Bloggers vs. Blight

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Happy and Morgan are in the neighborhood before work, after work, on weekends. Observing, listening, learning. In other words, doing classic immersion reporting. “As we change as an industry,” Hanus says, “people out in the community are coming to be a part of making the story, and I think that’s a good thing.”

Happy and Morgan often describe themselves as wearing different hats. When they’re reporting and writing about the area, they’re journalists; when they’re making presentations to Detroit’s city council on behalf of the neighborhood or applying for grant money, they’re private citizens. Yet when journalism meets activism, the divisions between narrator and player are necessarily muddled. There’s no off switch for outrage.

09/01/07 01:52 a.m., by Michael Happy
Categories: Dobel Street
Where’s the beef?
I had all intentions of sitting down tonight and beginning to write the story about how a group of former residents of the City Airport community joined forces with current residents of the area—including a church, a community group, a neighborhood watch group and local businesses—to turn back the clock at Fletcher Playground. It’s a story I will tell in the days leading up to the celebration at the park on Sept. 8. But today I’m not in the right state of mind to do justice to that story and to the wonderful people I have met and been reunited with along the way. I’m angry, and I want to raise your blood pressure as well, inspire you to write a letter, make a telephone call, get involved—whether you live in the city now or used to call Detroit your home.

Happy goes on to discuss the city’s failure to maintain Fletcher Field, “despite the fact that it’s the city’s responsibility to maintain the park’s grounds and equipment.” Anger, he believes, invested with the agency of the communal, can lead to healing. Yet Happy and Morgan’s ultimate goal is not to be activists themselves, but to help others to be. For residents who don’t have Internet access, Happy and Morgan have tapped into on-the-ground networks—“Captain Edith” and others—to ensure that people are plugged in to the project. Happy and Morgan hope members of the community eventually will lead the project.

Detroiters are quick to admit to a complex relationship with their city. There’s a T-shirt popular among residents. “I Love Detroit,” the shirt proclaims on its front. On the back? “I Hate Detroit.”

One of Going Home’s goals is to leverage the love to work against the hate. The blog, of course, has its racial undertones: One of its key functions, after all, is to convene mostly white suburbanites to help a mostly black inner-city neighborhood. You could read a kind of misplaced colonialism into it. You could chalk its motivation up to white guilt. You could focus on the fact that Happy and Morgan, both white, live in Detroit’s comfortable suburbs. And you could wonder how much difference a single playground actually makes in the larger scheme of things. Maybe you’d be right. But Going Home, its advocates will tell you, is as much symbolic as it is practical—a small but important step in moving on from the mutual pain of the past. The blog’s potent combination of anger and understanding will, they hope, provide a bit of the heat necessary to help dissolve the racial tensions that have stymied the neighborhood’s, and Detroit’s, development over the years. “Unfortunately,” Happy writes in a post,

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