Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts, and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide

Chapter 8. African American and Middle Eastern American Relations after 1967

181 CHAPTER 8 African American and Middle Eastern American Relations after 1967 While the racial divide between inner-city blacks and suburban whites has been widening since the 1967 riot and still remains the worst of the racial divides in the Detroit metropolitan region, other racial divides also have emerged during this period. For example, tensions and conflicts between Middle Eastern merchants and African American customers and between African Americans and Latinos have created new racial divides that complicate and compound the old black/white racial divide (Arellano, 2001; Sengstock, 1999). This chapter will seek to understand how and why racial/cultural tensions and conflicts between Middle Eastern merchants and African American customers have emerged. Our ultimate purpose is to understand what role leaders of both communities played in seeking solutions to the problems. Few observers of the state of race relations in Detroit during the early period after the 1967 riot could have predicted the gradual shift from predominantly black/white tensions and conflicts to black/Middle Eastern conflicts and tensions. The bipolar black/ white paradigm dominated the study of relations throughout the twentieth century, and with good reason. The conflicts between these two groups over housing, jobs, neighborhoods and education largely influenced how generations of scholars, policymakers, and the general public thought about race in Detroit (Capeci and Wilkerson, 1991; Darden et al., 1987b; Lee and Humphrey, 1943; Locke, 1969; Shogan and Craig, 1964; Stolberg, 1998; Sugrue, 1996). The waves of southern blacks moving into Detroit during and between two world wars, their protracted struggles for decent housing and jobs, and their expanding community, met with relentless forces of white racial control, which was the foundation of their racialized identity . Blacks challenged and fought against this white racial control and, in the process, forged their own racialized identity (Sugrue, 1996; Thomas, 1992). In the shadow of the ongoing battles between these two major racial combatants, smaller but no less significant racial and ethnic groups, such as Latinos and Middle Easterners, tended to be overlooked. This situation would change, however. 182| Chapter Eight THE SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE BLACK/MIDDLE EASTERN RACIAL DIVIDE In the 1960s and 1970s a convergence of global and domestic social and economic forces forever changed race relations in metropolitan Detroit. During these years blacks in Detroit overtook whites as the dominant racial group in the city, gaining political power, and engaging in struggles over school segregation, fair housing, police brutality, white suburban hostility, and drug-related youth crime and violence in economically depressed black neighborhoods (Darden et al., 1987; Lewis, 1969; Rich, 1989; Taylor, 1990; Tyson, 1980). These struggles, especially in the wake of the 1967 race riot, intensified the racial identity of an entire generation of blacks. Radical black organizations such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Republic of New Africa and the black literary productions of Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press were among those that contributed to this heady black power movement dedicated to black self-determination (Georgakas and Surkin, 1998; Thompson, 2005). Meanwhile, changes in the U.S. immigration laws in 1965 resulted “in a considerable increase in migration into the Chaldean community,” which was part of a large wave of immigrants that dramatically increased the Middle Eastern population in metropolitan Detroit, from 70,000 in 1974 to 92,000 in 2004 (Sengstock, 1999; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2004). The 1965 immigration law that allowed more Asians and Middle Eastern immigrants to enter the United States was followed by the Refugee Act of 1980 and other legislation in 1986 and 1990 (Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Refuge Act of 1980; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Immigration Act of 1990; Liebowitz, 1983). As these developments unfolded, the stage was slowly being set for a realignment of historical racial tensions and conflicts in the post-1967 era. Prior to the increased outbreak of tensions and conflicts between blacks and Chaldean merchants in poor black neighborhoods, little contact or understanding existed between the two groups. Few blacks or whites, for that matter, knew much about the history of Chaldeans in the United States. Chaldean immigrants come from what is now the modern nation of Iraq. The Chaldean community in Detroit dates back to 1910. The 2000 U.S. Census estimated that 31,322 foreign-born Iraqis resided in metropolitan Detroit. The majority of Chaldeans live in the Detroit metropolitan area and originate in Telkaif, “a Northern Iraqi village near the ruins of the ancient...