When the Lights Go Down in the City: "Escape from Detroit" Reviews

Detroit in 2012 is 90 percent Black. No one can hear you scream in Detroit

Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America's Black Metropolis is reviewed at Vdare by Peter Bradley, who writes:

The 1967 riots helped usher in the ultimate death blow to Detroit – political control by blacks. By 1973, the city had a narrow black majority and the mayoral election was essentially a racial headcount. Black Democrat Coleman Young campaigned against “police brutality” while his white opponent John Nichols ran on a law and order platform. Young won by a few thousand votes and would begin a 20 year reign that finished off what was left of Detroit.

The city became the crime capital of America in the 1970s and Young implemented massive affirmative action for city employment. To give an example of the kind of leader he was, here is Young, quoted by Kersey, on affirmative action:

“Some people say affirmative action is discrimination in reverse. You’re damned right. The only way to handle discrimination is to reverse it.”

Brett Stevens of Amerika.org reviewed the book here, writing:

Even more importantly, as this book points out time and again, for whatever reason that the white middle class left the city, the city then became ruled by African-American leaders for the African-American majority. This point is perhaps the most important one this book makes. If Kersey has time to do more analysis for a second version of this book, it would behoove him to include an economic history of the auto industry in Detroit to debunk this correlation that is often trumpeted as causation for Detroit’s decline. His analysis of black leadership may be more important, in that he shows how African-American poverty was not alleviated by African-American leadership:

Young was quoted as telling Rose in Detroit’s Agony:

In this country, Black people are victims of racism. It’s not accidental that cities around the nation that have the largest percentage of Blacks, have the largest percentage of poverty, have the largest percentage of crime, and the largest percentage of unemployment.

Immediately after making this assertion (which is true, because once a city goes majority Black, the Visible Black Hand of Economics takes over), Rose points out:

But in Detroit, Blacks aren’t just the majority. They’re the authority. They run the police, the courts, the schools, and city hall. But Black political power has not meant Black economic prosperity.

(245)

This paradox underscores much of the book. If white rule was oppressive, removing that white rule would alleviate the problem, we think. Clearly it has not, and Kersey will give any thinker a run for their money because his analysis of this gap is diligent and thorough. The evidence is overwhelming: since the advent of white flight and African-American government, we haven’t heard much from Detroit. The city is known worldwide for “ruin porn,” or photographs of its once-grand buildings and homes now in decay. Most people find such images depressing because they show abundant potential put to waste.

Kersey draws a distinction between Black-Run America (BRA) or the liberal plan for wealth transfer to poor black Americans at the expense of everyone else, and Actual Black-Run America (ABRA) which he uses to describe the leadership in Detroit and thus to illustrate the negative future offered if BRA succeeds. His thesis seems to be that African-Americans are incapable of self-government, and that a liberal plan to introduce Black-Run America will thus introduce Detroit levels of destruction across the United States. This idea contradicts the notion that most Americans are applying to race, which are expressed most clearly in the Kerner Report (253). This report, like most mainstream news sources and government, argues that since people are equal, the only source of African-American poverty is white racism. Further, the thinking goes, the solution is to spend large amounts of money on “Great Society” styled programs designed to bring equality to people through welfare, education and empowerment programs.

Both Bradley and Stevens nail it when it comes to understanding why this book was written: it serves as a warning to people who (erroneously) believe that as whites become a minority, they will instinctively start uniting and fighting for their rights a group. Plus, it shows that Black people will justify all levels of present - and future - discrimination on the past inequities their ancestors suffered at the hands of white people's ancestors.

In particular, this review at OD by Hunter Wallace put the entire project of SBPDL into perspective:

Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America's Black Metropolis is really a personal meditation on political theory, economics, sociology, and history. The real significance of this book is the vocabulary and the theoretical context that Paul Kersey has created to describe the process by which the “Paris of the West” was inexorably transformed into the “Mogadishu of the West.”


This arsenal of concepts include Black Run America (BRA), Actual Black Run America (ABRA), Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs), Black Undertow, Climate Change, Structural Inequality, The Black Imprint, Detroit-ed, “Those Who Can See,” and The Visible Black Hand of Economics.


There are plenty of race realist websites which dwell on subjects like racial differences in intelligence, morality, and behavior. What’s rare is Paul Kersey’s willingness to go beyond race realism, to take race realism as a given, and to explore its implications for the broader liberal paradigm.

The forthcoming book on Atlanta (Black Mecca Down: The Fall of the City too Busy to Hate) will be the second in a planned trilogy on America in the post-Civil Rights world. We already live in South Africa; just a lot of mini-South Africa's where white people pay taxes that go to support the proliferation - and betterment - of every race but their own.

Well, in 90 percent Black Detroit, half of the street lights are about to be turned out:

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.  


As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

Detroit's white population left, leaving Black people in control of their own - proverbial - destiny, free to completely control the city council and every public service (fire, police, city hall, public schools, water board, etc) job in the city. In 2012, 90 percent Black Detroit resembles what happens when Black people are left in charge of a major metropolitan area for 40 years.

There's a saying that, "when the last white person leaves a [any city, county, or nation] to be sure to turn the lights out." In Detroit, there is no need for this: Black people lack the capacity (or industriousness when it comes to entrepreneurship) or adroitness in terms of maintaining a civilization to even bother with trying to help keep alive the spark of hope.

Prometheus once gave fire to man, and for that, he was punished. With Detroit in 2012, we see a world that Prometheus himself couldn't bring light too. Because we can't discuss the real reason for 90 percent Black Detroit has failed (it's not because of Democrats), we are all punished, with an increasing number of cities and counties across America doomed to share the same fate as "Mogadishu of the West."