swirlspice

milkeemountainmama:

i been wondering this forever.

flint has just as many beat up run down decaying houses that detroit does. in fact, flint has had many of the same proposals surrounding it to “deal” with blight that detroit has—downsizing, 1$ houses, etc.

and yet—when it comes to the whole “zomg i luuuurv abandoned houses!”—the narrative focuses almost exclusively on Detroit. the “once great city.” the “former glory.”

flint is also a “once great city” and has a lot of “former glory”—tons of wealth, lots of beautiful old buildings/architechture…

so what’s the difference here? why is the gaze on detroit so fucking focused?

i can only think of two things.

first; michael moore’s movie, roger and me, detailed exactly how violent the process of resource withdrawal really is. families being kicked out of their homes, families going hungry—empty houses in his movie (and many of his follow up documentaries) don’t carry that same mystique that houses shown in ruin porn do. in short, he contextualizes what ruin porn deliberate fails to. that the houses aren’t just randomly abandoned—that many times (probably most or all), *eviction* happened—making it a violent, demeaning, shaming, frightening experience—the ghost of frightened children and terrified mothers hang around michael moore’s houses.

second: because ruin porn *deliberately* decontextualizes the houses, viewers are able to write their own fantasies onto the blight. one of the fantasies I saw on the detroit ruin porn flowing around tumblr involved a person crying, then flipping over piano and playing it while smoking a cigar (or something, I was so grossed out, I didn’t read it very closely). Viewers of ruin porn repeatedly value terms like “haunting” and  “once great” and “so sad” and “heartbreaking.” —and yet, to see a (black) family removed from their house (as you see in Roger and me) can often be described using the same terms. the haunting image of the little boys face as he watches his mother scream at his siblings….

but i get a feeling that THAT is not the haunting image people are recalling as the looking at Detroit ruin porn. because detroit ruin porn decontextualizes the houses, viewers can do the same thing they do when racism or white supremacy stairs them in the face—ignore it, turn away from it, or pretend like it doesn’t exist.

detroit ruin porn, in a sense, allows viewers to reinforce the fantasy that there are no consequences to white supremacist heteropatriarchy—there are no consequences to capitalism. houses, like the titantic, just accidently hit a magic ice burg. everything would’ve been fine if the captian had slowed down like he’d been told. or if there had been enough lifeboats. it’s not that exploitation, violence, resource hoarding, pollution, segregation, violence against workers, and a corporate greed created a new more extravegant way to hoard money and reinforce violent structures of control—it’s that the captain didn’t listen to the warnings to slow down.

…

I think there’s also something going on with working class white folks *from the south* (i.e. hillbillies, rednecks, etc—or: whites that are easily written as being *inherently* violently racist by upper class white folks) being a big community in flint—whereas in Detroit that community exists, but for most of it’s history, the “face” of detroit whiteness was either white collar management or white immigrants (i.e. polish, esp.).

but right now…i’m tired and i still have a long day of work ahead of me.

so fair the well, tumblr.

(via racialicious)