In 2025 Detroit, the city boasts a population is 78% black and 10% White. It should be noted that the 2010 Census showed the city at 82% black and 7% White, when in 1910, the city was 99% White. What war did America lose to see Detroit go from 99% White in 1910 to 7% White in 2010?
This is the conversation American’s have avoided having for more than half a century, for the answers basically force a serious reflection on the conclusion of The Kerner Commission (convened after the black riots of the 1960s rampaged through scores of US cities) and the usurping of the US Constitution with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Long held as sacrosanct and a victory for morality and justice, one can’t help see the ruins of a once prosperous civilization in Detroit, St. Louis, Birmingham (Alabama), Jackson (MS), Rochester (NY), Baltimore, or Memphis and conclude some cataclysm happened.
But that’s conversation is coming and it will no longer be a monologue dictating from the playbook of the 1619 Project. Enter an 11-foot statue celebrating a 1987 movie into the narrative. [Rubin: Some Detroiters view ‘Robocop’ film, statue as raw bigotry, Detroit Free-Press,
Not long after RoboCop saved Trunetta Roach’s hometown, which was in 1987, the Detroiter found herself on vacation in Florida.
Chatting with a stranger there, she told me in an email, she mentioned where she was from — and the woman recoiled, took a step back, and told Roach that she “seemed very nice to live in such a dangerous place.”
It hurt, Roach said, and decades later, it infuriates. After I offered an update Thursday on the status of the crowd-funded statue of the star of “RoboCop” — it’s still bound for Eastern Market, ideally by the end of the year — she responded with a concise review of the movie and the project.
“The RoboCop story,” she said, “represents a mainstream, racist narrative about Detroit that has damaged our reputation worldwide. It should be consigned to the trash heap of lies and misinformation.”
I’ve always thought it was on the amusing side of peculiar to erect, in Detroit, an 11-foot-tall bronze likeness of the title character from a film whose founding premise was that the city is a festering hellscape.
Having spoken often to one of the Detroit-based ringleaders of the project, I’ve come to appreciate that the intent is to get people thinking and talking, not just about the sculpture but about the philosophies and attitudes that inspired the movie.
As a rule, I hold that more art is better than less art, that public art makes places better, and that my taste should not be the universal yardstick, even if I’m always right. That 17-foot-tall statue by Kaws outside One Campus Martius in downtown Detroit makes me roll my nearsighted eyes, but I see people posing with it all the time.
What hadn’t struck me, in my capacity as a white guy from the suburbs, is that some people view the film and its commemoration as raw bigotry.
“It’s a cult classic,” said Wayne State professor David Goldberg, “but only for certain groups of people” — and not the ones who have to defend the city as “actually having human beings in it.”
A mostly white cast
The movie had Dallas playing the role of a futuristic Detroit and Peter Weller playing RoboCop, a law enforcement cyborg constructed around what was left of a murdered police officer.
The leader of the drug gang that killed him is introduced as a suspect in the murders of 31 other officers, which suggests a wildly out of control city. He’s white, as are most of his gang, some looters shown late in the picture, and pretty much everyone else except for a likeably tough police sergeant, the briefly seen mayor and one executive of the venal Omni Consumer Products.
“The hoodlums are mostly middle-class white gangster types,” said Brandon Walley, a graphic designer and experimental filmmaker who has become the spokesman for the small band of artists behind the sculpture.
As for the movie’s Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, Walley said, he’s politically well left of center, and his goal was to blend science fiction, action and a human touch into a social commentary that took potshots at Reaganomics and the smothering state of capitalism.
The ultimate bad guy is a treacherous corporate bigwig played by the shiny white Ronny Cox. No bigotry was intended, Walley said, by either the filmmaker or the fundraising amateurs who attracted $67,436 in a worldwide Kickstarter campaign inspired by a facetious tweet to Mayor Dave Bing.
But intent and perception don’t always march side-by-side.
The ’80s view of Detroit
Art, whether high, low or blood-spattered, is supposed to evoke reaction.
What Walley found, he said, especially in the early stages of the project around 2013, is that many of the most strenuous objections came from people who had heard about “RoboCop” but hadn’t actually spent whatever trivial amount it took to buy a ticket back then.
Others left the theater outraged, and it’s not his place or his philosophy to begrudge their ire.
“No one that’s from the city wants this statue,” said Brandon Keyes, another emailer last week. “We’ve always seen it for what it is: a racist joke that’s turned into some perverted project. It’s disgusting and offensive.”
Goldberg, 52, an associate professor of African-American Studies and director of the Crockett-Lumumba Scholars program, ignored “RoboCop” when he was a high schooler: “I was watching sports.”
He caught up with it as it spawned two unsuccessful sequels, a pair of animated series, video games, comic books and action figures, and “all I see is that there needs to be extra control of the Black population.”
Give credit, though, he said: “It put Detroit in the exact role Detroit played in the national media in the 1980s, as the American Beirut.”
Tragedy and possibility
Weller, the star, told the Free Press’ Julie Hinds last year that he sees the movie as a tragedy.
Walley, the statue’s guide, sees Weller’s towering replica as an opportunity.
Not for profit, though it will likely draw visitors to its unspecified spot just outside the main retail area of the market. After commissions and unfulfilled pledges, the original campaign collected less than $60,000, which didn’t even pay for the bronze.
Not necessarily for praise, either. Critics have complained that a better subject would have been someone like Rosa Parks, to which Walley responds that if they could have spontaneously collected that much money from small donors around the world for a likeness of her, they would have.
Rather, he said, RoboCop will stand at Eastern Market as a magnet for discussing everything from class to design to race to geography — and no, he said, despite years of reports saying otherwise, there was never any intention of parking the statue in front of the pre-renovation Michigan Central Depot, where it would simply have called attention to blight.
That’s all presuming the sculpture stays upright, and that Keyes, who emailed his displeasure, is exaggerating for effect.
“This is Detroit,” he said. “RoboCop’s ass is getting scrapped” — a theft that would be, fittingly, a case for RoboCop.
This is Detroit… funny to mention Rosa Parks, who spent time in residing in Detroit and was robbed and beaten by a black man there in 1994. He recognized the Civil Rights Icon and still continued the assault and robbery.
In the movie, our eponymous human-cyborg crime fighter had three directives:
- Serve the Public Trust
- Protect the innocent
- Uphold the law
The problem: in 2013, we learned Detroit’s Ceasefire program aimed at deterring gang activity and cutting down on violent crime was targeting only black males (because these were the individuals collectively responsible for violent crime in Detroit).
Police departments across the nation are being pressured to get rid of their gang databases because they are filled with profiles of black and brown people, a de facto admission in the current climate of systemic inequality, implicit bias and outright racism by the police.
Or, they represent the key to unlocking civic improvement and answering the question of what happened to Detroit’s White population (and so many other US cities). As the increasing population of black residents increased crime, the intolerable decline in social capital and city service – both private and public – meant White individuals sought a new city with demographics reflecting the 1910 population of Detroit.
It’s time to see the Robocop Statue go up in now 78% black/10% White Detroit and have the unpleasant conversation we’ve deemed necessary to kick down the road until it goes away.
The post Black Residents View Effort to Put Up 11-Foot Statue Celebrating 1987 Robocop Movie as “Representing … Racist Narrative” appeared first on American Renaissance.
