[P2P-F] Fwd: ZNet Daily Commentary: Power Grows From Motor City Soil By Betsy Catlin

Wed Jan 30 13:17:14 CET 2013

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Date: Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 6:34 PM
Subject: ZNet Daily Commentary: Power Grows From Motor City Soil By Betsy
Catlin
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Power Grows From Motor City Soil

January 29, 2013 By *Betsy Catlin*

Betsy Catlin's ZSpace
Page<http://email.zsustainers.org/wf/click?upn=xrLDuKs9E-2FW2gJyS-2BCwKWwqejxOUzTFczw65YAHq4GoCoUoQKyVppTxEr2gZGWcBRlcwacodEJ292N-2FpBbKa2Q-3D-3D_V-2FUUiW5KvBPNV-2FItFYsbuIFOqr58NacNTIV3-2FGcH-2BSAFzX4H0Xm-2BSNFz8uqMhfaD7MCCXvPt1Qh2Ur5zB5f9iP-2BXDzD-2Btq82hWhF-2BmybS55B9YXntiSlSMwSuyws96wUeZk0ykFcRg4RnzFCTeZ4uCZ7pKqwlflbD04tfkCooWA-3D>/
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On Dec. 10, 2012, hundreds of Detroiters lined up outside of The East Lake
Baptist Church, braving the cold for the last of a series of public
hearings on “the Hantz Woodlands deal.” At stake was the “largest
speculative land
sale<http://email.zsustainers.org/wf/click?upn=xrLDuKs9E-2FW2gJyS-2BCwKW3V6o0Grhm8lXNxbYiemIuAGIfn84DEw62q4pAAmeY9ozXE9Dyo-2BuWlbgl4eQ5zcoH9BRM1sx1LvHTNReh5Uqlrrp27hG0kzFSg-2BeyaiI9aCq8h-2F-2B23NaPQBAs4MvgQNCQ-3D-3D_V-2FUUiW5KvBPNV-2FItFYsbuIFOqr58NacNTIV3-2FGcH-2BSAFzX4H0Xm-2BSNFz8uqMhfaD7MCCXvPt1Qh2Ur5zB5f9iOglBgkB6Ddl-2BYRnhol0h7ypRSKCZDVXDiosPTEB1XW54Oi5356433hK3ihZde-2BlaOSEckNpw16dbKOr5Lufk8Q-3D>in
the city’s history”: 140 acres comprised of 1,500 lots of city land.
Local multi-millionaire John Hantz wanted to turn this plot into a large
timber farm that would be, as he promised, “Detroit’s saving
grace<http://email.zsustainers.org/wf/click?upn=xrLDuKs9E-2FW2gJyS-2BCwKW7fMEg-2BInVTLc5Bs-2FNEWNN0axzKqX-2B-2ByoJMi4786-2BZWBSYJgbSCtHubf6CkPJZGyFQ-3D-3D_V-2FUUiW5KvBPNV-2FItFYsbuIFOqr58NacNTIV3-2FGcH-2BSAFzX4H0Xm-2BSNFz8uqMhfaD7MCCXvPt1Qh2Ur5zB5f9iND6lNADPpsUKQzwOXOCoI9naHU6BfuZ9tQNDVeShvmBUkZNiWBXUty-2BdjBgovgguZeDjs5HlHsrIXYbMPHDitI-3D>.”
But the hundreds of residents waiting outside had another idea of what
saving the land could mean: They wanted the city to sell individual vacant
plots at affordable prices for people to plant community gardens.

Despite the public outcry, the council accepted Hantz’s bid to buy the land
— an outcome that dismayed Charity Hicks, co-founder of the Detroit Food
Justice Task Force.

“We have lost the ability to think collectively about our own interests in
the public political sphere,” she said. “Our public policy is completely
distorted, and John Hantz represents that kind of corruption of our
governance.”

The Hantz deal symbolizes a broader battle occurring in Detroit: the
struggle over who will control the rebuilding of a major American city
after the decline of its industry. The city that was the home of
manufacturing in the United States in the 20th century is poised to become
once again a city of producers. But today, power is growing from the ground
up thanks to Detroiters who are giving new meanings to value and work by
redefining their relationship with the land, themselves and each other.

*‘Our work’*

To Charity Hicks, there is something liberating about a city that has, in
her own words, undergone “profound collapse.”

“You get to remake yourself,” she said. “You get to re-imagine yourself.
You get to reawaken to new possibilities of being.”

These possibilities are growing in more than 1,000 urban gardens and three
full-scale farms that now cover the once-industrial landscape. These farms,
tied together by various networks and coalitions, are transforming the way
Detroiters relate to the food system. “[Right now] our primary and
predominant role is that of consumer,” explains Shea Howell, a member of
the Boggs Center<http://email.zsustainers.org/wf/click?upn=bnbUouWB28gJE3xtJuNG4XSqjP641wN4sT4yB-2Bv0Of0-3D_V-2FUUiW5KvBPNV-2FItFYsbuIFOqr58NacNTIV3-2FGcH-2BSAFzX4H0Xm-2BSNFz8uqMhfaD7MCCXvPt1Qh2Ur5zB5f9iIMtUN4EOmI4wc81I11719ME3Me9hy3yacL-2BueaElYDpGWgWDlhTQPDqb-2BMF1oTQMGL6RH-2FdN-2FcyQnzGfVVzcWU-3D>and
a community activist with the Detroit Black Food Security Network. But
the urban agricultural movement is changing the way Detroiters define their
work and their own individual and collective value.

The Black Food Security Network reports that although Detroit’s population
is 85 percent African-American, there are only two African-American-owned
grocery stores in the city. To address this fact, the Detroit Food Justice
Task Force runs a host of initiatives aimed at achieving food sovereignty
for Detroit’s residents. There are community meals that include education
about urban farming and institutional racism; campaigns to fight against
genetically-modified foods; legislative initiatives to make city land
available for long-term community leases; gardening scholarships, workshops
and roundtable discussions; and, of course, hundreds of active farming
operations inside the city’s limits.

For many residents, traditional employment is hard to come by. Official
statistics report that 30 percent of Detroit is unemployed — but in 2010
Mayor Dave Bing said that he believed real unemployment to be closer to 50
percent<http://email.zsustainers.org/wf/click?upn=xrLDuKs9E-2FW2gJyS-2BCwKW3V6o0Grhm8lXNxbYiemIuCM3M5Q3hufnKeyu0PQ8MD-2BD7P5ruL-2BKHf7F29Lo8AFFlTFqeZY2D6gmzz7pA1YIAKtbEY1bQ9HXZ98DT-2F7nhmf_V-2FUUiW5KvBPNV-2FItFYsbuIFOqr58NacNTIV3-2FGcH-2BSAFzX4H0Xm-2BSNFz8uqMhfaD7MCCXvPt1Qh2Ur5zB5f9iJAbWH1dGeugvaADDymZdxw6C6O4Xz3yNsJclIBth7d5ANhKgh3a4vN0IVq8iTgz79IvSjseUgHhdEPmEXFZIP0-3D>
.

“When we lost our jobs, most of us went into a depression, because for most
of us the majority of our identity is in what we do,” said Hicks. “If you
don’t have access to a job then who are you? What are you? We started
asking those questions.” Through the urban farming movement, she has found
that many realized, “We are more than a job! We didn’t die. We still live
here. We’re not ghosts.”

“Now people don’t say ‘our jobs,’” she said. “They call it ‘our work.’”

In this way, urban farming is not only replacing disappeared jobs; it is
also redefining the very substance and philosophy of work by asking
questions about what the meaning of work should be in the first place.

To Wayne and Myrtle Curtis, founders of Freedom Freedom Growers, a farm on
Detroit’s East Side, work is about meeting collective needs. “[The jobs] we
once had didn’t satisfy our needs,” they wrote on their website. Instead,
they desire work that respects their community, themselves and the earth.
The collapse of industry in Detroit and the organizing that has followed
make it possible to try again.

*The roots of the movement*

Detroit is a place where labor, manufacturing and race relations have
intersected to create a deep history of organizing. The city was a center
of the labor movement during the 20th century, when it gave birth to
powerful unions like the United Auto Workers. It was one of the centers of
the Black Power and Pan-African movements, the home of The League of
Revolutionary Black Workers, and the birthplace of The Nation of Islam.

“This was one of the first cities where Black Power talked about a
different kind of city,” said Shea Howell.

This history of Detroit as a stronghold of labor and African-American
organizing has been lost in the story often told of Detroit’s collapse,
which included a 60-percent decline in the city’s population since 1950.
Charity Hicks summarized the faulty narrative about Detroit: “It is really
poor. It has collapsed. It is the most blighted area in North America.”

In this narrative, “Capitalists are not to blame,” she explains. “But the
people of Detroit are.”

To Hicks, this story, which places the fault of Detroit’s collapse on the
city’s residents and particularly the African-Americans who stayed after
the factories chased cheaper labor overseas, is mere propaganda. The real
story of Detroit’s decline is the intermingling of deindustrialization,
capital flight and fear sparked by radical African-American organizing.
Beginning in the 1950s, middle-class white families fled the city center to
white-only suburbs. Thousands more followed after the Detroit Rebellion of
1967, which was sparked by outrage at the racial inequality in the city,
particularly policing in African-American neighborhoods.

Yet, through the city’s food sovereignty movement, Detroiters are
countering that narrative of Detroit’s collapse to reflect a city that is
building a new kind of future — one rooted in its long movement history.* *

*Land is the basis of power*

Today’s gardens in Detroit grew out of a long history of urban farming that
begins with the Great Migration: the wave of six million African Americans
who moved northward from the South throughout the 20th century. In Detroit,
some of these migrants brought with them their agricultural roots. They
formed a group called “the Gardening Angels” in the 1980s. The movement
grew food both for sustenance and to bestow the traditions of the elders to
the youth, who had little connection to the earlier generation’s
agricultural knowledge.

The politics of this urban gardening movement grew out of the core tenets
of the Black Power and the Pan-Africanist movements — political
orientations that are still alive in today’s food generation of farmers.
Malik Yakini is the director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security
Network and was formerly a member of the Pan-African Congress in the 1970s,
which held the position that land is the basis of power.

In a recent Facebook
post<http://email.zsustainers.org/wf/click?upn=-2FajTbpohXNFQ9BX1OchEDorTub2WngJI1m8L8f0xIHYA-2F4fQ1btV2EIy1y-2FnGcIEQjHbuwbBS7uP19wVd-2F-2FLvx6aP8GP-2BfB5A9D4BDrvQdE-3D_V-2FUUiW5KvBPNV-2FItFYsbuIFOqr58NacNTIV3-2FGcH-2BSAFzX4H0Xm-2BSNFz8uqMhfaD7MCCXvPt1Qh2Ur5zB5f9iBSOLcE3m-2FJ6E0DksW5Cosanxg6WLt7s6oef60KGIer2D8bXMZfj6sZ-2FVDkzj-2Fo8NVmwoj2g35dNomvTv24C4d0-3D>regarding
the Hantz Woodlands deal, Yakini articulated that position again,
which holds a significant meaning in light of the present struggle. Amidst
a landscape dominated by blighted structures and vacant lots, this
philosophy reflects not only the idea that land sustains life but also that
it builds community and allows one to create a sense of home, identity and
belonging in a place. This is all the more necessary in neighborhoods that
have been deeply fractured by the incarceration of African-American males
and neighborhood violence due to the war on drugs.

Hicks explains that for her as “an African-descendant-American woman,”
Detroit is a “city of profound violence and murder” but also “profound
possibility.” “It is a place of trying to repair black people’s identity
and self-worth,” she said. In Detroit, which has the largest percentage of
African-American residents of any major U.S. city, the idea that land is
the basis of power has become not only about food sovereignty and
self-determination but also about re-planting African-American cultural
roots deep enough to regrow community.

*The battle between two futures*

As the emerging possibilities in Detroit become ever more evident, Charity
Hicks asks, “Whose possibility is Detroit the place of?”

Municipal and state political leaders, as well as large landowners, are
confronting the new power being sewn from below with increasing resistance.
The Hantz Woodlands deal, passed despite community outrage, is only one of
a slew of recent power grabs.

Late last year, Michigan governor Rick Snyder signed both the Right to Work
law, which attacks labor power, and the Emergency Financial Manager law,
which could lead to the state’s full-scale takeover of Detroit’s municipal
finances. The fact that these laws and deals passed in spite of so much
public opposition was not an unexpected outcome for many Detroiters, who
are growing accustomed to city and state officials disregarding the voices
of their constituents with the demeaning excuse that the people don’t know
what’s best for them.

But to Shea Howell, these moves also signal something new — and positive.
“We are now posing not just some little alternatives here and there,” she
said. “These alternatives are now beginning to suggest a totally different
direction for the city.”

“Detroit becomes two worlds,” Hicks explains. On the one hand, it is “the
world of possibility, of the emergence of a new way of life, a new
understanding, a kind of re-emergence of our humanity.” But on the other,
it is “the old status quo of perpetual growth and the capitalist constantly
making a profound return on the dollar.”

The battle for a new direction for Detroit resembles similar struggles in
many crisis-ridden urban areas — especially those experiencing the
consequences of storms like Katrina and Sandy. As climate change continues,
we’re sure to see more neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward and Far
Rockaway: communities struggling to rebuild while abandoned by capital and
the political elite. In these neighborhoods, people will be left to rebuild
as they have been doing in Detroit in the decay of industrialism.

As Shea Howell says, “Detroit is so compelling, in the way that Chiapas is
so compelling, because you can see places where real liberation is actually
happening — not in its fullness, certainly not, but enough that we know
that there can be a better future.”
 ------------------------------

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