Just Whip It
<align=just>I moved to Detroit partly in response to a subconscious nudge which can never genuinely be broken down in rational terms: these nudges are Gestalt. But mentally, I expected Detroit to present every form of social questioning, and so it does. Daily, in just the small sphere of my particular neighborhood, sweeping issues of fundamental importance are presented in the guise of a far smaller problem or tension point. Most focus on the facade. I’m interested in the scaffolding.
Recently, a neighbor expressed concern over the stacks of discarded whippet vials lining our streets. When he approached one local vendor – a gas station convenience store (uniquely called “party stores” in Michigan) – the employee told him in so many words to suck it. Capitalism, my man, he said. I’m selling what “those people” are buying. The public health concern was a concrete issue. The intimation of “those people” was insulting. The seeming flagrant disregard for community responsibility or alliance was enraging. You had me at “the Vernor gas station.” Posts flew. Boycotts were proposed. Legislation is on the way. A petition is being formed. The troops are being assembled for protest.
All of these are good, immediate actions with a viable outcome, if the goal is to eliminate whippet sales from party stores. Arguably, they are actions not as useful if we want to address the source and understand why kids in Southwest Detroit are huffing stuff that they surely know is no good for them. We are caught up in the new-school fervor of whippets, but if we don’t address the root problem(s), taking the nitrous out of the party store just gets us back to old-school paper-bag huffing paint and glue from the garage. It’s hard for me to really “get” why whippets are outrageous in a state where drinking is a competitive sport, and everyone is on a year-round intramural team. Can I really explain to any kid why they shouldn’t whip it, when every adult is in line with a 6-pack or a fifth and a pack of smokes?
But, compelling as the obvious is – and the public health implication is real – none of this immediacy addressed the bigger issues and questions underneath. And so I wrote this to my neighbors.
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Dear Neighbors:
Regarding the topic of kids huffing whippets, loosely, and the emailed statement that we can’t allow “corporate greed & local small business greed over caring & being a good partner in our neighborhood & community! Cooperation, partnership, protecting our health & safety, & basic caring about the residents who live amongst &/or patronize the local businesses & local corporations is a MUST!!!!!!!!!!!….”
Hey, I agree.
However, I think these comments relate to an important point we may want to ponder. One, although some of these places are located in or adjacent to our boundaries, it does not follow that they are invested in the community or have any knowledge or care for it. It is likely the shop owners do not live in Detroit, and given that both Vernor sites are a bit of a hot spot with regards to self-harm crime, like addiction and prostitution, it is not hard to imagine that they feel justified in perceiving themselves as separate and better than them. Of course, maybe “they” is only a necessary pronoun, and it meant those customers, so this is all just a thought exercise.
But even just a couple of weeks ago, I called El Club to ask if it might be used for the policy café. I did this because in a former conversation, Graeme had explicitly invited me to ask, commenting that they wanted to do things which were community oriented. That they were the site for the January neighborhood potluck evidenced their sincerity. Yet, when I phoned him, I got a lot of pushback and he said, “I’m not part of Hubbard Farms.” Sigh. True, I guess, although that street-crossing distinction would seem one not prudent to make. I suppose that means he feels so successful with his venture, there is no implicit need to court the immediate geography. And ultimately if they are willing to share space, which they are, should I care if it’s begrudging or PR more than genuine participation?
I don’t know if I should, but I do. Some people react negatively to new residents coming to Detroit and setting up lives, including homes and businesses, as immigrants do, encroaching on the native. But I take offense at those who’ve set up shop in Detroit at any time over the span of history while living outside of it, exporting wealth and spatially bracketing they. That’s my bias: I’m Southern by origin – the original carpetbagger destination – with every letter of my DNA threaded with the trauma of various colonial legacies. So the notion bites me a bit deeply. I have no idea who does live here and who doesn’t, so I’m not dry snitching or implying, just using an idea and personal experience as an example to demonstrate the point.
And that point, here, is that we keep throwing around the word community with the assumption that it embodies fixed meanings, values, geographies, alliances, desired outcomes. It doesn’t. It can have more alignment in all those things, with concerted effort across the board, but often community is ironically used as just another word for silo-ed tribes and gate keeping. It has become, too frequently, justification for exclusion. Community can be used to demand that our neighbors must petition to participate in the place where they live, or to continue to marginalize our neighbors as outsiders. So, I am neither surprised nor outraged that the values expressed by what are called “middlemen minorities” in urban planning are not congruent with my own. Exactly as they said, they are serving a community – just not whom and how we want them to. They are, indeed, serving them and not us, whomever they and we are. They are, also, fulfilling a role in the social system – just not one everyone recognizes, since its recognition requires admissions of other kinds we’d rather not make.
Therefore, I acknowledge this complexity. Oh, so, these participants are here, too. No one has to buy into my notions of whom we are, where we are, how we do. Me, I take in the information; I map the middleman community and log the values we see expressed on the board (so to speak).
What becomes most interesting about this is how it plays into gentrification. We so often talk about gentrification “out there,” as though it’s an invading army moving in. If you’re woke, you might think of yourself as a hopefully benign, but still occupying force. But instead, gentrification is often percolating from within. Boiled down, much of what we talk about is not delighting in the wild weave of community so much as it is trying to homogenize the communities pixelating our street. Most of us want the credit of living in an authentically diverse place, but scrubbed of all the confrontations of an authentically diverse place. It’s all fun and games until someone’s chicken gives you e-coli*, or Slow Roll slows your roll and interferes with the emergency of getting your ice cream into the freezer*, or the neighbor’s choice of music in what seems a ceaseless BBQ event* makes you consider how thick of a concrete wall you could build.
I know – but, Marlena, no one feels this way. We only want the bad things to go away, like drugs, and hookers, and theft. We’d put up with the irritations of each other if we could just do away with the harm.
Or maybe we would say, This is getting good, how can I make it better? That junky car could go*. Someone should call the police about the bee hive – and they’ll respond, because property values are up*. The Yorba….oh, the Yorba, how fast do bed bugs burn? And then there we are, living in a sterile place we all said was anathema.
This is not an accusation, but a meditation. Because if a lot of us agree, for example, that mixed income neighborhoods are resilient and have better pro-social outcomes, then what does it actually look like? What it doesn’t look like is sameness within a narrow range of recognition. It doesn’t look like a street full of cars about 5 yrs old, in the $25,000 original price range. It doesn’t look like small, nuclear families living in a well-kept house across the terrain. It doesn’t look like safe, but oddly empty streets at night. It doesn’t look like a themed environment, instead of a messy combination of norms. It doesn’t say, I live in Mexicantown and you can tell, because there’s a Mexican-ish restaurant down the street.
This is not to say we should abdicate advocacy. It does not say, Screw it, in the spirit of diversity, let’s put a whippet dispensary in Clark Park. Rather, it encourages us to look at what these discrete issues cause us to say and do, as they come up – and then look at why. And then ask, If that’s why, would it change what we say or do?
* Actual things said/done