Oops! My Parents Forgot To Do Well In Business In Detroit On Account Of Their Being White
Few people in Detroit or the surrounding suburbs are doing well right now.

But, no, it couldn't be due to the car companies' failure to streamline and innovate or any of a number of other really logical reasons.

Jessica Chasmar writes at WashTimes that MSNBC's Michael Eric Dyson blames racism for Detroit's recent bankruptcy:

Host Ed Schultz asked if race could be responsible for the city's downfall.

"Of course, it's an 85 percent black city," Mr. Dyson replied. "It's been perceived as a colony of black people who are ringed by suburban white areas that are now going into the city to plunder it. The perception is that there is a massive takeover of resources and materials and properties, basically being occupied."

If only. The problem is, the city is abandoned and rotting, not being occupied.

Here. See for yourself.

Something tells me this sort of accusation is how Dyson gets people to pay attention to him.

UPDATE: I forgot to include this piece in the WSJ by Steven Malanga, about how Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, drove out the white and middle class:

Young was right that Detroit needed reform to deal with problems sparked by the migration of poor Southern blacks into the city in the 1950s. He and others, white and black, criticized the political power structure in Detroit, and especially its police department, as racially insensitive. The 1967 riots, sparked by a police raid on an after-hours club in a black neighborhood, generated legitimate calls for change.

Elected ostensibly as a reform mayor in 1973, however, Young made things worse. He divided the police department along racial lines, creating separate layoff lists of white and black officers. He and his handpicked police chief, William Hart, made clear that policing that resulted in too many arrests or citations in the black community would not be tolerated. "I wouldn't write tickets for black kids," one black officer told journalist Tamar Jacoby in her 1998 book "Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration."

When residents complained about a lack of law enforcement, Chief Hart called the protests "racism and sour grapes." Mayor Young declared that "law and order was code for 'Keep the n-----s in their place.'" Detroit became one of America's most violent cities.

Young's divisive brand of governing extended to economic policy, such as it was. When General Motors agreed to build a new plant in the 1980s to help the city's revival, Young and GM targeted the still vibrant, largely white ethnic neighborhood of Poletown to locate the facility. In one of the nation's most infamous cases of eminent domain, the city sued in 1981 to raze some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses and displace 3,500 people.

As some Poletown residents hung on, hoping that court challenges would overturn the takings, Young withdrew services. Residents lived among demolition crews by day and looters by night. Documentary filmmaker George Corsetti described the chaotic last days of Poletown in a 2004 article in CounterPunch: "The night air was always smoke-filled and people slept with guns nearby."

Young benefitted politically from his very ineffectiveness. As the economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer write in their study of urban ethnic politics, "The Curley Effect" (named after Boston's early 20th-century mayor James Michael Curley), as whites fled Detroit, Young's margin of electoral victory grew because his electoral base of poor blacks became a larger share of the city's population.