Detroit is at an interesting juncture. On one hand, the city is experiencing a noticeable boom in development and resources. Such however is coming at the expense of longtime Detroiters that have been the soul of this city for generations.
Yada yada yada, you know how these articles generally go. Likely in the past few months, you've probably read some variation of this story from a well-intentioned writer trying to make a narrative breakthrough. Chances are, the article was ripe with statistics, mentions of policy, and an analysis of the immense harm that has been caused to Detroiters. On one hand, these pieces are great crash course for understanding inequality and how it manifests currently in our lives. But on the other hand, these same pieces can be a bit disempowering, mainly because they offer up no clear call to action for folk reading. They often come off as short academic papers written for an audience of more privileged readers and because of it omit the perspectives of folk outside of the petit-bourgeoisie.
Some examples of this framing are:
Centering people who have moved from Detroit because of its lack of amenities, but not engaging Detroiters who don't have the ability to move.
Focusing only on the actions of lawmakers and decisionmakers
Omitting the perspective of community organizations and organizers who are working towards change on the specific issue they're choosing to focus on.
Shock value headlines meant to polarize people
Pathologizing Detroiters with broad generalizations about their values, experiences.
All of these examples are subsets of a larger dominant narrative that has led Detroiters to feel both disillusioned but also disempowered. Since at least the uprising in 1967, we have been told that Detroit is a hell-hole plagued by violence and poverty. It's seen as an embarrassment and the quintessential allegory for post-industrial decline. These jabs have led to folk feeling their city is inadequate, something, I encounter a lot in my work as a community organizer. Because of this, I think its important to start giving a name to the contrivances that make us feel less than. I dub it Doom Journalism.
Perpetrators of this down-trodden narrative are often members of a fraternity of Doom Journalists– beat writers that chronicle Detroit’s history solely through the lens of despair.
If you’re reading this we can agree that the circumstances that affect people’s day-to-day lives here – the poor especially – are inhumane, full stop. But the Doom Journalists are not telling stories from the perspectives of the poor– or even those in shared struggle with them. These are articles where the poor are nothing more than political footballs–allowing writers to add credibility to their own contrivances. If you're able to find a disillusioned Detroiter to satisfy a quote in an article, it's seen as a success. But what narrative are they being invited into? And will they have clarity on how they can work towards solutions?
Often we’re told the role of a journalist is to “cover the facts” or to remain “objective.” It’s something that almost feels patronizing given the clock of the world. While yes, there is a need for reliable information, the press has unfortunately obscured its allegiances to the public. Objectivity appears more like a farce than a reality in our current media landscape. And not In the MAGA "fake news" kinda way. Folk are noticing that the press is choosing to both platform & protect corporations that cause direct harm to our communities.
After all, an article about a large-scale development or policy is not objective; it’s a choice that said development holds priority. Should people know about it? Absolutely. But if that were true, most of this news would not be housed exclusively in platforms like Crains that most Detroiters can't afford. This becomes increasingly true when we consider the stakeholders that consistently utilize the press for their own devices.
In climate organizing we notice that corporations like DTE cause immense environmental and financial harm to families, yet they are given free reign to aggrandize themselves via the press. This is a tension that writers often face. How does one engage the public in difficult truths without overwhelming them into inertia? How does one be critical of power players without alienating them entirely? And who are the people critical to discuss when contextualizing social issues. These are contradictions I generally give some beat writers grace for.
But this is where I think Doom Journalists differ from your common beat writer. They go beyond their limitations to carve out their own longterm beat on the city. Often they're writers of either status or immense controversy. I don’t interpret Doom Journalists as beat writers or folk wading through contradictions. These are class traitors with self-interest not too dissimilar from your common NIMBY ("not In my backyard"). They want a better life for themselves and are wiling to advocate publicly, but they ironically don't want that better life to juxtapose them next to certain people. They're ashamed of poverty and want no proximity to it. I'd argue their analysis is too ruled by shame to reflect upon their contradictions and comfort zones.
What is it?
So what is Doom Journalism actually? Most concise way I can define it is an analysis with a primary lens of despair. I've already given some examples of it but I want to zoom out a bit to interrogate the soul of Doom Journalism.
Doom Journalism centers the decisions of politicians, developers, and corporations, and how their decisions rule the lives of Detroiters. At face value, telling these stories is good. If anything, America’s increasing descent to corporatocracy suggests that the political floor of working class people must be lifted through widely accessible education. But while in a broad sense this critique of inequality appeals to a categorically left-leaning base of people, it fails in activating folk outside of that base. The average person does not read a Doom piece and If they do, It doesn't orient them to organize in their community.
Now granted, organizing is a bit of a loaded term depending on either your politics or the context you are organizing in (grassroots, NPO, mutual aid, etc.). But the clearest way I can define it from my perspective is taking responsibility for developing the agency of folk in your community to collectively obtain change.
We navigate a multimedia day-to-day that can feel like we are jumping from crisis to crisis, and I resolve some of this as a result of the press. We’ve adjusted to high-output news cycles that often leave us unfulfilled and cynical. But more complicatedly, there is a desperate need for folk to be engaging with current events– hence the need for research and writing about social issues and how they impact our lives. Within that, there is also the need to chronicle all of the different actors that influence these events, so that we can develop a better understanding of how we might course correct. Both history, and documentation are incredibly important.
At any point in our history there are changemakers and organizers resisting wide scale harm. Even for a city like Detroit where corporations have facilitated a hostile takeover of our communities, there are grassroots leaders proposing a different context. Like for example, just last year we celebrated the demolition of the incinerator, a large scale pollutant that folk in this region have organized against for 30+ years. This organizing win was a monumental one for a community that had experienced the health outcomes of the incinerator. And while the incinerator was demolished for a mix of economic reasons, its demolition signaled that organizers who had been fighting against it had valuable perspective all along.
But the scope of resistance is not always this grand in scale. Within every neighborhood there are folk organizing. You will always find block club leaders, political strategists, healers, gardeners and everything in between. There are nonprofit organizations dedicated to training residents to organize in their communities. But there is also a wide-array of grassroots organizations that are teaching organizing at the neighborhood level. There are mutual aid circles that are teaching their communities how to build networks of safety and care building greater self-determination. As a matter of fact, we’ve seen an increase in such community leaders in the past 8 years. I say this as a community organizer who was activated as a teenager during the protests in Ferguson. Often, all of these types of resisters and radicals are ignored by Doom Journalists.
But why? Most simply, I posit that Doom Journalists are 1) not of the community and 2) not revolutionaries. They have not clarified for themselves what resistance means and their own role to play in it. Makes total sense; that lack of specificity is the average person’s norm. But what differs about these doomers is that they see their analysis of the surrounding world as more indispensable than others. It's almost analogous to the NPO laborer or academic researcher who sees their role as some sort of divination that can only be bestowed to them. They move about the world assuming that they should lead but never putting themselves in positions of vulnerability where their leadership can be questioned. Resolved, Doom Journalism is conflict avoidant and ego-serving.
While I could stop here , I actually want to be fair and extend a bit of empathy and humanity.
Something that has become clear to me as a community organizer is that often hyper-critique can be a political shield when we’re deeply scared of our oppressors. We want to rally people to a particular social issue because: 1) it holds high priority for us, and 2) because we’re scared that folk won’t be prepared enough to prevent it. When organizing from a place of fear, you often fall into what we call a mobilizing structure. You are willing to activate your communities around a common cause but you don’t yet have the discipline to gauge how they might play a part in building change with you. People are far too complex to just be soldiers or task doers. They need clear opportunities to get involved in spaces where they have choices and decision making power.
I don’t think that Doom Journalists are all that different from the organizer facing this internal struggle. Often their class status grants them access to discussions that the average person isn’t having. This privilege allows a person to both observe but also articulate the intricacies of inequality. It however does not grant one the immediate clarity of how to organize folk in their community. On one hand political analysis and foresight are gifts. But also if political conversations stay theoretical in nature, one might not take agency over what is directly in front of them. At some point one has to make invitations to people in order to organize with them. This can be an uncomfortable experience but it is necessary.
“Effective organizers operate beyond the bounds of their comfort zones, moving into what we might call their “stretch zone,” when necessary. No one has to be able to work with everyone, but how far beyond the bounds of easy agreement can you reach? How much empathy can you extend to people who do not fully understand your identity or experience or who have not had the same access to liberatory ideas? How much discomfort can you navigate for what you believe is truly at stake?” - Let This Radicalize You by Kelly E. Hayes & Miriame Kaba
Obscuring organizing opportunities is the limitation of just covering the facts. It proposes that the actions of decision makers are the only consequential actions in the public arena. But additionally, this framing can be disembodying for folk in the community. When one learns to hate and fear their own hometown, they then project those same perceptions onto folks. This has been a consistent sticking point in regards to public safety where well-intentioned residents advocate for more policing despite the low returns of policing as the primary form of public safety.
This means that intention is actually critical to any narrative of Detroit. Skillful narrative can set the emotional stage for greater organized action.
So how do We Course Correct?
I know that I can be a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to articles but its often cause I’m curious about the intentions behind articles. Often I ask writers, “Why Detroit?”. Or similarly, “Why did you write this story?”. The response is generally some variation of ‘I wanted people to know about it.’ That’s generally where I ask the follow up question of “what did you want people to know about it”, at which point there’s a bit of radio static.
We have been told that Detroit is a destitute city, condemned by the loss of jobs, opportunity, and safety. We’ve been told that black folk are incapable of governing themselves and that the only solution is austerity.
“In Detroit specifically, a prolonged dominant negative narrative has profiled the city’s residents as inherently dangerous and incapable of self-determination. The fact that the city suffers great economic poverty, i.e. a medium income of less than $27,000 per year is rarely considered. What is also rarely considered is the history of disruption and destruction of viable black led communities through the leveling of neighborhoods for freeways and other forms of imminent domain. Because of this, greater efforts are needed to reinforce opportunities that create true safety, outside of increased policing and mass surveillance, including facial recognition systems.”- Tawana Petty, Stanford PACS
These disparaging narratives set the basis for policy that harms our communities. For example, we see investments in surveillance like Shotspotter and Project Greenlight under the guise of violence prevention. Or, we forfeit over millions in tax abatements to billionaires because we’re told that they create jobs. When we don’t wrestle with these dominant narratives, we are doomed to perpetuate them. But most importantly, when our analysis only stays in an academic context, our politics never have to come into conflict with folk outside of our bubble. We develop an almost anthropological understanding of working class people, but not a personal one.
Doom Journalists’ audience is not the most impacted Detroiter: disabled, queer, elderly, poor, etc. Their audience is people whose economic situation is less precarious than those aforementioned identities– impacted folk who rightfully feel entitled to dignity but sadly are not accountable enough to join others in seizing it. Doomers are often not in community with the poor, because being such would require them to work outside of their social settings. After all, it’s much easier to talk to folk who share class and academic status.
Doomers should consider what communities are in their blind spots and learn more about them. But also they could consider where their writing can both educate and activate the community. Building awareness of social inequality is a necessary baseline for moving someone into action, but awareness itself does not foster action. Practice does.
So what could that practice look like?
Generate
Curiosity, courage, and leadership
Genuine relationships with impacted residents and organizers
Calls to action for your readers that go beyond just clicks. Its enticing to make decisions solely based on analytics (likes, reposts) but there is more required of people in the physical world.
Share organizations weighing in on these issues. Hold them accountable to offering perspective & resources.
Understand that
You are capable of harm.
The need for surviving off our work is a contradiction. Clarify your stretch zones. Where are you unable to negotiate?
Working class people need greater access to the press
Ask yourself?
Who are my people?
What is their problem?
What resources do they have that they can use in new ways to obtain change?
What is the Dominant Narrative here in Detroit?
Do I agree?
What is the song I want stuck in people’s heads about Detroit
Why?
How can my work empower folk to take greater action in their communities?
Once you have done this work, you are on the path to unpacking where your work fits in the bigger picture of class struggle. While these are not the only questions you should ask, they are a few that I think start to develop intentions. At every point of your work, return to those intentions. Lean on your community for support and reflection. Interrogate if you could be stretching more and talking to more folk. There are always opportunities to form meaningful connections. You just have to want to.
Where Can Organizers Support?
Organizers could be inviting folk in the press into organizing contexts. While writers have certain limitations on what public political stances they can be taking, there are alot of ripe opportunities that organizers leave on the table. In order for us to resist a Doom Narrative of our city, we have to be unafraid to invite our personal networks into a Visionary one. If all we do is complain and minimize our organizing to just winning vs. losing, we are not inviting our communities to be a part of change. We're wanting to protect our own feelings because we fear that they will judge us. So we should:
Generate
Relationships with folks in your community that you feel accountable to. Building relationships allows you to make decisions informed by actual data. But also offers you greater negotiating power with the press.
Genuine relationships with journalists. Check in regularly. Have off-the-record conversations about current events and develop a shared analysis of the political arena.
Narrative agreements with community members you are organizing with. Ask them if they feel comfortable with being featured in coverage of your organizing. But also facilitate relationships between them and journalists.
Understand
You are capable of harm
The self-interest of journalists and the platforms they write for. Some newsrooms are liberal. Some are conservative. Some are radical. Develop a thorough understanding of their values and how they might engage with your organizing.
Dog-whistles that express contempt, indifference, or alignment.
In general, there is a lot of work to be done in not only addressing dominant narratives. There is a need to both call out doom when we see it and develop our community’s ability to do the same. But additionally, we can form generative narratives that instill clarity and hope. Given the circumstances we’re living in, fear will not sustain us beyond peak moments for mobilizations. Only hope will.
Critical Readings that might help idk
Poet and Organizer- Tawana Petty on Visionary Resistance, Social Justice & Tech
Let this Radicalize You by Kelly E. Hayes & Miriame Kaba
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown
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