, there’s been heavy criticism of the plan from within Evanston’s Black community. Activists argue that the sum from cannabis sales is, essentially, unreliable chump change. They’ve also echoed Darrity and Mullen’s position that real reparations should come as direct cash payments to the people who’ve been so horrifically mistreated over the course of this country’s history, not as grant money that may ultimately stuff the pockets of the same real estate sharks and investment banks that left them penniless in the first place. Darity and Mullen have criticized the local approach directly. It’s “a good step,” they write about Evanston in a Washington Post piece, but “this is a housing voucher program, not reparations.” They go on to argue that well-intentioned, cash-strapped cities risk drawing “momentum” away from federal programs that can make a real dent in lack suffering. In response, McCampbell points out that “There has been harm done to Black folks on every level of government and in every corner of this country.” But he agrees with Darity and Mullen up to a point. “The federal government has the most ability to provide reparations,” he says. Still, “that does not absolve the city of Detroit” or the state of Michigan from responsibility for accelerating and intensigying Black pain. Instead, he says, “I would argue that every level of government in this country should be providing reparations.” At this time, Detroit is considering a similar path to Evanston, with housing grants reportedly on the table. But it’s
way too early to say. The City Council still has to appoint the task force, which will then study the issue before making any recommendations. Key decisions about the task force, from its size to the professional backgrounds and racial identities of its members, and how deep their connections to the city run, will ow from the input of everyday Detroiters. According to Hood, this level of participation is vital to ensuring the process includes what Detroiters have eternally lacked: real decision making power. “That’s why Sheffield’s team didn’t really want to be prescriptive,” Hood says. “The resolution says the City Council can just establish it … but they wanted to give people a chance to weigh in” on every “aspect of the process.” On top of that, Hood acknowledges that because “it took us a couple hundred years to get here, it’s gonna take a long time to get us out.” So many Detroiters “are faced with the daily struggle of keeping their water on or keeping food on the table,” Hood says, adding, “There’s a lot of tension between trying to get something done now, so that the public can see that there’s progress, and doing something worthy.” A highly visible and public process shows “people that there is traction and movement.” And as Neavling wrote for Metro Times back in July, “the initiative faces an uncertain future. ” Specifically, “The Michigan Constitution bars the use of tax dollars for racially exclusive purposes. And a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2006 prevents preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity.” But there are things we can say with some certainty, both about Proposal R and its place in a changing city. For one, local officials have already acknowledged that a serious reparations program, one that can actually remedy the economic side of racism’s toll, can only be carried out by the federal government. For them, these local experiments aren’t a substitute. They’re one part of a tightly knit web. Sheffield’s resolution, for example, calls for “a strong and sufficient U.S. federal government program funding commitment to reparations” that is “democratically administered at the local level.” We also know something about the role of ordinary people in this. McCampbell explains that the ultimate success of any reparations plan must take the same route that brought it to the nation’s attention in the first place: grassroots organizing. “We got to make sure that there’s concrete action and teeth … this can’t be a report or proposals that sit there and collect dust,” he says, adding that
there must be “a sustained push on every level” to make sure city leaders carry out the people’s wishes. Proposal R proves that this kind of “organizing works,” McCampbell says. And it has a long, rich history. On the one hand, locally rooted organizations like N’COBRA and the Reparations Labor Union have been pressing the issue for years. Long before any presidential candidates, national press, or local officials paid serious attention to it, the reparations ame was kept alive by dedicated activists. It was those same activists, and wellorganized regular people, who made local and national elites see the writing on the wall. Detroit’s Charter Revision Commission is a shining example. As the body was considering changes to the city’s governing document, they received more than 500 proposals from across the city. After several rounds of community input, these ideas were bundled into Proposal P. P’s vision was sweeping and bold: the progressive package would have established a right to basic human goods like food, water, housing, recreation, and transportation. Notably, Proposal P also included a reparations task force. As I wrote in October, Prop P would have struck a significant blow against the city’s towering racial and economic inequality. The response from corporate and political elites was swift and brutal. Organizers had spent two years talking with residents about their needs and hopes for the city. But they were badly outspent, and ultimately crushed, by a web of Duggan-aligned dark money groups with Orwellian names like “Committee to Protect Detroit’s Future” and “Detroiters Protecting Our Future.” With deep corporate pockets at their disposal, these groups cannibalized the airwaves with vague and meaningless claims that Prop P was a “Problem.” That message was eerie enough to defeat the most serious attempt we’ve seen in generations to make Detroit more equal. It’s also worth mentioning Proposal S, which would have amended the city charter and allowed Detroit citizens to vote on how tax dollars are appropriated, also failed with 53% voting no. Proposal S was also met with stiff opposition, though less severe than P. But for McCambell, none of this erases the undeniable reality at the heart of life in the city, re ected in both Proposal P and R. “I think there is still a tale of two cities in Detroit,” he says. “You wouldn’t have 500 detailed proposals if there was this rosy picture of the city, right? There are deep inequalities that still exist in the city of Detroit. And you will find that folks across the city want more.”
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WHAT’S GOING ON Select events happening in metro Detroit this week. Submit your events to metrotimes.com/calendar. Be sure to check venue websites for COVID-19 policies.
FRI 4/8-SAT 4/ 9 Jack White
Like many of us, rock star Jack White appears to have emerged from the pandemic shutdowns as a bit of a changed man, now sporting a dyed-blue Elvisesque hairstyle and reportedly working with a new team. But while most of us were cooped up inside binging Net ix and playing Nintendo, the Motor City native was busy recording not one but two new full-length solo records — the first of which, Fear of the Dawn, gets released on Friday, while the second, Entering Heaven Alive, drops July 22. If the lead singles are any indication, the former appears to be a louder, more electric and eclectic effort (tracks like “Taking Me Back” and “Fear of the Dawn” see White seemingly cranking his guitar amp to 11, while “Hi-De-Ho” includes a Cab Calloway sample and a feature from rapper Q-Tip) while the latter will be a quieter, more acousticdriven effort (with “Taking Me ack” reprised as a folksier version). White has also named his upcoming tour “The Supply Chain Issues Tour,” which isn’t just a cheeky response to the economic fuckery we’re all experiencing he recently shot a video at his Third Man Records Pressing facility in Detroit, calling on the major labels — Warner Bros., Universal, and Sony — to invest in once again building their own vinyl record manufacturing plants. The tour kicks off in Detroit with double dates at White’s beloved Masonic Temple the Sugar Tradition and Olivia Jean are also on the bill both nights. —Lee DeVito Doors at 6 p.m. on Friday and Saturday at the Masonic Temple; 500 Temple St., Detroit; 313-832-7100; themasonic.com. Tickets start at $50.
FRI 4/8 Arts, Beats + Lyrics
The traveling pop-up Art, Beats, + Lyrics has been celebrating hip-hop and urban art in cities around the country for 17 years and will make it to Detroit for the first time on Friday. The one-day festival features work from more than 50 visual artists, music performances, and lots of booze. The festival is presented by Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey (hence the booze) and is curated by the art
Jack White returns to Detroit on Friday and Saturday to kick off his new tour.
organization Cult Creative. It started out in 2004 as just a local art show in Atlanta and has since grown into a national festival featuring acts like Kendrick Lamar and Snarky Puppy over the years. Friday’s show will feature a performance from Southern rapper Bun B, and art by ArrrtAddict (A A Lisette Correa) and Charly Palmer, who recently did a cover for Time magazine. —Randiah Camille Green Doors open at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 8 and the event goes until midnight; Eastern Market, Detroit. Entry is free, but you must RSVP at artbeatsandlyrics. com. Must be 21 or older to attend.
FRI 4/8-SUN 4/30 Ramadan Suhoor Festival
The Ramadan Suhoor Festival is back after a two-year hiatus, and this year it’s taking over Dearborn’s Fairlane Town Center parking lot with more than 50 food trucks and vendors. The outdoor culinary extravaganza is held in honor of Ramadan, when Muslim practitioners fast from dawn to sunset. As such, the
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festival takes place from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. (worshippers can eat before and after the fasting period each day). “Suhoor” is the meal eaten before sunrise during Ramadan to tide Muslims over during their fast. Though the festival is relatively new, starting in 2018, it draws thousands of people a day from the Midwest and even Canada. And it’s not just frequented by Muslims. Everyone from self-proclaimed foodies to nightowls or those just wanting to learn more about Ramadan are welcome. —Randiah Camille Green The festival goes from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. every Friday and Saturday from April 8 to April 30. There is a $1 entry fee.
SAT 4/9 The Potency Test
In another life, Benjamin Sobczak was a rapper who performed as frontman of the hip-hop group Mice & Musicians. Now he’s a cannabis attorney for the Michigan-based cannabis chain Pleasantrees, but his love of music hasn’t gone away. Sobczak and Pleasantrees are
PAIGE SARA
helping to bring up the next generation of local musicians with the Potency Test, a new battle of the bands-style competition in which the winner earns $5,000 cash and studio time. Participating artists include Pontiac rapper Arie KD, Lansing rapper Kwaj, Battle Creek singer-songwriter Sam Luna, Detroit hardcore band Adventurer, Brighton rock band V*A*S*E*, and Kalamazoo singer-songwriter Grace Theisen. The six acts will be judged by three guest judges: “White Boy” Rick, the former teenage FBI informant who was recently freed from prison, whose story has been told as a Hollywood movie and an Eminem cameo on Starz show BMF, and who also launched his own cannabis brand, The 8th Chad Nicefield, frontman of rock band Wilson and Pontiac City Councilwoman Melanie Rutherford, who is also a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. All proceeds will also go to charity. —Lee DeVito Event starts at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 9 at the Crofoot Ballroom; 1 S. Saginaw St., Pontiac; 248-858-9333; thecrofoot. com. Tickets are $5.
4/24 CAVETOWN
w/ Tessa Violet & Addison Grace LOW TICKETS
4/29 LEWIS BLACK: OFF THE RAILS JUNE 5
COLIN JOST
JULY 22
BANKS
4/30 SEVENDUST
w/ All Good Things, Plush, DEEPFALL
W/LAUREN JAUREGUI
5/1 5/7
5/8
APRIL 19
ROYAL BLOOD
APRIL 27
KALEO
W/ BONES OWENS
MIKE. INTERPOL
w/ Tycho and Matthew Dear
ACTION BRONSON, EARL SWEATSHIRT, THE ALCHEMIST, BOLDLY JAMES
5/10 SIMPLE PLAN & SUM 41 w/ Set It Off
5/11 JAMES ARTHUR w/ Nina Nesbitt
5/13 RYAN HURD
w/ Morgan Wade
5/14 TECH N9NE
w/ Joey Cool, X-Raided, Mayday!
MAY 3
AN EVENING WITH STEVE HACKETT
MAY 6
JESSE MCCARTNEY
5/20 THE OFFSPRING w/ Blame My Youth
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MUSIC A second act for the Blue Bird Inn
The Detroit Sound Conservancy hopes revitalizing a legendary jazz club could be a catalyst for new development on the west side — and highlight all Motor City music By Lee DeVito
Detroit’s historic Blue Bird
Inn has a new lease on life. Once a jazz venue where legends like John Coltrane and Miles Davis performed, by the early 2000s the building at 5021 Tireman Ave. on Detroit’s west side was abandoned, and later threatened with demolition. But now, the building’s prospects are looking up. The Detroit Sound Conservancy nonprofit acquired the building in 2019, and it earned a historic district designation from the city in 2020. The DSC put a new roof up late last year, allowing for the nonprofit to move onto the next phase of actually bringing life to the building. “Fully replacing the roof was a huge step for really bringing it back,” Jonah Raduns-Silverstein of the Detroit Sound Conservancy tells Metro Times. How bad was it? “You could see daylight!” adds Michelle Jahra McKinney, also of the DSC. “Not just with the Blue Bird, but with any building that sits, every day is one day closer to kind of its own destruction,” Raduns-Silverstein says. “So the roof in and of itself was a really big step for us.” The roof repair was made possible through an internal fundraising campaign, Raduns-Silverstein says. “We found some great support from some known places, and kind of some unknown places,” he says. Now, the DSC has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $30,000 to bring the project into the next phase. Funds will be matched by a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. To make the vision a reality, the organization has tapped Saundra Little of Quinn Evans Architects. “She’s an award-winning Black woman architect,” McKinney points out. Little’s renderings depict a venue with a café and performance space. McKinney says the DSC could use the space for musical performances, art exhibitions, educational workshops, and other community events. She says the design was the result of many conversations with members
Residents and community partners stand in front of the Blue Bird Inn on Labor Day 2019.
of the community to ask what they wanted in the space. “I think kind of what’s pretty ingenious about the design is this exibility and ability for it to serve many uses, while also becoming Detroit’s only music archive,” Raduns-Silverstein adds. The back of the building will house the Detroit Sound Conservancy’s library, which includes books and other documents about Detroit’s many contributions to the world of music. So the new Blue Bird Inn won’t only be a jazz space. “Our organization is cross-genre,” McKinney says. “I think it’s probably going to mainly be jazz and blues, but we got Motown right down the street, all kinds of Black music … we have techno, and reggae, there’s the African folklore community. There’s so many different communities that would be able to use that archive. … I was hoping that we could develop it into a place where [people from] all the genres felt comfortable coming and experiencing the archives.” “It will surely be a kind of crossgenre, genre-agnostic venue and
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performance space,” Raduns-Silverstein says. “But I think the ethos will probably go back to the kind of legendary jazz days of close listening and intimacy, and peer-to-peer mentoring of the youth, but in terms of kind of the music itself, it will be expanded to any and all music that is being made and performed and enjoyed in the city now.” Raduns-Silverstein says the hope is that the project will be shovel-ready by the end of the year. “The truth is, there’s a lot of pieces that need to fall in place,” he says. The building’s iconic blue exterior will be preserved. The venue’s small Art Deco-style stage has already been salvaged and used by the DSC for on-site activations elsewhere. When the space is ready, it will be returned to the Blue Bird Inn. Otherwise, not much else was left to be rescued. “When you leave a building vacant for 5 to 10 years, every year, and every day, there’s less to salvage,” RadunsSilverstein says. Beyond the building itself, the DSC says the hope is the resurrected Blue
COURTESY OF DETROIT SOUND CONSERVANCY
Bird Inn could help them draw more traffic and development to the community. “They need a grocery store and other stuff there,” Mc inney says. “And something like this, I think, could attract that.” But Raduns-Silverstein sees the project as an important way to preserve Detroit’s musical legacy. “It’s much more about how do we support our culture in a way that can really sustain and have longevity, and usher in the next generation in a way where, you know, kids growing up down the street actually know that techno was invented here, or actually know what the Blue Bird Inn was down the street from where they live,” he says. “We’re so driven by this project because it’s the physical version of this deep commitment to this work, celebrating, advocating, and preserving Detroit music history — the most important innovative music city in the world, yet people in Detroit don’t even know that.” More information about the project is available detroitsound.org/give/bird.
metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
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FOOD A destination hotel restaurant By Jane Slaughter
Hotel restaurants used to
have a bad rep — diners were a captive audience, so management didn’t feel a need to make the food shine. Madam, on a busy downtown corner in the Daxton Hotel, appears to be reversing that disrepute. On my two visits I saw scads of Birminghamites sitting on their coats — not hotel guests but people who’d come from outside to drink and eat, even to see and be seen through the big sidewalk windows. Madam, pronounced Ma-DAHM, is proudly pricey, with entrées $30-$85, pasta $28-$29, vegetable sides $9-$11, desserts $12-$25 and appetizers $16-$22. Even bread is $10. (Remember when it came with your meal, before the carb scares?) I could have used some to mop up Madam’s excellent sauces. Bottles of wine run $38-$5,045. Dishes are uniformly pleasing, from good to fantastic. Service is more than attentive, with tables wiped between courses (thus calling attention to the diner’s sloppiness). A server refolds a napkin left on the banquette while its owner is in the restroom. Giant pillows boost you up to the table. The silverware is gold in color. Mild techno plays. Chef Rece Hogerheide, formerly at Gather in Eastern Market, excels at contrasting textures and at combining a wealth of avors in a way that delights rather than confuses. Let’s start with appetizers, the term Madam’s menu uses rather than something cuter. I couldn’t have been happier with either of the two I tried, both a shareable size. Tuna tartare is silky and matched with crunchy, spaghettilike strands of papaya, dressed with a sweet-tart passion fruit vinaigrette. Then dots of avocado are added for more smooth richness. You might argue that that final touch was not needed raw tuna is already smooth and rich — but Hogerheide knew just when more was more. Mushroom dumplings, one of the most-ordered items, have a Chinese feel, served with pea leaves and dressed with chili oil, not overwhelmingly. Again, a bit of crunch, a bit of vegetable snap, a bit of heat, and tenderness and umami from the mushrooms — it all works together as it’s supposed to. Hogerheide manages to pull off the rare feat of serving non-rubbery octopus, by cooking it sous vide first.
Tagliolini with Calabrian sausage, rapini, pecorino, Fisheye Farms spinach, and pickled pepper.
A long tender tentacle snakes around the plate; the dish is padded with lots of crisp potatoes and a lemony crème fraîche. And I repeat myself: you’ll find more good texture contrasts in a salty plate of housemade tagliolini with sausage, crisp rapini, and spinach. I love the mouth-feel of a good pasta, and it’s enhanced when there’s a little bite as well. Braised scallops are cooked just right — they can lose their singular sea allure when breaded and fried. Mine were served with slightly sweet celery root and parsnip, equal stars of the dish, and a smear of sweet potato. Hanger steak was less successful to our taste, the avor off. It’s served with a confit of piquillo, a sweet pepper. Hogerheide says both “vegetable-forward” dishes and red meat are trending, at Madam and industry-wide. Other protein entrées are beef, chicken, trout, and lamb saddle, the latter being the $85 outlier. The three pastas are meal-size, too, and there are four pizzas for those on a budget. (Though if that’s the case, then why are you at Madam?) Other budget options are
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the very large vegetable sides, fine for a vegetarian’s entrée: cucumber, kale, broccolini, cauli ower, carrots. We scarfed our carrots, served with pepitas and a kicky harissa, and learned they are equally popular with regular diners. All these came from a winter menu that was new in early February — lots of root vegetables. Menus change seasonally. A chocolate sundae is appropriate any time of year, especially this sundae. Chocolate-plus-orange is a timetested combo, but this one was even better with tangerines, a little more tart. It included some house-made gummies with a pleasing texture, not chewy. How do you make a gummy? At Madam, with French fruit purées set with pectin. Almost the entire menu is made in-house, and Hogerheide likes to make his workers’ jobs stimulating: “We try to find absorbing food items to showcase the talents of our team,” he says. Cheesecake is made with Manchego, and comes with a lemon ice cream; the rye crust is another good contrast. Opened April 1 of last year, Madam
TOM PERKINS
Madam 298 S. Old Woodward, Birmingham 248-283-4200 daxtonhotel.com 7 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Sun-Sat, 5-9:30 p.m. Sun-Thurs, 5-10:30 p.m. Fri-Sat Entrées $30-$85 Handicap accessible
has quickly become a local favorite, with 85% of its clients not staying in the hotel; some have standing reservations two or three times a week. Wines north of $250, even $1,000, are routinely ordered. Hogerheide likens his diners to those at the shuttered Townsend, and says Madam is “fortunate to have the luxury of having a well-to-do clientele where we can serve … the best possible product and treat it with the utmost care.” That care includes sourcing from 28 local farmers and joining the Make Food Not Waste program, where every scrap is composted and sent back to a local farm. So order a $25 slice of chocolate cake.
metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
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FOOD Bites
Under new management, Detroit’s Anchor Bar reopens with tweaked menu (again) By Lee DeVito
After changing hands
several years ago, Detroit’s iconic Anchor Bar is still tweaking its menu. The beloved bar announced that it will reopen next month with some new dishes — following similar announcements in 2019 and 2021. After closing for several months earlier this year, Anchor Bar was set to reopen with its new menu on Tuesday, April 5. On Friday, April 8, the bar will also host a “Tigers Opening Day Non-Tailgate” party starting at 11 a.m. with drink specials that will last all month long. According to the bar, new items include a fried chicken sandwich and baked mac and cheese. Those items join old favorites like the Anchor Classic Chop salad, Garbage Can Nachos, Chili and Cheese Whiz Totchos, Tru e Fries, and wings. “The Anchor ar has been a fixture of downtown Detroit’s dining scene for more than six decades and we look forward to reopening and welcoming our guests again,” said Stephanie Prechel, general manager for the bar’s hospitality group the Iconic Collection, in a statement. “The Anchor Bar is the perfect spot for people to gather and experience engaging, inspiring, and real connections, great food, and beverage options, and personal service.” The bar has been a beloved watering hole for both sports fans and journalists over the years, thanks to its proximity to the former Joe Louis Arena and the offices of the Detroit News and Free Press. The Derderian family, which ran the bar for decades, announced it was selling the business in 2018. It was later acquired by The Iconic Group, which also runs the posh Parc in downtown Detroit as well as 220 Merrill and the Rose Room in Birmingham. Anchor Bar reopened in 2019 with a tweaked menu, and then reopened
The beloved Anchor Bar announced it will reopen with some new dishes — following similar announcements in 2019 and 2021. COURTESY PHOTO
again in 2021 with further changes to the menu, following a forced closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The bar then abruptly closed in January, preceding the latest menu tweak. Anchor Bar’s hours of operation are 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Wednesday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, and 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday. It’s located at 450 W. Fort St., Detroit. More information is available at anchorbardetroit.com.
Black-owned Detroit Pizza Bar opens in longabandoned building
A new pizza spot is getting ready to open in a long-abandoned commercial building on McNichols Road. The Detroit Pizza Bar opened for a soft opening from last week. The restaurant plans to officially open for business on Friday, April 8, according to a press release. The $1.3 million Black-owned restaurant was opened with funding from the Strategic Neighborhood Fund, a publicprivate partnership aimed at improving 10 neighborhoods throughout Detroit. “When developing in corridors like Livernois-Six Mile that have traditionally struggled to get funding for projects, the Strategic Neighborhood Fund
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has become an indispensable resource, because they allow both the redevelopment and the stabilization of longforgotten commercial thoroughfares,” Detroit Pizza Bar co-owner Marcus Jones said in a statement. “The SNF has helped my partner Akunna Olumba and I not only open our business but help make a difference on this stretch of McNichols.” The owners say they have created 20 obs, with 100% of the staff Detroit being residents, and 97% of them living within two miles of the restaurant, and plan to hire more. They also say they want to keep as much money in the community, and plan to work with local farmers. Located at 7316 W. McNichols Rd., the 4,500-square-foot spot also has a rooftop terrace for the warmer months. The $150 million Strategic Neighborhood Fund project was announced by Mayor Mike Duggan in 2014 and is led by the nonprofit Invest Detroit and funded through six corporate funders and philanthropic organizations. It initially started in three neighborhoods and has since expanded to all seven of Detroit’s city council districts. “Invest Detroit is thrilled to support Legacy City Group in bringing a great
restaurant and job resource to this neighborhood,” Invest Detroit executive vice president of lending Keona Cowan said in a statement. “Detroit Pizza Bar is a wonderful addition to the redevelopment of this key commercial corridor that is largely being led by some of Detroit’s most talented Black developers and business owners.” The opening comes on the heels of a $7 million streetscape overhaul of McNichols that includes new bike lanes, parking lanes, sidewalks, and other features. A similar project was completed on nearby Livernois Avenue. “We created the Strategic Neighborhood Fund to strengthen neighborhoods and to help revitalize the commercial corridors that serve them,” Mayor Duggan said in a statement. “The business growth we’ve seen on Livernois has been tremendous and with the help of strategic SNF investments in businesses like the Pizza Bar, we are seeing the same thing start to happen along McNichols. I’m so proud of Akunna and Marcus for the incredible transformation they’ve made to their new space.” More information is available at facebook.com/detroitpizzabar. — Lee DeVito
WEED One-Hitters
U.S. House passes cannabis legalization — again By Lee DeVito
Cannabis prohibition is
now quite possibly the closest it has ever been to ending in the United States finally. On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve H.R. 3617, the Mari uana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (MORE) Act. The legislation passed 220 to 204, largely along party lines, with Democrats in support and Republicans opposed. If it passes the Senate, the legislation would remove cannabis from the federal Controlled Substances Act, as well as expunge or resentence incarcerated people with nonviolent cannabis convictions. It’s only the second time in more than 50 years that Congress has voted to repeal cannabis prohibition. In 2020, the U.S. House voted to decriminalize cannabis for the first time in its history, but the effort was stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. Now that the Democrats have a narrow majority in the Senate, the prospects of an end to cannabis prohibition have never been higher, though it isn’t yet fully clear if enough Democrats and Republicans are on board. Senate Ma ority Leader Chuck Schumer of New ork has said cannabis legalization is a top priority, however. The bill was introduced by House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New ork. “Whatever one’s views are on the use of mari uana for recreational or medicinal use, the policy of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration at the federal level has proven both unwise and un ust,” Nadler said in his opening statement. “For far too long, we have treated marijuana as a criminal justice problem, instead of as a matter of personal choice and public health.” While many states, including Michigan, have legalized cannabis for adult use in recent years, an end to federal prohibition would eliminate the con ict between federal and state laws, and open the industry up to bank-
Cannabis enthusiasts at Ann Arbor’s Hash Bash on Saturday. See more photos at metrotimes.com.
ing and the transportation of cannabis across state lines, for example. According to a Congressional udget Office analysis, the passage of the Act would increase revenues by over $8 billion in ten years. Furthermore, a recent Pew Research poll found that the vast ma ority of Americans support cannabis legalization. “This vote is a clear indicator that Congress is finally listening to the vast ma ority of voters who are sick and tired of our failed mari uana criminalization policies and the damage they continue to in ict in communities across the nation every day,” said Morgan Fox, the political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Mari uana Laws. “It is long overdue that we stop punishing adults for using a substance that is ob ectively safer than alcohol, and that we work to address the disparate negative impacts that prohibition has in icted on our most vulnerable individuals and marginalized communities for nearly a century.” Fox added, “The time has come for federal lawmakers to put aside partisan differences and recognize that statelevel legalization policies are publicly popular, successful, and are in the best interests of our country. Now that the House has once again supported sensible and comprehensive cannabis policy reform, we strongly urge the Senate to move forward on this issue without delay.”
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In voicing her support, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan called the war on drugs racist and said that the More Act “is a common-sense bill.” “Colleagues, as someone who grew up in a community on the frontline of the racist so-called war on drugs, I am proud to stand here today and supported the MORE Act to finally decriminalize marijuana and expunge marijuana-related convictions,” she said. “The war on drugs was designed as a project to target our lack and brown communities, and the obvious racial disparities in enforcement show us that it still is, at its core, an effort targeting communities of color through war over-policing, criminalization, and mass incarceration.” She added, “This is a good start on the road to repairing the damage, but we still have work to do. We must be bold. Our goal must be to end the country’s militarized ail first, ask questions later approach to addiction, and to stop trying to solve social problems with more criminalization.”
Hazel Park gets Michigan’s first official cannabis consumption lounge
An events space in Hazel Park says it has officially become Michigan’s first licensed cannabis consumption lounge — a place where patrons can legally smoke or otherwise imbibe in the sweet leaf. The space is owned by Trucenta, a
MT STAFF
company that also runs Hazel Park’s reeze dispensary. It says it plans to open for private events later this month and open to the public later in 2022. “We are honored that Michigan has awarded us the state’s first license for a consumption lounge,” Nowfal Akash, Trucenta’s chief information officer, said in a statement. “Our plan is to first use the space for corporate, social, and special events. Come summer, we’ll start scheduling events so the public can experience Hot ox Social with consumption-friendly activities like social gatherings, educational opportunities, and arts-focused activities.” Akash added, “Our hope is that Hot ox Social will be used to bring a new experience for companies hosting brainstorming meetings, friends who are gathering for private parties, and one-of-a-kind fundraisers to raise money for nonprofit organizations.” Hot ox Social is located at 23610 John R Rd., Hazel Park. The 3,0000-square-foot space includes an indoor lounge and a 5,000-square-foot back patio. The venue says its capacity is approximately 200 people. According to the law, cannabis products must be delivered from a licensed dispensary and used onsite. Hot ox Social says it will have cannabis experts on hand to help guests choose products. Local caterers and food trucks can be brought in for when the munchies inevitably set in.
metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
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CULTURE Three stories of chance collide By George Elkind
No filmmaker I can think of
had a better past year-and-change than Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, an enviable feat in our stricken time. The director and co-writer of Drive My Car, co-writer of the sublime Hitchcockian thriller Wife of a Spy, and solo writer-director of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy has done more and better work through a pandemic than most could manage in a regular decade. With a recent suite of work proving not only deft and sturdy but frequently transcendent, Hamaguchi has displayed an appetite for experimentation across a range of genres, themes, and tones. Where the newly Oscar-winning Drive My Car grappled with the weight of loss, cutting between rehearsals and what could often feel like periods of recovery in between with a severe, even curt editorial hand, Wheel — which plays at the Detroit Film Theatre this Sunday — bears its burdens more lightly. Set up as a triptych whose vignettes cross-pollinate in terms of romantic themes, the film tells dense, literary, and quite modern stories of characters teetering between extremes of longing and hurt, disarming viewers to their workings with a remarkably airy style. Indebted plainly to the most questing, good-humored, and circumspect works of Éric Rohmer, Wheel feels buoyed no matter where its stories go by its light and graceful form. As with Rohmer’s first prolific decades of material, Hamaguchi treats the existential through bright windows into the everyday. Using minimal resources in terms of cast and setting — some three speaking parts per segment, populating easily available shooting spaces like cars, offices, transit systems, and domestic interiors — Hamaguchi’s work here feels purposefully stripped down, forsaking showiness in a manner that atters his own craft. Driven by honed, extended scenes (some easily surpassing twenty minutes) driven solely by dialogue, framing, and performance, the modesty and sense of “dailiness” of each segment’s apparent subjects belie their ability to touch on deeper themes. Take, for instance, the film’s first episode, which opens with Meiko, a plainspoken fashion model (Kotone Furukawa), and her starry-eyed friend, Tsugumi (Hyunri), departing a shoot where
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy Rated: Not rated Run time: 121 minutes
Katsuki Mori in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.
COURTESY PHOTO
Hamaguchi’s work here feels purposefully stripped down, forsaking showiness in a manner that flatters his own craft. they’ve just worked together. Throughout a meandering car ride, Tsugumi opens up to Meiko about a thrilling date she’s had recently with a man who’s expressed to her both his desires for her and a painful romantic history that’s left him hesitant to move forward with her. The conversation, like many in Wheel, dances on the boundary that these sorts of conversations tend to occupy: an overlapping space between the trivial, the real, and the monumental. As much as these sorts of romantic musings could be taken for gossipy nothings (a gendered notion, for what it’s worth), relations that accrue gravity so often begin in just this way. Framing these first glimmers as the subject of breathless, hopeful remarks, the conversation (approached lightly though it is) accrues both a sense of the credible and a potential for import. For it’s a peculiar combination of feelings, this same strain of hope or faith among them, that makes successful romances the life-altering things they are. But over the course of the two friends’ talk, confident-seeming Meiko largely adopts the pose of a listener, patiently plying her eager friend for details. Without spoiling too much, I’ll
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stop at saying she’s hiding something, and that these sort of furtive dynamics undergird the vision of relationships Hamaguchi promulgates across each chapter. Rarely in Wheel are both parties truly open, and so it goes in most first and early meetings. Such negotiations form the bedrock of friendly and romantic intimacy — acts of cautiously opening up, always at some risk. They’re reliant, too, on the presumptive leap that you can trust and know another person as you’d hope. Such guarded dynamics bleed into the second episode, which sees an adult university student, Nao (Katsuki Mori), attempting to seduce her French professor, also a prominent novelist — all at the whims of a casual, on-the-side romantic partner who’s struggled in his course. If that premise sounds juicy or overly courant, it’s approached with an evenhandedness that characterizes all three episodes. Throughout the work, Hamaguchi keeps a steady distance, allowing for an equitable engagement by the viewer with each of the characters in play. Avoiding a moralizing air even when characters (like Nao’s partner) are at their worst, Wheel embraces the presence of chance and accident as
forces which shape its characters’ lives. Freed in this way, he observes the professor’s guarded engagement with Nao’s roundabout advances calmly, treating a fraught situation with a welcome air of reserve. Though hierarchies of both status and information impose themselves on the dynamic, in Hamaguchi’s treatment, these don’t preclude either party’s capacity to move the other emotionally, regardless of where what follows from that may lead. Such power structures (save for a whiff of class) are fairly absent in the last episode of Wheel’s three, which treats two characters who run into each other around a high school reunion. Recalling each other only vaguely, the two women fumble their way through a chance meeting on an escalator, disarmed by faulty attempts at recollection and the wear of years in isolation. In a slippery segment whose terrain is continually upended, structures and both first and recalled impressions seem to fall away, re-casting each person as, at least for a blissful moment, new. In this light, their engagement becomes not about old scores but freeing escapes, and the things they might give one another. Through this halting but never cloying approach to depicting interpersonal connection, Hamaguchi melds an air, or atmosphere, of small diversions with feelings (and sometimes stakes) that are as big as they come. Despite its sense of modesty, Wheel feels by its finish anything but slight on the contrary, it’s a rich, essential, and wholly pleasurable burst of life in a medium and realist genre that could use many more like it. But part of Wheel’s pleasure surely stems from the scarcity of what it offers, giving it the same air of delicate value as any of its chance meetings. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy will be screened at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 10 at the Detroit Film Theatre; 5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit; 313-833-7900; dia. org. Tickets are $9.50 general admission, $7.50 for seniors and DIA members.
LET’S GO TIGERS! OPENING DAY IS FRIDAY APRIL 8th!
WE’RE OPEN @ 11am!
Fri 4/08 TIGERS HOME OPENER @1pm Bar Opens@11AM DJ SKEEZ / DJ BET / DJ NANO (hip hop) Doors @9 $5 Cover Modelo PROMO @5pm
Sat 4/09 BENEFIT SHOW for BRYAN: DETROIT 442 / Macho / Permanently Pissed (punk/hard) Doors @9 $5 Cover
Happy Birthday, Erica Pietrzyk!
Mon 4/11 FREE POOL Tues 4/12 B. Y. O. R. Bring Your Own Records You Can DJ! @ 9pm NO COVER!
Coming Up In April: 4/15 Danny Kroha/The Brown Thrasher 4/16 RICO AFRICA Memorial 4-9pm 4/16 TVOD/Jess X/ Pretty Marty/ Jeremy Wuan 4/17 GREEN EGGS & HAMMS EASTER BEER HUNT 4/19 DANNY OVERSTREET DAY! 4/21 The Burning Suns / Lucas Powell / Kat & The Hurricane / Josie Palmer 4/22 MIZ CORONA album release party 4/23 Rushmore Pass / Super Horndog /Static Factory Weekly Drink Special (M-Th) Jim Beam Shot & 9oz Miller Draft $5 JELLO SHOTS $1
IN LOVING MEMORY Rico Africa 3/9/1964-2/22/22 Celebration of Life: The Old Miami, April 16, 2022 @4pm
The Old
Miami 3930 Cass • Cass Corridor • 313-831-3830 metrotimes.com | April 6-12, 2022
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Savage Love
CULTURE Q:
I am a 29-year-old woman and I have a problem when I have sex or masturbate. I always feel an annoying pain, a stinging sensation in my vulva, at the entrance of the vagina, that does not allow me to enjoy it, as the pain is too overwhelming. Unfortunately, this situation has led me to avoid having sex or masturbating in order not to feel that pain. I have consulted several gynecologists, but no anomaly or infection of any kind has been found. With the last doctor we also talked about a possible psychological component but, apparently, even on this level everything seems normal. Do you or an expert have advice for someone with a problem like mine? —Lost And Baffled Inside America
A : “Vulvodynia, or pain in the vulva,
is unfortunately very common, and it sucks,” said Dr. Rachel Gelman, a clinician, pelvic oor specialist, and author based in San Francisco. “But there are a variety of treatment options and providers that could help LABIA out.” Dr. Gelman says it’s good that you’ve already had infection ruled out as a possible cause. But there are lots of other things that could be going on nerve irritation, in ammation, hormonal imbalance, something genetic — and she urges you not to give up until you find an answer. And while Dr. Gelman is too polite to say it, I’m an asshole, so I’m just gonna blurt it out: it’s shocking that not one of the gynecologists you consulted referred you to a pelvic oor specialist. “The muscles inside the pelvis, aka the pelvic oor,’ and the surrounding musculature can contribute to or cause the pain LABIA is describing,” said Dr. Gelman. “Just like tight muscles in the neck can cause pain in the shoulder, arm, or aw, a tight muscle inside the pelvic oor can cause pain at the opening of the vagina. A pelvic oor physical therapist, like myself, would be able to assess and treat this kind of muscle dysfunction, which would decrease LABIA’s symptoms and get her back to enjoying sex again.” But don’t stop at just getting a referral to a pelvic oor specialist. “Due to the fact that so many systems live inside the pelvis which impact the vulva, several specialists may be needed to investigate and treat the potential causes of LABIA’s pain,” said Dr. Gelman. So, in addition to seeing a pelvic oor specialist, Dr. Gelman recommends you consult with a vulvar specialist. ( ou can find a list of vulvar specialists at the website of the National Vulvodynia
By Dan Savage
Association: go to nva.org, and click on the link to their “health care provider list.”) “A vulvar specialist would be able to perform appropriate tests to tease out what is going on beyond what a general gynecologist may look at,” said Dr. Gelman. “And it’s important to note that the tissue around the vaginal opening is highly dependent on hormones to stay happy and healthy. Certain medications or medical conditions can impact hormone levels, which can in turn impact vulvar tissues and lead to pain. There are also underlying in ammatory conditions that could also be causing this pain.” And even if you don’t have an underlying mental health or psychological condition, LABIA, the pain you’ve suffered along with the resulting sexual deprivation — sounds like a lot, and talking about it with someone could help you reconnect more quickly with your ability to take pleasure in this part of your body again. “The brain is powerful and having vulvar pain or any kind of sexual dys-
were out of her control (her bad day, her seizure) and she’s too embarrassed to answer my texts right now or if she stood me up twice in really shitty ways and used a health crisis as an excuse the second time. I would love to hear your feedback. I have enclosed screenshots of our text messages for your review. —Blatant Lies Or Constant Kerfuffles
A : Hm.
JOE NEWTON
agreed to meet for a drink. On the day of our planned date, I get a text saying, “Hey, I’m having a really bad day o t t t t to e o r rst impression of me, can we reschedule?” That seemed reasonable, so I agreed.
Asking a paramedic to let a date know you’re having a seizure isn’t something a person having a seizure can do because that person is having a seizure. function can be mentally draining which can further exacerbate pain,” said Dr. Gelman. “So, a good sex therapist may also be a helpful ally here. Bottom line, vulvar pain is common and typically requires a team of providers — but help is out there.” Find Dr. Rachel Gelman online at pelvicwellpt.com and on Instagram PelvicHealthSF.
Q:
I’m a young gay man who needs to break up with his boyfriend. I know it, my friends all agree, I even think it’s what he wants. I’ll spare you the messy details. I just need a push. Maybe if you tell me to do it, Dan, I’ll do it. —Just Another Word
A : Marry him. Q:
I’m a man in his 30s in Boston. I just got ghosted and want some advice on how to handle it. I matched with a woman online, also in her 30s, and the conversation seemed good and we
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Later in the week I asked what she is up to on the weekend. I didn’t get a response until late Sunday: “I thought I replied, I’m so sorry!” I took her at her word that it was a mistake, and we rescheduled drinks. The afternoon before our rescheduled date for drinks, te te to co rm ere e e were meeting. We agreed to meet at 7 p.m.. At 6:40 p.m., I got a text from her number: “This is Boston EMS. Gertrude wanted us to let you know she won’t make it to the date.” I responded promptly, asking the paramedic what happened and if Gertrude (not her real name) was alright, and the paramedic re lie t t s e s e ct ll more worried about me than herself. In the evening I get a text from Gertrude saying, “OMG! I’m so embarrassed! I’m so sorry!” She explained she had a seizure. I texted her the following day to ask how she’s feeling, but received no answer. Here is my conundrum. I have no way of knowing for sure if both situations
The text messages Gertrude sent you were far less interesting and far less revealing — than the tiny photo of Gertrude at the top of them. The woman in the photo is conventionally attractive (extremely so: thin, toothy, blond, skinny), and she looks more like a teenage girl than a woman in her 30s. (Indeed, a Google image search on the picture didn’t find a match, but all the “very similar images” that came up were of teenage girls.) So, I’m gonna climb out on a very short and very sturdy limb here, BLOCK, and tell you that the person in the photo isn’t the person you’ve been messaging with. That’s why Gertrude keeps making excuses to call off your dates increasingly ludicrous excuses. I mean, take this paramedic nonsense. Dude. If Gertrude was able to hand her phone to a paramedic and ask that paramedic to find one particular guy in her contacts and then send that one particular guy a message canceling a date then Gertrude was well enough to send you that message herself. And even if sending text messages and canceling dates were services paramedics provided — and they’re not — asking a paramedic to let a date know you’re having a seizure isn’t something a person having a seizure can do because that person is having a seizure. So, yeah. The problem here is not that Gertrude is too embarrassed to respond to your text messages about finally getting together for that drink, BLOCK, it’s that Gertrude is too nonexistent to ever show up for that drink. ou most likely won’t hear from her again, but if you do, it’ll be a request for money. I shouldn’t have to say, “Don’t’ send her money,” but I’m going to say it just in case you’re really as gullible as your letter makes you seem: don’t send her money.
Ask! questions@savagelove.net. Listen to Dan on the Savage Lovecast! Follow Dan on Twitter @FakeDanSavage! Columns, podcasts, books, merch and more at savage.love!
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CULTURE ARIES (March 21-April 19): To provide the right horoscope, I must introduce you to three new words. The first is “orphic,” defined as “having an importance or meaning not apparent to the senses nor comprehensible to the intellect beyond ordinary understanding.” Here’s the second word: “ludic,” which means “playful full of fun and high spirits.” The third word is “kalon,” which refers to “profound, thorough beauty.” Now I will coordinate those terms to create a prophecy in accordance with your astrological aspects. Ready I predict you will generate useful inspirations and energizing transformations for yourself by adopting a ludic attitude as you seek kalon in orphic experiments and adventures.
a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.”
TAURUS: April 20 – May 20 I love your steadfastness, intense effort, and stubborn insistence on doing what’s right. our ability to stick to the plan even when chaos creeps in is admirable. ut during the coming weeks, I suggest you add a nuance to your approach. Heed the advice of martial artist ruce Lee: “ e like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but ad ust to the ob ect, and you shall find
CANCER: June 21 – July 22 In ritain, 70 percent of the land is owned by one percent of the population. Globally, one percent of the population owns 43 percent of the wealth. I hope there’s a much better distribution of resources within your own life. I hope that the poorer, less robust parts of your psyche aren’t being starved at the expense of the privileged and highly functioning aspects. I hope that the allies and animals you tend to take for granted are receiving as much of your love and care as the people you’re trying to impress or win over. If any ad ustments are necessary, now is a favorable time to make them.
GEMINI: May 21 – June 20 Gemini-born basketball coach Pat Summitt won Olympic medals, college championships, and presidential awards. She had a simple strategy: “Here’s how I’m going to beat you. I’m going to outwork you. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.” I recommend that you apply her approach to everything you do for the rest of 2022. According to my analysis, you’re on course for a series of satisfying victories. All you have to do is nurture your stamina as you work with unwavering focus and resilient intelligence.
LEO: July 23 – August 22 TV show creator Joey Soloway says, “The only way things will change is when we’re all wilder, louder, riskier, sillier, and unexpectedly over owing with surprise.” Soloway’s Emmy Awardwinning work on Transparent, one of the world’s first transgender-positive shows, suggests that their formula has been effective for them. I’m recommending this same approach to you in the coming weeks, Leo. It will help you summon the extra courage and imagination you will need to catalyze the necessary corrections and ad ustments. VIRGO: August 23 – Sept. 22 “Find a place inside where there’s oy, and the oy will burn out the pain,” wrote mythologist Joseph Campbell. I don’t think his cure is foolproof. The lingering effects of some old traumas aren’t so simple and easy to dissolve. ut I suspect Campbell’s strategy will work well for you in the coming weeks. ou’re in a phase of your astrological cycle when extra healing powers are available. Some are obvious, and some are still partially hidden. It will be your sacred duty to track down every possible method that could help you banish at least some of your suffering and restore at least some
38 April 6-12, 2022 | metrotimes.com
Free Will Astrology By Rob Brezsny an extreme position to take, but I think it’s the right one for now. Where does your greatest freedom lie How can you claim it What shifts might you need to initiate
JAMES NOELLERT
of your oie de vivre. LIBRA: Sept. 23 – Oct. 22 ou know who Jimi Hendrix was, right He was a brilliant and in uential rock guitarist. As for Miles Davis, he was a Hall of Fame-level trumpeter and composer. ou may be less familiar with Tony Williams. A prominent rock critic once called him “the best drummer in the world.” In 1968, those three superstars gathered in the hope of recording an album. ut they wanted to include a fourth musician, Paul McCartney, to play bass for them. They sent a telegram to the ex- eatle, but it never reached him. And so the supergroup never happened. I mention this in the hope that it will render you extra alert for invitations and opportunities that arrive in the coming weeks perhaps out of nowhere. Don’t miss out! Expect the unexpected. Read between the lines. Investigate the cracks. SCORPIO: Oct. 23 – Nov. 21 Poet Anne Carson claims that “a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.” I agree. If there are tea stains, it probably means that the poem has been studied and en oyed. Someone has lingered over it, allowing it to thoroughly permeate their consciousness. I propose we make the tea-stained poem your power metaphor for the coming weeks, Scorpio. In other words, shun the pristine, the spotless, the untouched. Commune with messy, even chaotic things that have been loved and used. SAGITTARIUS: Nov. 22 – Dec. 21 Sagittarian author Martha eck articulated the precise message you need to hear right now. She wrote, “Here is the crux of the matter, the distilled essence, the only thing you need to remember: When considering whether to say yes or no, you must choose the response that feels like freedom. Period.” I hope you adopt her law in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. ou should avoid responses and in uences that don’t feel liberating. I realize that’s
CAPRICORN: Dec. 22 – Jan. 19 I’m glad you have been exploring your past and reconfiguring your remembrances of the old days and old ways. I’m happy you’ve been transforming the story of your life. I love how you’ve given yourself a healing gift by reimagining your history. It’s fine with me if you keep doing this fun stuff for a while longer. ut please also make sure you don’t get so immersed in bygone events that you’re weighed down by them. The whole point of the good work you’ve been doing is to open up your future possibilities. For inspiration, read this advice from author Milan undera: “We must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.” AQUARIUS: Jan. 20 – Feb. 18 Aquarian historian Mary Frances erry offered counsel that I think all Aquarians should keep at the heart of their philosophy during the coming weeks. She wrote, “The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can’t be done.” I hope you trust yourself enough to make that your battle cry. I hope you will keep summoning all the courage you will regularly need to implement its mandate. PISCES: Feb.19 – March 20 What’s the leading cause of deforestation in Latin America Logging for wood products Agricultural expansion New housing developments Nope. It’s raising cattle so people everywhere can eat beef and cheese and milk. This industry also plays a ma or role in the rest of the world’s ongoing deforestation tragedy. Soaring greenhouse gas emissions aren’t entirely caused by our craving for burgers and milk and cheese, of course, but our climate emergency would be significantly less dramatic if we cut back our consumption. That’s the kind of action I invite you to take in the coming months, Pisces. My analysis of astrological omens suggests that you now have even more power than usual to serve the collective good of humanity in whatever specific ways you can. (P.S.: Livestock generates 14.5 percent of our greenhouse gasses, equal to the emissions from all cars, trucks, airplanes, and ships combined.) This week’s homework: What’s the biggest good change you could imagine making in your life right now?
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