'Detroit Was Like Cheers: Everyone Knew Your Name'

By artappraiser on Thu, 03/10/2011 - 1:49am |

By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic blogs, March 9, 2011

This is an outtake from my reporting on Palmer Woods, a small affluent neighborhood in Detroit. See the final print version here.

....there's a point where the gaze shifts from informative to lurid, from documentary to pornographic. I did not want to write something "positive" about Detroit. No writer should ever set out to do such a thing. But I did want to reflect a different sort of truth. I did want to get as far away from voyeurism as possible. Part of that urge lay in being black. Part of it lay in being from Baltimore. But most of it lay in being a writer. I wanted to understand the city, as much as possible, as though I were a native. ...

URL:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/03/detroit-was-like-cheers-everyone-knew-your-name/72226/