ABSTRACT
As he was campaign manager for Coleman Young in his 1977 re-election campaign, it would be too strong to say that Dennis Archer later disassociated himself from the stewardship of his predecessor. In a meeting with Young in 1991 he pointed out that he was working on a new vision for Detroit but that he still ‘felt like a son . . . telling a father that I have admired a lot of things you’ve been able to do and accomplish inside the city of Detroit’ (quoted in Bohy, 1991: 50). Although he had spent part of his childhood in Detroit’s African American community, Archer, as a former member of a top law firm and Michigan Supreme Court Justice, was not a ‘street man’ in the mould of Young. At the root of his vision for Detroit was adherence to a view that to stabilize and revitalize the city required bridge-building, negotiation and compromise with the suburbs and the white business élite. It is a vision that sees cultural separatism as an economic dead end for African Americans. The vision has been the assertion of the possibility of a multicultural city in a regional context where persistent racism makes this an uphill task, risking the personal charge of being ‘a silk-stocking elitist’, a synonym for ‘the white man’s candidate’ (Bohy, 1991: ibid. 51). The tone of the two Planning and Development Department directors appointed under Archer was far removed from the outlook of the separatist Ron Hewitt. The first, Gloria Robinson, an African American and professional planner by training, points to how Archer had not played the ‘victim card’ in the manner of Young but also points to the ‘difficulty of sending an inclusive cultural message to the suburbs when the mayor knows the reality of the real racism which is out there driving sprawl’ (Robinson, 1999). Paul Bernard, her successor, also an African American planner and likewise exuding confidence and cultural pride, states plainly that the continued pursuance of a separatist identity for Detroit would have been a mistake. The aspiration is for ‘a city where diversity is celebrated and different people can live side by side’ (Bernard, 1999). The aspiration is for what the poet bell hooks has called a ‘progressive multiculturalism’ where people of colour unite not in order to separate from ‘mainstream’ culture but to claim an equal place within a multicultural democracy (hooks, 1995: 203). This expresses an optimism of the will over a pessimism of the intellect undoubtedly present at the heart of the Archer administration in Detroit. As hooks points out:
More than ever in our history, black Americans are succumbing to and
internalising the racist assumption that there can be no meaningful bonds of
intimacy between blacks and whites (hooks, 1995: 269).
