So far, suggestions have ranged from more focus on Detroit’s positives like culture and the arts, sports, opportunities for young people, urban gardens… Here’s the deal, though – I see these kinds of stories reported every day. Panel moderators Bill Mitchell and Nichole Christian asked Jennette Pierce of Inside Detroit, one of the participants in the conversation, where she thinks responsibility lies – is it the media’s responsibility to inform people, or do people have a personal responsibility to inform themselves? Pierce says both. As any reporter will tell you, you can write stories until you’re blue in the face, but you can’t make people read them…

Another participant, the Rev. Simmons (whose first name I didn’t catch) just raised an interesting question – how do you talk about Detroit’s warts? Simmons, who lives in Brightmoor, says he doesn’t see his reality reflected in mainstream media coverage. He says his life is neither rah-rah electronic music and sports nor Dodge City, get your guns… and most of the coverage he sees lies on one extreme.

I would like to add a caveat here, though as a Crain’s Detroit Business reporter I probably shouldn’t be promoting another publication - a writer named Detroitblogger John, in my opinion, consistently does some of the best journalism in Detroit. His byline often appears in the Metro Times. John is a faithful chronicler of the soul of Detroit, and his love for the city and its people comes through in everything he writes.

I think this is an example of the question Bill and Nichole were asking… if a journalist does great work, but no one is there to hear the tree fall…

Even the Internet, he says, was originally conceived of as a tool for elites – the military and academia. But then regular folks got ahold of it.

That begs the question, in my opinion – isn’t the Internet still a tool for elites? As in, you have to have access to a computer and Internet access to use it? Despite the best efforts of public libraries, Internet access is hardly ubiquitous. Though it certainly seems that way to those of us who have it.

Malcolm Dade: Help has to begin with us but doesn’t preclude our reaching out to wherever – you build coalitions locally and nationally.

Marcella Wilson: Help is coming, and it’s real… the Obama administration is demanding that if we receive money in this city, we have to be working collaboratively.

David Feund: When cities were great, it was a result of public-private partnerships. We have to have that again, but it must be a more equitable version.

That folks in the past got by just on plain, old-fashioned hard work is a myth, he says. People worked hard, but when you see people of various ethnic backgrounds, all working hard, with extremely different outcomes, you should ask questions. The myth that everyone who worked hard got ahead is missing something, Freund says.

If the “problem” is one leader – Coleman Young, for example – or the riots, then we get the wrong answer.

If our problems were caused by one bad leader, then all we need is one good leader, Fike says – except that’s not really going to fix Detroit’s problems.

That Detroit has “black neighborhoods” and “white neighborhoods” isn’t an accident, he says.

“The story of the real estate industry is not just one of white flight but also one of directing choice, limiting choice, for minorities in the metropolitan area,” Sugrue said.

Post-war, the federal government instituted policies to encourage homeownership, he says.

“It made possible large-scale homeownership, even among blue-collar workers who could not previously afford a home,” he says.

These programs raised homeownership from 30 percent to 60 percent, but African-Americans were often excluded from programs because of systemic discrimination. African-American neighborhoods were not deemed suitable for home loans by governmental criteria.

And white homeowners passionately and often violently resisted black “encroachment” into white neighborhoods. When they couldn’t drive new black residents out, whites left, en masse, becoming absentee landlords, or abandoning property outright…

The ultimate result? The disinvestment we see now in many Detroit neighborhoods, and perception of a lack of common interest between suburban metro Detroiters and city dwellers.

Sugrue says that when he takes white folks who grew up in the city back to the old neighborhood, the most common reaction isn’t sadness about the policies that led to instutionalized discrimination, or the disappearance of jobs that led to economic equality. Rather, he said, whites often say, “look what ‘they’ve’ done to ‘our’ neighborhood.”

SMH, y’all. SMH.

It’s hard to separate myth and legend about Detroit’s decline from fact, he says, and most myths are persistent and pernicious – he’s fond of the word “pernicious,” for which this language nerd gives him points.

Some commonly believed myths considered causes of the city’s problems:
. That the federal social safety net created a cycle of dependency that hasn’t been broken
. That poor people behave badly, and have thus created and/or deserve their circumstances
. That it’s the result of the rise to power of black radicals – “aided and abetted by ‘misguided’ white liberals” – who seized city government and alienated “regular white people.”
. That Detroit was a thriving city until the 1967 riots, and that the riots were the pivot point for the city. It’s a myth, he says, that’s particularly persistent among white residents, and puts far too much weight on a single incident.
. Coleman Young

All of this conventional wisdom has bits of truth, he says, but the real answer is policy decisions, the flight of capital and commerce away from the city and persistent segregation in housing.

“The flight of capital, discriminination, the Balkanization of the metro area because of politics… that all three occured silmutaneously, that all interacted with each other, that they were mutually reinforcing, had devestating consequences,” Sugrue says.

Detroit lost 144,000 manufacturing jobs between 1947 and 1963, before globalization, before competition from Asian automakers… the city’s economic decline started in what’s considered the “golden years” of Detroit’s prosperity.

Detroit, as cliche went, was “arsenal of democracy,” and job-seekers streamed in from the South, expecting an enlightened work environment, only to often be stymied by the same kind of insitutionalized discrimination they’d fled.

He’s telling the story of an African-American auto worker who couldn’t find work in post-war Detroit… in contrast, his dad, a young white kid who didn’t really want an auto job and didn’t have a great track record, was consistently able to find employment.

Entry-level jobs started to to disappear as business owners sought a lower-tax climate, and labor-saving technology that eliminated the same jobs was introduced.

“Jobs that provided the first rungs of economic opportunity were disappearing,” he said.

Detroit lost 144,000 manufacturing jobs between 1947 and 1963, Sugrue said, before globalization, before competition from Asian automakers… the city’s economic decline started in what’s considered the “golden years” of Detroit’s prosperity.

Right now, he’s talking about the contrast between the neighborhood where he grew up – Chalfonte and Santa Rosa – and the neighborhood as it is today – unrecognizable to his ancestors, he says.

The neighborhood is 99 percent African-American, and in the 2000 U.S. Census, about 12 percent of its residents were unemployed, a statistic that was likely underreported 10 years ago and is sure to rise after the 2010 Census. Poverty was high in 2000 – in the middle of the tech boom, Sugrue notes, and a disproportionate number of residents are disabled. And this isn’t the poorest or most blighted neighborhood in Detroit.

But this neighborhood, he says, “tells us in microcosm” the history of working-class Detroit, and of urban America over the last half-century.

The question to ask is deceptively simple, he says – why?

That question encompasses poverty, racial segregation, disinvestment, unemployment… the answer is far more complicated. Stay tuned…