Amid the continuing celebrations of Detroit's resurgence, researchers at Michigan State University have recently released a report “dismissing much of Detroit's vaunted recovery as a mirage that obscures the continued widespread blight, poverty and misery in the sprawling town.”Footnote ¹ The hollowness of Detroit's recovery is one of the worst-kept secrets, which a number of cultural and urban studies observers have commented on, including Rebecca Kinney in her book Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America's Postindustrial Frontier. Kinney's title points to the central premise of her book: that narratives of Detroit as a “beautiful wasteland” pave the way for gentrification and entrepreneurial development, or in this case redevelopment, in the spirit of the nineteenth-century western frontier. This perspective depends on seeing the city as largely empty and uninhabited, thereby not only disappearing its majority (over 80 percent) poor black population but also obscuring from view Detroit's history of institutionalized racism, rooted in housing and job discrimination, which led to the disastrous current conditions of the city in the first place. By making white privilege invisible, Kinney warns, the effects of racism continue into the present and the future.

Kinney shows how the overarching popular narrative of Detroit as one of rise and fall and rise again shifts popular perception from beautiful wasteland to postindustrial frontier. She offers a fine-grained analysis of five popular-culture narratives that each reveal in their own way the invisibility of white privilege and institutionalized racism as a central factor in the decline of Detroit. These narratives include an Internet discussion thread about the former homes of white Detroiters before they left the city; the photographs of José Camilo Vergara, which Kinney argues paved the way for more recent bodies of ruin photography; the 2011 “Born of Fire” Super Bowl commercial by Chrysler Corporation, which functions like a mini-film about the rise of Detroit; the two Detroit films Deforce and Detropia, which devolve into a “rise-again” narrative based on neoliberal individualism; and the establishment of a Whole Foods store in the gentrifying 7.2-square-mile area of Detroit known as Greater Downtown and the public-relations fanfare that described the store's foray into the city as “fighting racism.” Kinney raises the questions what does it mean to revive the dream of a “new Detroit” again and again? Who is the “new Detroiter”? This “new Detroit,” constituting only 5 percent of the city and engineered in large part by billionaires Dan Gilbert and Mike Illitch, depends on the continuing decline of the poor black population and the continued influx of those who are young, educated, and white.

This process is integral to capitalism itself. We see it in the gentrification of New York City, often cited as a model for Detroit, and we see it in the racist assumptions and embrace of white privilege that played such a large role in the 2016 US presidential election, which brought to power another billionaire businessman whose slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was widely understood to mean “Make America White Again” and resonated with many wealthy white Americans. But the popularity of this slogan among Rust Belt non-college-educated whites – an aggrieved population that Kinney represents in her analysis of those for whom white privilege is invisible – makes it clear that this large and economically insecure part of the population feels enormous downward economic pressure, longs for change, and may be easily set against other segments of the population. They see themselves, not blacks, immigrants, and minorities, as the victims of racial and ethnic discrimination, rather than perceiving themselves as the victims of corporate greed and disinvestment aided and abetted by the capitalist state. Thus white privilege remains invisible even as neoliberal globalization widens the gap of income inequality. Indeed, Trump revels in his gold-plated privilege and ostentatious wealth which was amassed through the exploitation of labor both domestic and foreign. By railing against “the elites,” of which he is nonetheless a star member, Trump is perceived as the embodiment of the “American Dream,” a wholly imagined “self-made man,” though he inherited his money from his Ku Klux Klan-affiliated father.

Implicitly standing on the shoulders of Thomas Sugrue's seminal work, Kinney's project shifts the emphasis of Detroit's narrative of rise and fall and rise again. She is especially and rightly critical of the nostalgic retelling of the past as a “golden age” by pointing to the long-standing institutional racism that structured Detroit's historical development. But her argument would be strengthened by a greater emphasis on corporate disinvestment, antiunionism, and the ways in which racism is structurally endemic to the deindustrialization of Detroit. She only occasionally takes her arguments to their logical conclusion, though her thoughtful arguments about race clearly point to the inherently racist nature of capitalism itself.