| HN Mirror

I remember very little about my childhood in the Soviet Union; I was only seven when I left. But one memory I have is being on a bus with one of my parents, and asking something about a conversation we had had at home, in which Stalin and possibly Lenin were mentioned as examples of dictators. My parent took me off the bus at the next stop, even though it wasn’t the place we were originally going... What’s more, this is so even though most people, including most Communists, knew that Stalin was of course a dictator. The government itself had acknowledged as much. Even Lenin was widely understood to have been a dictator in the sense of someone who didn’t govern through democratic means. But it’s not the sort of thing that you’d want to say in public, or even to your friends in private. Sssh! — people might hear! Those who hear might draw deeper inferences about what else you might believe. This might get back to the place you work. You might be fired, or blacklisted. By the 1970s, you probably didn’t have to worry much about being shot, or being sent to Siberia; these were not the 1930s. But lost jobs, ruined careers — sure. And a forced public apology: well, of course, that might help a bit.

Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history. And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African- American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent -- using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain. I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.

It's clearly not just due to black people, either, though. Atlanta has a large black population, and is a pretty decent city (it has problems, sure, but so do other places). And there are cities with largely-non-black populations which also suck in the same kind of ways as Detroit.

Any city with a massive decline in population (which was probably triggered by racial issues and bad governance in the 1960s, a time when a violent armed revolution, at least at the local level, was quite possible) is going to have problems. Detroit had a heavily union population, reflected in the government as well, so unlike mining/etc. ghost towns, the "hangover" from the massive decline in population was a lot more unsustainable (in a place like Butte, people just left when industry left).

Sure, the decline into a war zone hurt, and compounded all the initial problems, but NYC was a warzone in the 1970s/1980s too, and didn't die. LA and Miami in the 1980s/1990s. I mean, even Oakland is somewhat turning around now (largely on the strength of SFBA overall and an artificially limited housing market in SF, true, not internal improvement.)