'Your Fight Is Mine' -- Letter to Detroit From A Netroots Nation Visitor
July 20th, 2014, 10:54 AM
Denise Oliver Velez, a former Black Panther Party member who's now a cultural anthropologist, reflects Sunday at the Daily Kos website on Detroit's image and impact after a few days downtown:
As I prepare to leave Detroit, Michigan, today and head back to New York after attending the Netroots Nation 2014 gathering of bloggers, I'm thinking about the multi-faceted meanings Detroit has for me, not as simply a visitor, but as a political activist, ethno-historian and a person raised in black American culture.
I'm left with a montage of images, some current — dealing with protests against Detroit's water shut-off, which the United Nations has stated is a violation of human rights — and other images that emerge as flashbacks from different moments in time in my past.
Velez, a 66-year-old adjunct professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, flashes back to local jazz legends, Motown Records, Diego Rivera, the 1967 riot and labor activism of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers during the 1960s and '70s.
Though the Detroit fist sculpture may be considered controversial by some viewers, to me it represents the power and the strength of the people of Detroit, who no matter how many punches they take, will keep fighting back.
Thank you Detroit for having stolen a piece of my soul. I feel like your fight is mine, and belongs to all of us who you have inspired over the years.
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| Denis Oliver-Valez visited Detroit to attend the Net Roots Conference. |
Denise Oliver Velez, a former Black Panther Party member who's now a cultural anthropologist, reflects Sunday at the Daily Kos website on Detroit's image and impact after a few days downtown:
As I prepare to leave Detroit, Michigan, today and head back to New York after attending the Netroots Nation 2014 gathering of bloggers, I'm thinking about the multi-faceted meanings Detroit has for me, not as simply a visitor, but as a political activist, ethno-historian and a person raised in black American culture.
I'm left with a montage of images, some current — dealing with protests against Detroit's water shut-off, which the United Nations has stated is a violation of human rights — and other images that emerge as flashbacks from different moments in time in my past.
Velez, a 66-year-old adjunct professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, flashes back to local jazz legends, Motown Records, Diego Rivera, the 1967 riot and labor activism of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers during the 1960s and '70s.
Though the Detroit fist sculpture may be considered controversial by some viewers, to me it represents the power and the strength of the people of Detroit, who no matter how many punches they take, will keep fighting back.
Thank you Detroit for having stolen a piece of my soul. I feel like your fight is mine, and belongs to all of us who you have inspired over the years.
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