Documenting the Erasure of the Black Body from the City: Race and Revitalization in Detroit

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Documenting the Erasure of the Black Body from the City: Race and Revitalization in Detroit

Craig Hennigan

Wayne State University

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ABSTRACT: There is a large effort being undertaken to revitalize postindustrial rust belt cities.

Detroit, Michigan has had an influx of filmmakers documenting that effort to increase business

and economic opportunities. With new opportunities comes questions of who will win a

contest over spaces and gain the right to the city. Often, marginalized races are shut out of

While racial tropes and memes have been studied in many forms of fictional narrative films,

there is less work done in the documentary genre. Finding racial “semes” in the film Detroit

Lives, we see that the documentary style can be used to shut the black body out of discourses of

urban revitalization. Because documentary implies truth-telling and recording of history, the

style is especially problematic when depicting the black body in ways that omit them from the

possession of the city spaces in which they dwell.

In 2010, filmmaking in Michigan was booming. Film incentives given by the state of

Michigan paid for up to 42% of the production films produced in the state (Caranicas &

Abrams, 2013). One of the results of such a generous film incentive program was a boom in

documentary films focusing on the city of Detroit. One of those films, entitled Detroit Lives

was seen as a counter-narrative to films that were portraying Detroit as a city in a state of

collapsing death throes. Detroit Lives was released in 2010, just after a Dateline NBC special

hosted by Detroit-born Chris Hansen angered many Detroit residents with its defeatist portrayal

blaming the economic collapse of Detroit on Detroiters (Davis, 2010; Shea, 2010). This anger

acted as a rhetorical exigency for a different depiction of Detroit.

When Detroit Lives was released, the reception was far warmer than the Dateline NBC

special. It was called “honest” and a more “fair and accurate” depiction of what was going on

in Detroit (Wojdyla, 2010). This essay examines the film Detroit Lives and how it positions

black bodies in relation to urban revitalization efforts in Detroit. Using three indicators of

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racial memes from James Snead’s White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side

(1994), this essay analyzes the use of marking, mythification, and omission to find where black

citizens of Detroit are positioned by the filmmakers. Using Snead’s analysis as a method to

examine the film, I argue that the black body of Detroit’s revitalization are locked in the

periphery of Detroit’s revitalization narrative. This narrative is particularly problematic

because the White filmmakers of the documentary portray the positive effects of revitalization

while erasing black bodies from the urban narrative. Critical evaluation is especially important

for Detroit Lives because its reception in mainstream media as a more accurate depiction of

Detroit in opposition to the Dateline NBC report. If Detroit Lives is considered truth-telling

while constructing problematic positions for black bodies in urban revitalization then there is a

need for criticism that uncovers and mitigates the effects of racial tropes.

Right to the City

When discussing any issues regarding Detroit, it is important to discuss the racial

implications of the narratives being produced. Historically, Detroit has been a flashpoint for

racial tension, erupting on three separate occasions with deadly race riots throughout the city’s

existence. However, urban revitalization generally considered a spatial issue first and a racial

issue never. Detroit provides a setting where racial and spatial intersections are on prominent

display. In critical geography and urbanist circles, the term “right to the city” is often

considered a resistance to the dominance of global economics over the creation of the space of

cities. As rhetorical scholars, unpacking the meaning of the right to the city is important to

future usage of the phrase and its potential for movement-building.

While critical geographers tout the right to the city as a popular, progressive concept

that can be used to resist economic restructuring of cities due to globalization, the concept has

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differing definitions (Plyushteva, 2009). The phrase “right to the city” was first coined by

Henri Lefebvre in a title essay, “Le Droit à la Ville” (Lefebvre, 1996). There is general

agreement that Lefebvre was proposing a shift in the production of urban spaces to serve

inhabitants of said spaces, particularly the disenfranchised. How that goal is realized, however,

differs among scholars.

Geographers David Harvey, Mark Purcell and planning scholar Peter Marcuse each

look at the right to the city in differing ways (Harvey, 2012; Marcuse, 2009; Plyushteva, 2009;

Purcell, 2002). Harvey looks at the right to the city as a rallying cry to begin revolutionary

changes in how city spaces are produced. The right to the city is a “political class-based

demand” (Harvey, 2012, p. 136) that can unite the heterogeneous groups of the city into an

organizing force. For Harvey, such a force is capable of resisting and upending neoliberal

economic models that serve to create disenfranchised populations within cities.

Purcell defines the right to the city as a radically democratic politics. The right to the

city gives inhabitants of urban spaces a proverbial seat at the table for all decisions that affect

the city in which they reside. A decision made in Chicago that may affect Detroit would

require the input and permission of Detroiters to proceed under Purcell’s interpretation. Purcell

recognizes this as limiting, but his view of the right to the city is only a starting point for more

democratic politics (Plyushteva, 2009; Purcell, 2002). Although Purcell does mention that a

new urban politics needs to better address questions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other

ills considered more social than economic, there is little articulation of what a right to a city of

social equality might look like. Purcell claims that too often scholars aim to reduce differing

agendas of disparate groups in an urban space as anti-capitalist as a universal goal.(Marcuse,

2009; Purcell, 2002) There is a research gap in the right to the city scholarship to further

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theorize how the racial city is configured. Analysis of racialized discourse intersecting with

neoliberal logics of space a logical step in reading.

Whiteness and Racial Neoliberalism

Whiteness and racial neoliberalism are two key elements that help us study race today.

Whiteness is a starting point to establish what it is that is being upheld through particular

discourses. Racial neoliberalism describes the evolution of whiteness and how it operates in

late capitalist society. Knowledge of terminology relevant to the economics and conditions of

today are key to understanding how race is constructed socially while having real material

impacts on people.

Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek describe whiteness as a set of discursive

strategies (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995). Through the use of these strategies, a discursive

formation is created. Discursive formations can have embedded contradictions, such as

whiteness being both of great importance while functionally invisible at the same time.

Nakayama and Krizek deconstruct whiteness as a center to which the Other compares itself to,

and instead theorize whiteness itself. Discursive strategies identifying whiteness arise when

white people are asked about what being white means. The importance of these strategies and

the discursive formations that are created, is the material affect it has on culture at large.

It would be simple to just change the discursive strategies in order to break down

whiteness if it were just a habit to overcome. George Lipsitz (1998) explains, however, that

these strategies are a part of an investment in the material gains that whiteness discourses

supply to white people. The investment has influence on political and legislative agendas

through the history of the United States. Federal Housing Administration loans in the 1940-

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50s, for instance, encouraged segregation and the building out of suburbs in American cities,

and Detroit was hit particularly hard by this practice (Sugrue, 2005).

As times and economies change, the deployment of the possessive investment in

whiteness also changes. While FHA loans in the past have been shown in court to carry an

overt racist component through practices like “redlining,” today the influence of whiteness on

governmental institutions is far more covert. David Theo Goldberg (2009) describes the

present incarnation of institutionalized racism as racial neoliberalism. Each broad anti-racism

movement (e.g., abolition, civil rights) is met with pushback from a counter group that attempts

to silence conversations about the historical disadvantages of race by making the mention of race

or racialization an inappropriate topic. Antiracialism suggests “getting over, moving on, wiping

away the terms of reference, at best (or worst) a commercial memorializing,”(Goldberg, 2009, p.

21). In other words, the mention of race is shunned as racist and a post-racial lens is considered

necessary for effective governance. The de-linkages of race to policy is based in neoliberal

financial logics that are (color)blind yet always seems to implicitly disadvantage non-white

people without formally naming that as an intent of the policy. Much like color-blind policies

often have racial results, the neolibralization of racism cuts off antiracist possibilities under the

guise of acting according to market forces or personalized preferences. Rather than continue the

antiracist objectives of Affirmative Action, for instance, the antiracial turn declares that group

preferences are undesirable because of the racial discourse embedded. Rather than utilize race

as a factor in job recruitment or college admissions, the market calculation of “most qualified

applicant” supplants the goal of remedying institutional discrimination. Mass media reinforces

these neoliberal logics that protect the investment in whiteness when there are omissions of

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discussions on racial implications of policy because it is seen as derailing the goal of moving

forward beyond race.

Black Bodies in Mass Media and Film

Representations of black people in mass media have long reinforced stereotypes that

have lingered for decades. The earliest depictions of black people in film (re)produced some of

the most common tropes about black people at the time. For example, Birth of a Nation used

multiple tropes such as the “mammy,” the “tragic mulatto,” the “brutal black buck” and more

(Bogle, 1997). The stereotypes of black characters in early films serve to entertain cinemagoers

by placing the black body at a lower social location that of the white body; whether through

status, intelligence, brutality, or buffoonery. As the films’ messages enter into the public

imaginary, audiences transfer these tropes onto black bodies outside the film. This is not to

exclude non-whites from this type of interpellation, because anybody may find gain in the

possessive investment in whiteness (Lipsitz, 1998).

Stereotypes in Hollywood pictures have been an object of study for a long time. There is

no question that cinema helps to define and reflect the culture of a nation. Scholarship has been

done in television media as well, with many of the same stereotypes of the cinema transferring over

to the small screen (Entman & Rojecki, 2000). Lipsitz addresses race problems as a problem not

of blacks, but rather of whiteness which creates social norms that cause racism (Lipsitz, 1998). In

many ways, those norms are formed through images portrayed in media (Entman & Rojecki,

2000). Even genres that seem more innocuous such as television news still portray a firm racial

bias through the amount of black people speaking and the positions they speak from (Entman &

Rojecki, 2000).

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The propensity for documentaries to create real world action makes it unique. Even

though other forms of mass media certainly influence society, documentary is similar to news

media in that it has a truth-telling function that other genres of film typically do not. The genre

not only reports factual occurrences, but can access the dramatic tools of storytelling with

emotional and personal accounts of true events when news media often does not have the time

or space to do so. When executed well, a series like the Television Race Initiative that ran on

the Public Broadcasting System in 1998 can meet their goal of identifying “documentaries and

works in progress with the power to open up new ways of thinking about race or other

neglected, critical and contentious issues, and to find ways of transforming raw individual

responses into some group sensibility or conversation,”(Schneider, 2001, p. 55).

Documentary has shown it is able to respond to prevailing discourses in Hollywood

regarding race and class. One example is that of the film Antanarjuat: The Fast Runner which

was created and wholly produced by Inuit people. The film argues against primitivist tropes

often seen in depictions of indigenous peoples (Bessire, 2003). These tropes are seen in the old

film about Inuit life called Nanook of the North. In Nanook, title character Nanook looks

quizzically at technology such as a gramophone amazed at the technology of the white man. A

staged scene, but portrays the Inuit as a primitive person. Although it could be argued that the

use of a media that is created under the umbrella of whiteness can only serve to entrench

whiteness, there is little alternative if people who are racially marginalized want to appropriate

media messages (Ginsburg, 2002). Although documentary certainly contains an emancipatory

power in its association with truth, it can equally codify misconceptions.

Although many have observed how fictive representations of Black people reinforce

whiteness, (Kellner, 1995; Shohat & Stam, 2003; Wilderson, 2010) little work has been done

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examining race critically in documentary films. The earliest documentaries were created by the

Lumière brothers in the early part of the 20th century. Their films were short, sometimes under

a minute, and depicted mundane events. Early filmmakers did not make arguments as later

documentaries would, rather the films were considered representations of the real world. As a

result, meaning was constructed between the filmmaker and the audience simply through visual

material, without any outside influence of narration or scripts (Vaughan, 1999).

Contemporary documentarians often do make an argument and present a narrative to

support positions on a wide range of social and political issues. Documentaries are

categorically labeled as a work of non-fiction, but that does not necessarily make them fact.

Fiction and non-fiction become difficult to discern in today’s version of documentaries because

the way a filmmaker portrays a subject is always susceptible to their personal biases and

agendas (Renov, 1993). The perception of the documentary film though, is that it displays

unfiltered reality. Currently, theorists look at documentaries through a poststructural lens

which takes into account that truth is subjective and that those behind the camera are restricted

by language (Minh-ha, 1993). As the genre has evolved, more filmmakers use a documentary

style in order to influence audiences toward a particular ideology or politics (Benson & Snee,

2008).

So when examining documentaries, it is important to acknowledge that while

viewers may know that the filmmakers are presenting a subjective position of an issue, their

first instinct will be to treat the genre as truth-telling. This becomes significant when

representing race through documentary. The impact that subtleties of representation have in

documentary are going to be multiplied because of the implication that documentaries are a

recording of what is, instead of what the filmmaker is selectively portraying.

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Mythification, Marking, and Omission

In order to observe and analyze how race is being portrayed in Detroit Lives, I look to

James Snead’s book, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (1994). In

Snead’s work, the opening essay mentions “semes” or small units of meaning. Semes have an

etymological origin in rhetoric, as semes are the smallest unit of meaning in semantics. For

Snead, he sees film as also having semes to be analyzed. Semes combine with other semes

and eventually form memes. Memes are ways that culture can be transmitted among subjects.

These memes help to form dominant narratives about culture, race, gender, and other identity

markers within society. Rather than looking at the entirety of a documentary argument, the

unpacking of tropes into smaller units like memes and semes makes is easier to take note of

evidence that points toward a racially motivated ideology in a documentary film. Neoliberal

forms of racism are not overtly obvious, so a preponderance of smaller racialized semes can

help uncover power relations in film.

The three devices Snead isolates in film portrayals of the black body which help to form

semes are mythification, marking, and omission. Marking is a way that the black body is

represented as the Other to the dominant white body. This portrayal is commonly

accomplished through stereotypes represented via memes in film. For example, early 19th

century filmmakers would literally darken the skin of black bodies in earlier films with

shoeshine or polish (i.e, blackface), but today marking is more commonly done by showing

contrasting binaries, like dark v. light, dynamic v. stasis, or low class v. bourgeois (Snead,

1994). Omission is rather self-explanatory, in that the black body is literally omitted from the

narrative. Omission is a very important trait as mediated communication is not just what the

viewer sees on the screen; rather omission is “the totality of presences and absences that

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constitutes the mediated communication,”(Entman & Rojecki, 2000, p. 5). Mythification is a

semiotic tool where the interrelationship between two bodies create a semiotic cue to the

viewer that will accept the station of each body. Snead describes the simultaneity of the

degraded other and glorified hero as essential to mythification. That simultaneous image

quickly works to create larger models of meaning that open and foreclose avenues of possible

action for the white body in authority and the black body debased, respectively.

Snead makes the claim that early filmmakers often inserted stereotypes and tropes in

their films that advanced an ideology (Snead, 1994). Films like Birth of a Nation advance

representations of blacks that are antagonistic in the face of the protagonistic Ku Klux Klan. In

the silent era of film there may have been intent among the filmmakers to place blacks in a

lower position in their portrayals of the world. Today the intent is more difficult to determine.

It is more likely today that whiteness is so entrenched into the white mindset that the resulting

racial tropes seen in films are from being accustomed to the tropes, rather than attempting to

extend them intentionally. This is why whiteness is more difficult for whites to unpack,

because the intent is not as clear as the days of the early 20th century (Lipsitz, 1998).

Analysis of Detroit Lives

A number of new documentaries about the city of Detroit have been produced in the past

few years (Dwyer, 2012). Much of the focus is on the postindustrial ruins that have become a

metonym for the city (Leary, 2011). A contradictory meme that is also often featured in these

documentaries is an element of boosterism (or cheerleading) for Detroit’s postindustrial

opportunities. The prevailing narrative for Detroit is a deindustrialized wasteland with little to no

hope, but new films are being released that portray the city as a potential site for growth and

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change. This essay problematizes the representations of the black body in Detroit Lives, the first

of a recent boom of documentaries about Detroit.

Palladium Boots is a shoe and boot manufacturing company that created a short

documentary film entitled Detroit Lives in 2010 (Mavros, 2010). It features star of MTV’s

Jackass, Johnny Knoxville, as a host that comes to Detroit to “see what else is going on”

outside of the negative national news stories. Applying Snead’s three codings as apparatus to

analyze black bodies, the film Detroit Lives creates a narrative of revitalization in Detroit that

is controlled by the will of the white body as a master of the direction of the city.

Beginning with the use of marking in the film, through the images described below, the

black body is marked through multiple ways in Detroit Lives. In the opening of the film, there is

a montage of news reports about Detroit, whether they are real or fabricated for the film is

unclear. It is in this montage of negative stories the viewer sees the largest amount of black

bodies, and the images show clear signs of the marking that Snead discusses. The first image

shows a black person on a park bench in an overgrown lot and demonstrates the example of the

stasis that the black body exhibits which is soon contrasted after the opening montage with the

white body of Johnny Knoxville cruising through Detroit in a gold Cadillac. The face of the

black person on the bench looks down toward the ground. The gold Cadillac, by contrast, is a

quintessential Detroit automobile, and symbolic of the affluent white body able to have mobility

in a city devastated by economic disaster.

Next, the image of the working class black body that has to sell raccoon meat to survive

in the post-apocalyptic scene of Detroit as told by the filmmakers. There is a blatantly obvious

use of a trope where the black man stands next to a sign saying “Fresh Coons,” but the more

subtle markings are also significant. Again, the first white body that will be seen after this is

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the affluent Knoxville riding in a status symbol that the viewer can now attribute to the white

body. This sets up the affluent/poor dichotomy where the hopeless black person has no

available avenue to leave their class. Additionally, it places the black body in what Snead calls

a “position of obscurity or dependence,”(Snead, 1994). Blackness in this cut not only is in a

position of obscurity, but also labels itself with a racial epithet in an unfortunate double

entendre.

Last, a very sharp image that represents how marking can actually cause the black body to

become even darker as a man sits in a very dark window of what looks to be an abandoned

building. The blackness of the dark room surround the black body, allowing the skin of the body

to blend into that background. The shot from the outside of the building during the day peering

into the room creates a large contrast from the bright outside to the dark inside. These markings

are not the same as in film eras long past where they were needed to truly distinguish black from

white characters to resolve any conflicts or confusion in the white mind but they still exist in

the documentary in question and serve to make the black “more black” and contrast with the

white body.

Mythification in film is more than just stereotyping, but a method of encoding messages

that serve to do ideological work (Hall, 1997). In the case of Detroit Lives, the choices of whom

to interview in the film and how they are portrayed is of vital importance. Knoxville becomes a

myth himself cruising the city in his gold Cadillac in direct contrast to the groups of blacks

hanging out in the streets. He is the dominant “I” to the black bodied Other that is portrayed

throughout the first 60 seconds of the film. A portion of the film frames three young black

males grouped on a sidewalk, their back turned to the camera and the viewer is left to wonder

what they are doing. The refusal to show faces indicates they may not want to show their

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identity, or they are hiding something, encouraging the viewer to believe the males are engaging

in possibly antisocial or illegal activity. During this scene the narration labels them further

stating how “you see a lot of bad stuff in Detroit,” (Mavros, 2010). Where the black portrayal is

despair and criminality, Knoxville is the happy optimistic dominant figure. Riding in the car

with Knoxville becomes a way for the film to create myth of other interviewees. Only white

bodies can ride in the Knoxville chariot through the streets of Detroit, as not a single black body

is portrayed inside. The white body can have the mobility and status of being chauffeured in the

golden status symbol, while black bodies are relegated to sidewalks, back turned, anonymous

and silenced.

The people who hold the key to the future of Detroit in this film are the white

entrepreneurs. The only time a person is asked where they would like to see the future of Detroit

to be it is asked to Phil Cooley, white entrepreneur, restaurateur, and to many residents a gentrifier

(“It’s time for a new narrative on Detroit” 2010). He is the one who rides in the Knoxville

Cadillac and holds the key to the future of Detroit, rather than the marginalized populations that

were here before him. Cooley mentions how he intends to change the landscape of his

neighborhood although these changes proposed have been a part of making the Detroit

neighborhood of Corktown a hip place with rising values of property. He has been dubbed the

“Prince of Corktown” or the “de facto spokesman” of the revitalization of Detroit, and Detroit

Lives continues to propagate that myth (Ryzik, 2010).

Artistic and Musical Minstrels

The prevalence of artists, and mainly musical artists, in the black body continues a long

tradition of showing blacks in the minstrel form. Although these entertainers are not the same as

the old minstrel that would bear the markings of blackface, it is a recreation of the same trope

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without the makeup. The entertainers of the film still primarily find success in their field from

entertaining white audiences, from Martha Reeves to electronic musician Carl Craig. The

connection is clearly similar to what Tommy Lott calls a “neo-minstrelry” (Lott, 1997). Neo-

minstrelry is described, however, as making a critique of the entertainment industry. Detroit

Lives brings neither a critique of the entertainment industry or the city revitalization programs,

rather just the white acknowledgement of black success through the entertainment of whites

with capital.

The minstrel trope continues through other sections of the film as well. Knoxville and hip

hop artist Black Milk visit the home of Berry Gordy, the founder of the Motown record label.

There is significance in that the new rap artist is being linked back to the black entertainers of the

past. The linkage marks the hip hop artist as the past of Detroit, rather than the future. The past

is where the causes of city collapse occurred. White entrepreneurs represent the future, while

black entertainers, even new styled and young black entertainers, are still marked with Detroit’s

past. During the scene visiting Berry Gordy’s home there are flashes on the screen of multiple

black entertainers, imprinting the images of the black image from the past. Black Milk himself

even speaks of the entertainers who had sat at the piano he was sitting at, “Smokey [Robinson],

and I wonder if Stevie [Wonder] touched this piano too, and now Black Milk touched this piano

too.” Using the past the film embeds the black body into regulated places where success can be

gained by them. With that past is an implied causality that Detroit’s economic turmoil is due in

part to the policies and residents of the city in the past. Those that were not of Detroit in the past

could not be responsible for its devastation. While initially this might make sense, urban

historian Thomas Sugrue has pointed out that the troubles of Detroit are multi-faceted and have

many causes from within and outside the city. From racial tension, ill-fated urban renewal

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policies, state government, local leadership, to mobility of capital and white flight, there were

many problems of the city creating a perfect storm of economic unrest leading to the conditions

of today (Sugrue, 2005).

Knoxville speaks to other people who are involved in the revitalization and

redevelopment of Detroit. Those that are interviewed are considered the bright spots of an

otherwise negative postindustrial image. It is noticeable that what urbanist and author of The

Rise of the Creative Class Richard Florida would consider the desirable young creative

entrepreneurial class are all young white people in this film (Florida, 2003). Every black voice

but one is a type of artist, mainly musical artists from Motown, hip hop, or electronic music and

they are labeled as such although some have accomplished much more outside of music.

Martha Reeves, for example, is a former Detroit city councilperson from 2005-2009, but hasn’t

released a new song since 1990 (“Martha Reeves Discography at Discogs,” n.d.). Reeves

certainly could have been portrayed as an active agent in the revitalization of Detroit, but

instead Detroit Lives keeps her as a Motown star. This makes her a cultural icon, but one from

the past rather than one in the present.

Although almost every business entrepreneur in this film has been young and white, one

is not. When there is a single black subject that is comparable in business stature to all of the

white subjects of the film that represent the future of Detroit, it is important to pay close attention

to the representation they are given in the film.

The Case of D’Mongo’s

Larry Mongo, owner of D’Mongo’s café, identifies himself as a businessman in Detroit

for the past 35 years. His position is outside of the young creative that are represented in the

film as doing the work of revitalization of the city. He is the old guard who closed the doors to

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his café for years as Detroit depopulated. Mongo tells the story of how too many murders by his

place of business caused him to close in the early 1990’s. More recently, Mongo tells the story

of how the neighborhood had gone through changes in both demographic and attitude. He

says, “Five years ago [if] I saw white girls running down the street… everybody would call 911

like ‘who’s chasin’ ‘em?’And [then] I realized they were jogging. And I said ‘Am I in Detroit?’

The complexion of the area was changing, and the influx of white people changed the

definition of what it meant to be in Detroit to the point that Mongo actually questioned the

space he resided.

As new white clientele that moved into downtown Detroit, they pleaded for Mongo to

open his café again. D’Mongo asks them for a date to open, and they tell him June 24th. That

day fell two days after a local Critical Mass bicycle ride, and to his surprise two hundred white

people on bicycles were at his door to confirm the re-opening of Café D’Mongos. The re-

opening was successful due to the influx of white customers.

In this story, the white holder of capital tells the black businessman to open his business and

even goes so far as to specify the day. Mongo is dependent on the white body for patronage and his

portrayal is not that of an actor in the revitalization story; rather he is a beneficiary of the white

renewal of downtown Detroit. The images that follow depicting a busy night at the café show a

vibrant clientele and not a single black body. Even the employees and musician playing blues

music is white as a soundtrack from a black blues song is played. The business success of the black

citizen is wholly dependent upon white citizens allowing that success to happen.

This is notable because Mongo would be a part of the private upper business class that

Harvey indicates are in control of the direction of the city. In the case of Detroit Lives, however,

the skin color of the clientele Mongo serves plays a greater role in his success or failure than his

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class position. Although Mongo has more class privilege than most residents of the city, the

dependence on whites to patronize, work at, and even entertain is telling when determining who

really has a right to the city. The position of power that Mongo carries as the business owner is

a paper tiger. The right to the city and urban citizenship is only afforded to Mongo with the

permission of the white body.

To conclude the close reading, Snead’s film device of omission will be addressed in

Detroit Lives. In a later section of the movie two band members, one white and one of Asian

descent, drive through the Heidelberg Project. Heidelberg is a socially aware art project

constructed and reconstructed often by black artist Tyree Guyton. Guyton holds an honorary

doctoral degree from the College of Creative Studies for the work he performs at Heidelberg.

He began his art project as a way to beautify the blighted homes that were in his neighborhood.

His art addresses class disparities in Detroit and can be very political in nature. Rather than

interview Guyton or talk about the meanings behind the art of the project, Knoxville and the

band members drive through the blocks of public art snapping photos and staring in wonder.

Guyton and his point of view are omitted.

Another glaring omission is in a figurative sense of the population that remains in

Detroit. Carl Craig states Detroit is a “blank canvas for developing business, for developing

anything you can think of.” In the closing, famous punk band MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer

says, “It’s the perfect opportunity for the American Dream to be realized that something can

come out of nothing. That’s what artists have always done, created something out of nothing.”

Detroit, with the 711,000 people that remained, is relegated to being nothing. They are omitted

from the revitalization discourse altogether. The filmmakers encourage people to flock to

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Detroit to create their something from nothing, despite the something or some people that do

exist in the city.

These omissions amount to what Goldberg calls “Racisms without racism,” not to be

confused with Eduoardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists (Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Goldberg,

2009, p. 360). Under a realm of neoliberal racism the invoking of race becomes racist, while

silence is acceptable. Race then disappears from the public eye, creating a situation where the

invocation of race is stigmatized, that leaves no avenues to remedy structural institutions that

damage people of color. The “blank canvas” is waiting for the white brush to wash over and create

a new Detroit. A Detroit where the historical and current racial struggles can be painted over and

ignored in exchange for an entrepreneurial renewal free of interference from government,

population, or other obstacles.

Implications

The use of the three devices in Snead’s method of analyzing films shows that depictions

of the black body still entrench power in a dominant narrative. Documentary filmmaking with

a feel of truth-telling makes the logics uncovered by these devices particularly problematic. In

the case of Detroit Lives as an example of boosterism documentaries regarding urban areas,

there is an issue surrounding ownership of revitalization efforts. The idea of the right to the

city has to be able to enfranchise not just the disadvantaged class, but the racially marginalized

as well. Without an avenue for enfranchisement, even when class mobility is achieved racially

marginalized people will still be on the outside of the power structure much like Mongo.

Although the ideological system of whiteness is one that is global, this research is

focusing on the local implications of that system. Control over contested spaces are not solely

enacted through the State, but also through our discourse. Mass media has a large impact on

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how we frame ownership over spaces, and filmmaking has a long history in formulating

popular opinion of citizens. The global system of whiteness is communicated through media

and filtered down through people affecting localized systems of space.

Black bodies are not included in media depictions of revitalization. Rather than a

depiction of marginalized communities being a part of an effort to create a better situation in

postindustrial urban areas, instead the task of revitalization is assigned to the white body. The

black body becomes a victim that waits for redemption and salvation from the young white

entrepreneur that enters the city in order to “save” it. The entrepreneur that is responsible for

rebuilding the city has to be white, because prevailing memes only allow blacks to entertain

or serve the white citizen in the city.

In the event that postindustrial cities do make an economic and social return to the

successes of the past, the overarching narrative gives whites ownership of the comeback. A

strategy to bring power through an invocation of the right to the city must address both

economic as well as racial strategies of marginalization. Detroit Lives constructs Detroit in a

way that is exclusive to a large portion of the citizens of the city.

Future Directions

In examining Detroit Lives it is not surprising to find racial imagery in documentary that is

common with previous forms of media. It is important to continue examining how documentary

films about spaces exert power over people dwelling in those spaces. One direction would be to

focus more on the messages regarding postindustrial cities. As the economic landscape changes

so will the communication forms coming from these cities. The communication not only from the

city, but descriptions of the cities from outside the space will help to form new social

constructions of what the meaning of these spaces are. Looking from a spatial analysis lens, it

21

could be said that much of the new media coming from Detroit are amounting to Detroit-

sploitation films, along the lines of the Blaxpoitation films of the seventies.

Analysis of further documentaries about cities should also be performed on a macro

level to confirm whether the stereotypes are being used in most of other films or if some show

signs to resist the order of whiteness. Resistance in media to dominant narratives of place

would be a useful endeavor to examine in order to further liberation for the people that reside in

affected places.

The most important note, however, it to continue criticism. Goldberg and others will

inform us that race itself, and all of the cultural baggage associated with it, is created through

discourse (Goldberg, 1993). The mass media can set the agenda of how we think of race.

Through criticism there must be possibilities to change dominant discourses in an attempt to

being life to the socially dead. Without those possibilities, the alternative of stasis in the face of

continuing gratuitous violence to the black body is untenable for communication scholarship.

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