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Looking at photos of the Detroit Riots, it’s obvious the city was punished in the sense that the response to the riots was to make the city a desert. Thus we can read the effect of the Civil Rights movement in the US in terms of the Law (not just the legislation typically associated with it but also the reaction of expanded incarceration, the “War on Drugs”) and Geography (white flight, cycles of gentrification and decay in the urban areas, abandonment of industrial areas by the investing class), to name two.
Looking at the photos also gives another feeling, one connected with the palpable “end of history” that is piped in. The serenity of the present-day vacant lots has no reference to the wound which ultimately created them. What’s weird about history is that it actually happened and it actually had an effect, when everything is saying the opposite (except of course, when it comes to 9/11). Thus ghosts do exist.
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