SUMMER 1999 - ISSUE NUMBER 48

Building Bridges
for Healthy Multicultural Communities inDetroit

Since I came to live in Detroit in 1953, Detroit and its environs have undergone dramatic demographic changes.1 In the early 5Os the city was majority Caucasian; African Americans were less than one-third of the population. Now Detroit is about 75% African American. Prior to the 1970 census the number of Hispanics in the region was so insignificant that they were not even counted in the census. Today there are over 50,000 Hispanics in Wayne County, mostly living in southwest Detroit where they have created a exciting concentration of churches, community and arts organizations, churches, schools and businesses. Southeast Michigan's Arab and Chaldean community of approximately 80,000, many of whom have come here since 1970, is now the largest in the United States. Prior to 1960 there were so few Asians in the region that they were not even counted. In 1960 the number was 6,000. Today it has increased ten times, to nearly 70,000, including East Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Japanese, Hmong/Laotian, Vietnamese, Pakistani and Thai, all of whom speak different languages and eat different foods. Meanwhile, the Native American population in the region has remained relatively small, at less than 10,000, but the community is engaged in an inspiring program of creating its own schools.

This rich ethnic mix is both a danger and an opportunity. It is a danger because as Hi-Tech and export of jobs to low wage countries continue to eliminate jobs, we can look for scapegoats and blame each other for unemployment instead of asking ourselves hard questions about how long we should continue to accept the dictatorship of Hi-Tech and the global economy. As a result, tensions can increase and lead to an explosion like that in southcentral Los Angeles five years ago -- or worse still, to the kind of massacres and atrocities which we have been witnessing in Bosnia. On the other hand, the rich ethnic diversity of our city and its environs provides us with a unique opportunity to make Detroit into the model of a 21st Century multicultural city where our children and grandchildren grow up like world citizens speaking many different languages and loving their neighbors, whatever their ethnic origins, as they love themselves. Down through the centuries the main reason why people have come to cities was because cities have always provided the best opportunities to live with people of many different ehtnic and social background.

That is the vision of Detroit that we need as we move towards the 21st century. But something as grand as this won't just come about spontaneously. It is going to take the efforts of forward looking individuals, individuals who realize that we can be proud of our own ethnic group without putting somebody else down.

• Who are ready to stop competing with one another as to whose group was the most oppressed.

• Who are able to appreciate that each of us has our own history of being oppressed and oppressing, our own history of struggle, our own heroines and heroes -- and our own contradictions.

• Who recognize that one of the best ways to stretch our own humanity is by ridding ourselves of the stereotypes which we all have of other groups and opening ourselves up to new experiences and new knowledge.

It is risky to open yourself up. It can be uncomfortable at first -- like going to live in another country where you don't know the language and the terrain. There is also the danger of being viewed as a traitor by those members of your own group who are so insecure that they can only acquire their own self-esteem by putting down others. But the personal rewards are tremendous. I know that from my own life.

I was born on top of my father's little Chinese restaurant in Providence, Rhode island, 82 years ago. In the Chinese dialect I spoke as a child, anyone not Chinese was a gui or devil. Whites were Fan Gui or foreign devils. African Americans were Hak Gui or black devils. Until my middle 20s I never knew any black people. When I married Jimmy in 1953, nobody gave us a party, nobody gave us any gifts. Most folks thought the marriage wouldn't last because we were so different in so many ways. I had been raised in New York City, the "Big Apple." Jimmy was born in the little town of Marion Junction, Alabama, where there were just a couple of stores on the main street. I have a New England accent. He spoke what is usually called "Black English." I like my meat and vegetables crisp, Chinese style; he liked them cooked to death. I hated housework; he actually enjoyed vacuuming and mopping and waxing the bathroom and kitchen floors. My approach to political questions came more from books; his from experience. We struggled over almost every issue. But I could feel myself growing from the struggle and I could also see the growth in him.

We were married for forty years. Until he died four years ago we were inseparable, so much so that FBI records describe me as Afro-Chinese. I can't even imagine what I would be like today if I hadn't married Jimmy. But one thing I am sure of &-- I would be a much smaller person in a lot of ways.

Jimmy loved to write. He would wake up mornings and dash off letters to the editor before breakfast. When asked where he had acquired his fluency in writing skills, he said that it came from writing letters for the people who couldn't read or write in the little town where he grew up. In his last letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press, one month before his death, he wrote:

It is no longer useful to look at the racial climate of this country in terms of black and white. People from more than 100 ethnic groups live here. By 2040 European Americans and African Americans will be among the many minorities who make up the United States. Blacks in Detroit are a majority; they need to stop thinking like a minority or like victims. Both African Americans and European Americans should be thinking of how to integrate with Detroiters of Latino and Arab descent.

It is hard for most people to think this way because racism (and the struggle against racism) have locked most of us into black-white thinking. Yet, whether we are ready to acknowledge it or not, in the near or distant background of almost everyone in this country there are Africans, Europeans, Native Americans, and maybe, like Tiger Woods, even Asians. To believe that anyone of us is pure African or pure Caucasian or pure Asian or pure Native American is a denial of history. Tens of thousands of years ago there was a land bridge between Asia and North America and for centuries there was a thriving trade between Asia and East Africa (bananas came to Africa from Indonesia). Africans crossed the Mediterranean into Southern Europe; they were called Moors. Into Europe from the East came Genghis Khan. An estimated 95% of African Americans have Native American ancestors and probably as many have Europeans in their family history.2 Yet few of us are ready to recognize this diversity in our ancestry. Instead we think and talk in terms of black and white and don't realize that in doing so we are accepting the racist vocabulary which was created by the power structure to divide and rule.

Actually the racist concept of blacks and whites didn't even exist in the world until it was invented by the ruling class in Maryland and Virginia three hundred years ago. In 1676 indentured servants from Europe and slaves from Africa rose up in struggle against their plantation masters in a rebellion known as Bacon's Rebellion. Threatened with loss of social control, the masters used their power over the language and the law to create a color line between the indentured servants who had come from Europe and the slaves who had come from Africa. They classified the bonded men and women who came from England or Scotland or Germany as "white" instead of in terms of their country of origin, replacing their cultural background with white skin privileges -- to move about freely without passes, to marry without upper class consent, and to change employment. At the same time, anyone with a drop of African blood was called "black" and deprived of such rights. That is how the concept of the "white race" and the "black race" came into being. It was consciously and deliberately invented as a weapon of social control by those who have oppressed and exploited people. And it should be repudiated by everyone who is opposed to oppression and exploitation.3

It isn't going to be easy to stop thinking and talking in terms of black and white, especially for those of you who have grown up in the last thirty years and associate blackness with Malcolm, Black Power and the militant struggle against racism, and who don't remember the days when you had to be ready for a fight if you called someone black. But in order to build a healthy multi-cultural Detroit, we have to get beyond thinking racially in terms of black and white and begin thinking of ourselves historically and culturally, as African Americans or Hispanics or Chinese Americans or Polish Americans or Chaldean Americans, proud of our culture and aware of our own historical contradictions but also committed to respecting the culture and knowing the history of other ethnic groups.

1. The following figures are from Patterns of Diversity and Change in Southeast Michigan, August 1994. A Report to the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan and Members of SEMCOG, the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments.

2. A good source of information about this heritage is Jack Forbes: Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

3. See Theodore W. Allen: The Invention of the White Race. Vol. One, Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso 1994). Also Allen's 1975 pamphlet Class Struture and the Origin of Racial Slavery. The Invention of the White Race. Ronald Takaki: A Different Mirror, A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1993) tells the story of Bacon's Rebellion, pp. 61-67.

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