Have you heard about the ruckus in Detroit? The Detroit City Council wants to declare the dilapidated city “Africa Town” and siphon off more taxpayers’ money for yet more skin color preferences. In other words, they expect the public to pay for their pity party.
Devoid of fresh ideas and innovative approaches, as well as spiritual and moral solutions to Detroit’s many problems, politicians with too little real work to do come up with one hare-brained scheme after another. There’s nothing new under the sun.
In the opinion of the very opinionated Laura Berman, the plan is illegal and racist. She doesn’t like us “right-wing ideologues” much, but she’s on target in this op-ed. Berman writes:
It’s wacky, irresponsible, arguably racist, almost surely illegal. Mostly, though, the Detroit City Council’s $30 million-a-year plan for Africa Town is a painful wail of the city’s abject failure to help black Detroiters move forward.On Monday, the council authorized the city to earmark $30 million a year for a race-based entrepreneurial zone that would be called Africa Town.
They based this action on the report of creative thinker Carl Anderson and his PowerNomics Corp. — a $112,000 report that argues the city’s black majority is acting like a minority, despite political power, spending power, and the power of sheer numbers.
And — try to follow this — because the majority isn’t starting businesses or owning the means of production or even spending its own $11 billion within the city limits, city government needs to re-invent segregation.
I’ve heard of wacky schemes like this before. Frankly, if blacks want to self-segregate, that is fine by me, as long as they don’t use taxpayers’ money to do it. If and when they decide to go through with this inane scheme, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves when it inevitably fails.
Kay Everett, a member of the Detroit City Council, practically pleads with her colleagues not to go through with it. She writes:
The African Town proposal is racist in that it excludes other races to the perceived benefit of Detroit African Americans. The proposal is detrimental to the interests of Detroit and southeast Michigan. The rationale for this ill-conceived plan is rooted in a form of victimhood justifications that scapegoats those of other ethnicities that we should be coalescing with, not separating ourselves from, such as our Hispanic, Arab, Asian, Chaldean and white neighbors.We fought too hard, were beaten and jailed too much and died too often fighting the ugliness of segregation to now embrace the same ugliness of neo-segregation as we wallow in victimhood. I will not wallow in victimhood. I will not marginalize the people I represent with neo-segregationist policies that only satisfy hooded nightriders.
Some of us cry because we know our history. We know that our people have been the victims of racism and suffer today from manifestations of institutional racism that would deny us business and job opportunities. But we need not wallow in the crippling morass of victimhood — angst lashing out at generations of immigrants that have snatched a share of the American dream with a strong work ethic and belief in America. We need to stop whining. We need to get busy working instead of looking for an exclusive handout.
Ms. Everett, don’t answer fools according to their folly. Instead, plead with your daughter and son-in-law to pack up and leave Detroit and watch from a distance as it is consumed by its own ineptly conceived and laughably ludrious “Africa Town.”
Update (10/1): Discriminations weighs in on Detroit’s plan.
