Ill-Advised Arrangement of Cement

The following is excerpted from a 15 May 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

What do you make of the Witkowski cement dynasty in this symbolism of land and water? We've got a substance that begins a liquid, becomes very solid, and washes all through Detroit, destroying neighborhoods and hastening Detroit's decline.

Art

I-75 and Ford Freeway Interchange in 1970, Detroit

Well, if they were involved in building the Chrysler Freeway (I-75 and I-375 through Detroit), they may have been the ones who paved over Black Bottom, originally named for its dark, fertile soil and for being the epicenter of black culture and music in the city of Detroit. 

This works out nearly perfectly for the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, by the way. Black Bottom is totally chthonic/ Dionysian and the impulse to destroy and pave it over in the 1960s was totally olympian/Apollonian. 

It's a complicated issue, but this act really went a long way toward hobbling black culture (and culture in general) in the city of Detroit. From what I've heard, Detroit's particular way of complying with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 more or less ensured that Detroit would never give its inhabitants an experience of true, vibrant urban living. That divided, piecemeal, culturally lifeless experience still persists to this day. And it's quite literally the ill-advised arrangement of cement that guarantees it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

This issue of race is an important one to bring up if our setting is Detroit. 

Isn't it interesting that Arthur White sings black music? Wouldn't it be interesting if his dad's company was the one who paved over Black Bottom? This all feeds into our motif of echoing or appropriating other people's content. Arthur White is not the real deal! Like all these other white wannabes--from Glenn Miller to the British Invasion to Michael McDonald to Rick Astley to Stevie Ray Vaughn to Eminem--no matter how good or bad they were, you have to feel more or less uncomfortable as you consider their success at parlaying another culture's riches into their own enrichment.

This is the exact subject I wanted to talk about next. We spent some time talking about the domination of men in our story--I think we need to continue with that, developing our female characters in the process. 

But no story about Detroit can be complete without a discussion of race.