For example, the construction of expressways (for military ingress in case of uprisings) wrecked working class black neighborhoods, and made it possible for white people to flee to suburbs where they could obtain low-cost home loans, while black people were red-lined out.
Racism combined with opportunism and profiteering to demolish much of what was once a proud Detroit heritage. The eradication of hope is attendant to the disintegration of empire. An imperial colonizer himself, Richard didn,t know the depth of ash to come. Detroit,s public schools were widely recognized as the best public school system in the world.ĭetroit has a remarkably prescient slogan, coined after the city burned in 1805 by the priest, Gabriel Richard, “We hope for better things we will rise from the ashes. The libraries, Institute of Arts, and Historical Museum were world class.
#DETROIT BECOME HUMAN THE HOSTAGE FAIL TO BUILD TRUST FREE#
Free health care and dental care was available to adults and kids through the Children,s Fund of Michigan. Detroit had more single family homes than any other US city. It,s powerful, radical, and active working class had income sufficient that one person working could take care of a family relatively well. Detroit had nearly 2 million people in the fifties. Largely because of repetitious failures of its rulers, Detroit, a true ghetto whose citizens are now 85% black, has been in a shocking nose-dive for decades. The lessons from this true class struggle are key to understanding the central role of school in a society which has nothing to offer youth but temporary jobs and endless war. The local ruling classes, sometimes divided against each other, but united against the working classes, are irrevocably tied to US battles for empire through the auto-industry,s almost desperate search for cheaper labor, markets, financial control, social domination, and raw materials, and through the war industry,s ties to what was once known as, “Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy. Each had to fight because each was cornered. The strike in Detroit represented a collision of complex social forces, and their representatives. On September 13, Detroit teachers voted by a slim majority to halt a 16 day illegal strike and return to work, voting on a “Tentative Agreement (TA) later. The Gary strike was brief and, flatly, inconsequential but it happened because education in a once proud industrial city was near collapse and the school workers, who typically carry signs saying, “I Don,t Want To Strike But I Will! took action because they had to take action not only to survive, but to preserve their dignity. In addition, the strikes clearly show how the imperial, perpetual-war, policies of the US reverberate within, and without, the US. In Palestine and Oaxaca, the strikes quickly spun well beyond mere battles about wages, hours and working conditions, and became social uprisings, demonstrating the thesis that educators are centripetally positioned in many societies to initiate, if not complete, fights for equality and democracy. Teachers in two of the most devastated cities in the U.S., Detroit and Gary, Indiana, joined teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Palestine, in job actions in 2006. School workers, strikes appear to be the new canary in the mine of society, measuring levels of exploitation, oppression, and freedom.
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