Dealmaking Detroit

Who profits from Detroit’s “reinvention”?In two incisive essays, historian Jamon Jordan and lecturer and labor activist Craig Regester dismantle the facile, corporate narratives surrounding Detroit’s past, present, and future.Jordan reveals how racial hierarchy has consistently shaped the making and unmaking of the city. He traces a direct line from 19th-century laws requiring “negroes” to pay $500 just to exist in Michigan, through generations of White managers overseeing Black auto workers, to mid-century “redevelopment” plans that displaced and demolished thousands of homes and 350 businesses in Black neighborhoods—and into the present day, where a banner celebrates White capitalist saviors for rescuing Detroit from failure.Building on this trajectory, Regester scrutinizes the upcoming University of Michigan Center for Innovation in Detroit, a foregone conclusion and joint venture between a public university and a pair of billionaires. Though funded with $100 million in taxpayer dollars, neither the university, the state, nor the developers seriously considered community visions for how the center should serve Detroiters. Regester exposes how the avarice and technocentric whims of the ultra-rich increasingly compromise the public service missions of major research universitie