I just finished reading a book. It’s called Shot in Detroit and was written by Patricia Abbott. The premise is a white, female photographer takes pictures of young, dead black men in Detroit. The story takes place in 2011, while it was published in 2016. Being only sixteen right now, when I started reading it, it was about a time that I don’t really remember on a large scale. I turned ten in 2011 and entered fifth grade. That’s what I remember. The narrator was talking about how bad Detroit was and I had kind of forgotten that it’s only been pretty recently that it’s been turning around. The book frequently talked about landmarks and places throughout the metro area and it’s really been making me reflect on my own experience of living in a suburb of Detroit.
Living in metro Detroit, there’s alway been a sort of pull to the city. The Tigers, Red Wings, the strange attachment to cars, I don’t know, just things that make you feel like you don’t just live in a suburb outside of the city, like you’re actually part of it. Yet, at the same time, I’ve felt a detachment, too. When I was a kid I wondered why our so called local news isn’t actually local. The weather report for our direct area? Nonexistent. It kind of felt like my town didn’t matter. It doesn’t really, but I’m okay with it now that I know the world is a lot bigger.
I’m going to tell you a kind of odd metaphor, but trust me, it’s accurate. The suburban life is like there’s a huge cake, but you only are about a small patch of frosting. Sure, you can take a bite of the actual cake if you want to, but you only actually care about it on rare occasions. The frosting is where you are at and where it’s nice to be. Sometimes you may visit better, more decadent patches of frosting, or even crappier ones, but for the most part you stay where you are. The frosting relies on the cake, so there is a sense of unity and pride about being part of the cake, but for the most part the frosting doesn’t bother with the cake. An unfortunate thing is that the cake used to be kind of crappy, while the frosting was much better. Fortunately the cake is becoming back to former high quality glory. It’s not there yet, but it will be eventually. Or not, I can’t predict the future. That’s what it’s like living in a suburb of Detroit for myself. I mean, in the form of a metaphor that compares it to cake.
I thought I knew about Detroit. I had field trips in elementary school to museums where I learned about old time Detroit or the car industry or something like that. A trip to the DIA(Detroit Institute of Art) in middle school. I thought I knew. I was wrong. Reading this book was like another step on this mental journey that I’ve been on. The more I continue on this journey, the more that I know that I want to become a lawyer. I’m sure. My ideas are becoming more liberal and I am understanding social issues on a deeper and more empathetic level than I did before. Than I did at the beginning of the summer when I posted my first blog on here. I am growing as a person and it’s upon reflection like this that I can tell how I’ve changed. I care more than I used to. I was much more apathetic. Apathetic was how I went about feeling about these things, but now I just can’t not care about the world anymore.
I know that I owe part of this to having gone to the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute in July at Wayne State University in midtown Detroit. That was the summer program that I wrote about previously. I wanted to maintain being almost completely anonymous, including to my location, but the only way that I can truly make sense of and let my readers into how I genuinely feel is if you guys can understand where I am coming from. Literally. And I’m only isolating myself to the metro area, which is not small by any means.
RBSI was an impactful experience. It was one of those times in your life where you don’t really understand what it meant for you to go through that until afterwards. It’s been over a month since it ended and I’m just now seeing how it shaped me as a person. Eight and a half days. That’s all it took. The first day we went on this bus tour of Detroit. I learned a lot from it. But I am also the kind of person who was unsettled by the tour guide’s lack of caring about gentrification. She seemed delighted by it. Maybe that’s putting her into an undeserved bad light. I think that she was glad that Detroit was finally getting back on its feet, so it was more ignorance than something sinister. That lady knows a bunch of facts about Detroit, so it’s not that she doesn’t love the city. I can understand why someone can be so happy that something good is finally happening that they can ignore the bad parts that go with it. I still don’t agree or like that she didn’t even mention the word gentrification.
So I learned facts about Detroit during that time, but I also learned about people and race issues. There was a pretty big focus on the 1967 Riots(there’s a term that they’re supposed to be called, but I don’t remember what it is and I feel bad about that) which was most likely because the fiftieth anniversary was this year and actually was the week after we finished the program. I knew next to nothing about the riots before going there, but we did visit where the riots started the first day on that bus tour. It’s just a park now, with a neighborhood right next to it. We even spent an afternoon with two people from Black Lives Matter. To be honest, we did so many things during that time that it would take multiple blog posts to contain it all.
I know that if I hadn’t gone to RBSI, I wouldn’t feel like I do now. I had thought that my eyes were open. I really did. I realized last night that I was squinting. I was squinting and now they’re open. The thing that makes me irritated with myself is I thought that what I saw in my limited, squinted view was just about all there was to see. Maybe I could have opened them a bit wider is what I had thought, but I was so wrong. My eyes feel open now. I know. I was ignorant. Now I know.
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