Scott Kurashige

Kicking them when they’re down

It is one thing to have read of the decline of Detroit as it happened, and quite another to read a summary of the totality of it all. The Fifty Year Rebellion is a fast moving summary of negligence, neglect, incompetence, corruption and out and out crime that leaves the head spinning. Fortunes were made on Detroit’s bankruptcy, the dismantling of its school district, and of course eventual gentrification, with new, more acceptable (and whiter) people. The losers, also of course, were the residents, civic workers and retirees, who lost again and again. If not from the mortgage scams, then from the denial of basic services. Much like airlines and their customers, and like healthcare and its patients, it seems Detroit barely tolerates its longtime residents.

Between 2005 and 2014, 36% of properties – 139,699 of them - went into foreclosure. Houses could be purchased for four figures. Farming became possible right in town. Misinformation spread, blaming unions and privileges for it all – and it became common knowledge. That the people of Detroit did it to themselves was accepted fact. As transit degraded, municipal services vaporized and firms went under, it became nearly impossible to live there. Then the pressure of privatization made everything much worse.

Kurashige cites forcing residents out with mass domestic water shutoffs as the low point and the turning point. All kinds of grassroots groups are organizing and pressuring governments and agencies to stop the stripping out of Detroit. Because from charter schools to emergency management, everything being done in Detroit seems to have the single goal of expulsion of the natives. “Children have no right to literacy and no recourse to the courts, according to the state’s official position” on schools, as it abandons its own institutions and lavishly subsidizes private developers.

Kurashige’s frightening argument is that the State of Michigan is employing strategies and players that replicate the disasters that led to the 1967 riots that were the beginning of the end. Yet with all the police killings, evictions, dislocations and suffering, possibly the saddest thing is that the architect of it all is promoting this as the proven solution. Based on his fabulous success in Detroit, he now wants to apply it to Puerto Rico.

David Wineberg… (plus d'informations)

Triangulation in Los Angeles

Bravo for Scott Kurashige, professor of History at University of Michigan, for delivering this highly nuanced history of race relations and struggle for racial justice from both the black and Japanese communities in the interwar period, WWII and through the interwar period up to the 1965 Watts Riots.

In the book, Kurashige attempts to answer the central question of why the racial makeup of Los Angeles was in constant flux from the Great Depression through to the turbulent 60s. Kurashige shows how complex and triangular the relations between the Japanese, black and white communities were and how white hegemony prevailed by playing the Japanese and blacks off of one another; how endemic white racism kept schools and neighborhoods segregated; how migration and internment fundamentally changed entire communities during the WWII period. Postwar Los Angeles saw continued tensions with the return of internees and the emergence of the black urban ghetto in South Central (Crenshaw) resulting from the white flight to the suburbs. The final culmination of conflict erupting in the violence of the Watts riots in 1965.

As an Asian, I especially enjoyed learning more about the "dual nationalist" sentiments of Japanese Americans prior to WWII and the "model minority" myth postwar. How Japanese Americans sought both to reassert their "Americanism" while simultaneously proving the competency and equality of the Japanese race with the white race. Ultimately it proved meaningless as white racism disguised as patriotism led a ruthless campaign to drive the "yellow peril" out of Los Angeles and into the internment camps such as Manzanar. Postwar, white racism continued though in a different form, perpetuating the myth of the "model minority". This ideological distortion of Asian immigrant success used to denigrate other minorities became a powerful mechanism by whites to once again, play off the Japanese and black communities off one another.

A final discussion on integration and multiculturalism during the Bradley era (LA's first black mayor) shows very much a gilded era of Los Angeles. Optically, race relations appeared to have improved through the cosmopolitanism of Bradley's multicultural policies, yet structurally Los Angeles remained as segregated and unequal as ever before and arguably worse.

Though written for the academic reader, Kurashige maintains a conversational tone throughout the book. Having read many of Mike Davis social histories of Los Angeles, "The Shifting Grounds of Race" will certainly expand the breadth of knowledge about the "City of Quartz" especially in the area of Japanese, black and white community relations. Notably absent is detailed discussion about the sizeable Latino communities which Kurashige correctly directs to a number of great histories already written.

Overall, "The Shifting Grounds of Race" is highly engaging and a mandatory read for anyone wanting to learn more about the unique history of mosaic diversity that is the City of Los Angeles.… (plus d'informations)