For the most part, I’ve put Detroit out of my mind since I’m 15 years removed from living there, but something mentioned at a wedding the other week brought back some memories. The best man at a wedding reception we were at in Grand Rapids went on a long, rambling, uninteresting, insider-only speech that seemed to last forever. The newly-married couple are coworkers and were being reassigned to work at their company’s Detroit office. The best man then makes an offhand comment about how the only way someone would move to Detroit would be because of a job relocation. This brought an angry murmur from the coworkers of the couple who lived in Detroit. Judging from the tone of his voice, I don’t think the best man was joking when he said it. For anyone not living in metro Detroit, the anti-Detroit bias is still alive and well.

One thing you will notice about Detroiters is they are fiercely proud of being from Detroit even though there are so many negative connotations associated with the city. It stems from being ganged up on by the rest of the nation. Any visiting newspaper writer will always take the stereotypical potshots at the city while they are in town. It gets tiring to read about a city that you love being constantly ridiculed in the press, even for those of us who have left the area for greener pastures elsewhere.

What makes all this frustrating is that by 1960, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the nation. It was the center of the automotive world, other massive manufacturing companies were also based here, and the blue-collar-middle-upper-class dream was a reality. Then the race riots happened in 1967 and the city was literally destroyed. The city was under martial law, houses burned down, and everyone left the city, leaving it a devastated hulk of its former self. Then Detroit began a cycle of self-destruction by electing and re-electing mayor Coleman A. Young who ran the city into the ground for 20 years. He practiced the politics of racial division and alienated all of suburban Detroit, creating a city that became an isolated island of abandoned houses, crumbling infrastructure and staggering poverty.

Unfortunately I lived in Detroit during this dark period from 1975-1990. It was not a place to raise a kid at this time but that was where we lived. I can’t recall how many times our house was broken into, including one time where they tried to set it on fire. It got to the point where we had iron bars on all our lower level windows, making us prisoners inside our own house. People tried to break in the house while we were in it and the only reason they stopped was because my great uncle/adopted father aimed his gun at their heads and threatened to shoot. Our car windows were shot out with regularity but since our cars were so junky and old, they didn’t get stolen like others in the neighborhood. The one time I got a new bike, it was stolen in less than a week by 2 kids on another bike who attacked me and knocked me out. I've seen my neighbor get drunk and shoot at people. I've heard the shotgun blast of my next door neighbor when he blew his head off. There are tons of other incidents but that would fill up a month’s worth of blog posts.

With all that being said, there were positive things about the city even in its darkest moments. When I visited the city a few years after Comerica Park was opened, I actually felt quite jealous. The downtown area was being revitalized, there were new baseball and football stadiums downtown, condominium developments were popping up and I realized I had lived in the city’s darkest years of its history. The baseball All Star Game was a success this season and the Super Bowl is coming to town in February. Like most big cities, it still has its warts but it still is better than how the city used to be. It’s no Chicago or New York, but it’s located in a beautiful state surrounded by lakes and Canadians.

I do worry about the immediate city’s future. Even though Dennis Archer succeeded Coleman A Young, revitalized the city, reached out to suburban Detroit to lure back businesses, and got Detroit back on track, his successor, Kwame Kilpatrick seems to have channeled the ghost of ol’ Coleman. He’s a brash, loudmouthed, pimp-suit-wearing, massive-diamond-earring-wearing practicer of corruption, racial hate, and government ineptitude and he just got re-elected.

To go back to Smarmy Best Man’s Comments at the wedding in Grand Rapids, it still seems to be that the rest of the world still gangs up on Detroit and for those who still live there, it seems as though half their time is defending the city that they live in. Even though most wouldn’t live in the city, I’ll put some of the suburbs up with any major metropolitan area in the country. Why do I still get riled up when people denigrate Detroit, even though I’m not from there any more? To paraphrase an old line – “It’s a Detroit thing. You wouldn’t understand.” Once you live in a place for an extended period of time, it grows on you and you can’t explain it to others the emotions that you feel. It might be a Rust Belt city, but that’s MY Rust Belt city you’re talking about. I liken it to white people not being able to use the “N” word. Well, the same rule applies to non-Detroiters talking about Detroit.