My Guest Commentary, care of The Detroit Free Press:

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Published April 2, 2012

DETROIT 

“This is white supremacy and we will fight you. Before we let you take over our city, we will burn it down.” — Minister Malik Shabazz

Consider those the scariest words I’ve heard in a long time.

The worst case scenario would be the eruption of violence baked by the hot air between the supposed leadership guiding Detroit through its fiscal mess. As a Detroiter, it pains me to see this fiasco unravel into such heightened tensions.

In this financial crisis, race relations are the elephant in the room that no one seems to be actively stepping forward to address with the sober seriousness it deserves. The absence of leadership on this front from our mayor, city council, the governor, local pastors and the media is deeply troubling. It must change immediately.

With the Trayvon Martin tragedy seeping through the nation’s collective consciousness, race is again center stage in America. And, it’s not hard to see the essential truth, how in the case of a killing of a young black man wearing a hoodie, that what is legal isn’t always just.

This begs the question in Detroit: although legal, is an emergency financial manager just? Angry factions of residents across Detroit think not.

Personally, I’m ambivalent.

Bankruptcy that maintains local control simply lets pride foreclose on pragmatism. An emergency financial manager yields efficiency to the blunt hostility of a “foreign takeover”. Ultimately, I expect a consent agreement for this option will allow the negotiated players do that rather feckless thing known as saving face.

This, I suppose, is the successive consequence of generations of heightened expectations and dismal returns, but it’s yet another example of Detroit’s penchant for a bunker strategy over principled leadership. It allows political self-preservation, institutional self-interest and inter-governmental posturing to trump the real leadership needed in a town desperate for some.

In the meantime, angry residents demand justice. In the meantime, some call for civil disobedience. In the meantime, some threaten to burn Detroit to the ground.

Does anyone else wonder when Detroit will get out of the bunker to stop managing decline, emphasizing division and carping about control and start facilitating the essential, but profoundly difficult choices ahead?

Our leaders tell us constantly, “My hands are tied.” In Detroit, our public servants are generally good people stuck in thankless jobs. But, for a moment, I’d like to ask all of them to take seriously the threat of backtracking this city right into 1967.

Our leaders should assume the responsibility they have to quell the race narrative engulfing the financial crisis that is seeping its way through the streets of Detroit.

Because the more time they spend raising their voices for the evening news instead of guiding residents through this extraordinarily difficult process, the more fearful I get that our racial divisions may erupt; such a tragedy would surely mask the real roots of the problem at hand and, ultimately, crush the city’s soul once more.

To all of Detroit’s public servants — from city council to the governor’s office — please, don’t let that happen on your watch.

Bradford Frost is a member of the Detroit Revitalization Fellows at Wayne State University.

I read two pieces this week by Charles Blow, a NYT columnist, that took on the two big shots of the Michigan Republican primary and their remarkable ability to alienate larges swaths of the electorate concerned with equal opportunity in America with their every utterance.   

To no surprise to anyone, Detroit offers a backdrop where this fault line is particularly acute.

Senator Rick Santorum gets singled out for his attack on income inequality as much for what is so crystal clearly revealed in the meat of the column:

Yet for Santorum to champion income inequality in Detroit, of all places, is still incredibly tone-deaf.

Detroit has the highest poverty rate of any big city in America, according to data provided by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College. Among the more than 70 cities with populations over 250,000, Detroit’s poverty rate topped the list at a whopping 37.6 percent, more than twice the national poverty rate. And according to the Census Bureau, median household income in Detroit from 2006-10 was just $28,357, which was only 55 percent of the overall U.S. median household income over that time.

This is a city that last year announced plans to close half its public schools and send layoff notices to every teacher in the system.

This is a city where the mayor’s pledge to demolish 10,000 abandoned structures was seen as only shaving the tip of the iceberg because, as The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010, “the city has roughly 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes and residential lots, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that tracks demographic data for the city.”

This is not the place to praise income inequality.

The other story, of course, comes from none other than Mitt Romney’s delightful “couple of Cadillacs” line, which doesn’t even begin to appreciate the vacant stares he’ll forever receive for asserting that America should Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.

Whatever your politics, it would help for our aspirants from the Republican party to take just a tad more care in appreciating who their audience is as they battle for the chance to take on President Obama this fall.

Add to that list a host of others: a woman’s right to choose, a gay person’s right to wed.  Last I checked, the logical fallacy’s of the right demand freedom from government except, of course, when conservatives deem it worthwhile.

But, I’ll save that rant for another day.

Still, I’d like to see our presidential contenders have a real debate about equality and opportunity debate here.

I’m SERIOUS: I’m using Change.org to petition for a  Presidential Debate on Opportunity in America  at Alter Road this September.  

In case you’re scratching your head, here’s why: America’s Destiny Divide — Alter Road, Detroit.

Until then, I wish these gentlemen the best of luck at the primary this week.

They’re going to need it.

The Political Moment
Hyperbole is the spice of life in American Politics.

But, assuming Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee, you heard it here: the 2012 election will be the most important for setting the terms for the American Dream for a generation.

If the political culture is simply a matter of competing visions for achieving America’s central defining promise, Romney and Obama will have the most critical debate of our lifetime on the essential role of government in fostering the conditions that fulfill the competing yet complimentary objectives of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Several articles lately have illuminated the stakes in this election. Let’s start with the fact that Mitt Romney is right … mostly.

It’s become entirely aparrent to me that the two parties speak in code, using trigger-happy language to stoke the flames of the inherent biases of the competing visions of government’s role in fostering the conditions for the American Dream.

Let’s try a relatively simple formulation.  

The American Left Believes Government should Invest To Enhance Opportunity & Promote Social Mobility. 

vs.

The American Right Believes Government should Divest To Enhance Opportunity & Promote Social Mobility.

If all you ever did was to think about your political preferences from that lens, you’d have a fairly decent handle on the policy arena you believe is more adept at securing America’s future. This is the essential fault-line for understanding the divide over which party holds the most credible claim for securing meaningful opportunity for the majority of Americans.

Spoiler Alert — The Republican vision is more attractive to American sensibilities than the Democratic vision. 

Reality Check — The Democratic vision is more aligned to the persistent facts of egregious social inequality, outlandish economic inequality, and enduring racial and ethnic disparities in achieving success in America.

These fault lines that propel division in America operate at the nexus of social justice, individual liberty and communal order.

To me the question is this: is it more just to articulate that the laws are fair, the systems meritocratic, and the free market effective at determining who wins and loses based on their own hard work? Or is it more just to acknowledge the playing field is unequal, the rungs on the ladder further apart on the bottom, and that market distortions favor the elite?

How poignant then it will be this fall with our two contenders?

Obama: the self-made Harvard Law President raised in modest circumstances to become America’s 44th president. Is Obama not the epitome of the right’s vision for “Bootstrapping It” in America? And yet, Obama routinely promotes enhancing social mobility programs for the disadvantaged.

vs.

Romney: the self-made HBS-HLS Executive raised by a former tycoon, Michigan Governor and candidate for president. Is Romney not the epitome of the left’s suspicion towards those with concentrated advantage? And yet, he promotes free-market fundamentalism.

You’ll hear countless binary interpretations and linguistic turns of phrase in the coming months. Look for these Verbal Triggers of the Left: Safety-Nets; Social contract; Affirmative action. And these Verbal Triggers of the Right: Anti-Entitlements; Government is the problem; Free-markets.

Through these prisms, the fight for America will ensue between Obama and Romney.  Through this debate, we will witness the war for staking the claim as to which vision holds the most promise for promoting opportunity in America.

If you’re driving by an abiding faith in the core principles America stands on, Romney will be your man.

But if you’re persuaded by evidence that these principles can guide a progressive realization of that vision, look no further than President Obama.

Consider the overwhelming evidence: 

• Harder for Americans to Rise From the Lower Rungs
• Reviving the Idea of America
• The 99%

Vs. the overwhelming desire to hold these truths

• What Kind of Society Does America Want
• The Anti-Entitlement Strategy
• Tea-Party mania

Martin Luther King Day
It’s as fitting a time as ever to have this debate.

I believe MLK Day is particularly noteworthy time to expose the contours of these issues and the fact that, in many ways, the divide is as old as the republic. When America first “held these truths to be self-evident” it knew the egregious disconnect between their principles and the fact of slavery. 188 years latter, this nation cleared the final hurdles to secure legal equality for all of America’s citizens.

And, in the wake of that victory over 44 years ago King and his comrades were preparing another march on Washington to support efforts that would yield progress on economic justice in America,

Resetting the Debate
If the question for America’s future rests on some false divide between freedom, free markets or securing justice and opportunity for all, then we’re all missing the finer contours of our national heritage. Americans faithfully believe in individual achievement, opportunity, meritocracy. We also hold dear faith in fairness, justice, and the generosity of the human spirit.

I find it perfectly understandable in this context to see merits to both arguments on the Right and the Left. I see the logic of Republican governance and its attractiveness to the American psyche.  

I ultimately side with those who see the injustice of being born into severe disadvantage and take governments role is to not only provide a safety net, but to progressively work to provide enhanced access to social mobility and equal life chances no matter where or to whom one is born in the great land.

Furthermore, there’s no doubt that decent folks on both sides of the aisle would love to resolve the cross-currents of social, economic, and cultural challenges in overcoming concentrated disadvantage in urban environments.  No party has a premium on solving these flash points, but it’s shameful both sides can’t find common ground in how they aim to address these issues. More must be done.

Until recently, I thought very little of Republican’s chances in 2012. Obama, despite efforts to brand him otherwise is too sober, serious, pragmatic and effective at bridging these emotional and intellectual divides in America. This makes Obama a strong candidate with American independents and even centrist republicans.

But the combination of a struggling economy, weak jobs, a tea-party ethos, and someone like Romney, also a centrist willing to placate those core activists with matched intellectual rigor to Obama now indicates this election will set the terms for how Opportunity is framed, understood and supported for at least a generation.

If you believe in American ideals from either side of the aisle, allow me to say this: the fight for securing equal opportunity in America remains incomplete, particularly for the disadvantaged. If you believe in justice, then an “opportunity society” will require ongoing investments to ensure social mobility for all Americans, especially those struggling to climb from the bottom rungs.

Indeed, the American Dream itself is at stake. And, despite my desire to believe in the Republican vision, I still have to face the facts.