La Ron S. Readus
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Barbarian Explained Detroit's White Flight POORLY (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2023-10-04 20:00:02 +0000 UTCReaders, I’ll be 100% honest with you. I had NO idea what I was getting myself into when I decided to watch Barbarian for the first time.
/I was one of those individuals whose first opinion about the movie was that it was gonna be about a woman who needed to safeguard herself because she was in a situation involving a man she doesn’t know that seemed INCREDIBLY sketchy, and it didn’t help at all that the man in question was played by Skarsgard #3 of 15, nicknamed “The Creepy One.”/
Like, I’ve never used AirBnB personally, and the combination of wanna-be real estate owners only buying homes to be AirBnB properties in the middle of a housing crisis and the whole “There are hidden cameras in the bathrooms” thing kinda turned me off from ever WANTING to use them, real talk...
/But as those of us who’ve seen the film know, while it’s a very interesting modern day horror plot in its own right -- especially since the main character Tess is a woman of color -- we find out that Barbarian’s premise is completely different./
And while that’s true, that wasn’t the part of the story that immediately got me intrigued in watching the film till the end.
/What got ME interested was WAY before the plot did the good ol’ switcheroo, when it was revealed that the city Tess was in was Detroit, MI and where she was staying in was the downtrodden west side border neighborhood of Brightmoor./
So me, a bisexual black man who was born, raised and currently resides in the city of Detroit was mostly interested in where Barbarian was going, because I wanted to see the role that both the city and the neighborhood played in the horror story the writer and director was trying to tell.
And for today’s lesson, while I don’t wanna necessarily focus on the initial plot of the film, I do wanna talk about what the film succeeds -- and fails -- at in capturing elements about the history of the city, its neighborhoods, and the offspring of the white people that used to call it home but abandoned it during one of the longest stints of White Flight in American history. Let’s begin.
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Hey, Readers. La’Ron here. Offering you analysis and perspective on your favorite bits of geek and pop culture media
If it wasn’t obvious from the intro, this video will in fact contain spoilers for the movie Barbarian. It’s currently available to stream on HBO Max, so give it a watch if you haven’t seen it yet, and don’t want me to spoil pivotal points of it for you in this video.
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That’s the syllabus. Now onto the lesson.
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So what is a White Flight?
Also known as a White Exodus, a white flight is either a sudden or a gradual migration of white-identifying citizens from areas that have become or are about to be more racially and ethnoculturally diverse.
The term White Flight actually came from Africa, referring to white folks from Britain and Europe leaving parts of the continent in droves post-colonization when enough of the native population utilized violence, and both anti-colonial and anti-white state policies against them.
As we know the phrase to be used here in America -- as I explained briefly in my video on the Netflix film They Cloned Tyrone -- a good chunk of the migration caused by a White Flight/Exodus is due to white folk feeling threatened by an influx of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South.
While Oakland, CA is one of these cities that come to mind just as easily as Detroit, MI, other midwestern cities like Cleveland, OH, Chicago, IL, and Kansas City, MO also experienced a White Flight from the black southern migration, using population pressure and safety as scapegoats for the reasons lots of white families that were middle-class and higher left said cities proper for the adjacent more “safeguarded” suburbs.
Y’know, in order to avoid being labeled racist.
And as those white families moved out of inner city neighborhoods, governmental programs both consciously and subconsciously supported them.
Yes, there was the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the National Housing Act of 1934 that kept the green and blue inner city neighborhoods populated by mid and upper-class white families segregated and separated from the yellow and red before the Fair Housing Act of 1968 put an end to it.
But 12 years before that happened, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 -- combined with low-cost mortgages via the GI Bill -- helped those white families leave the city for suburbs, taking tax payments away from adjacent inner cities, but allowed them to keep their inner city jobs because they were quickly accessed by said highways. Meanwhile, the HOLC and the NHA kept black folk from doing the same thing.
And some of these highways were used as dividing lines to deliberately cut off inner city black neighborhoods from goods and services, while the ones that were already there before the divide would eventually go out of business and the property be bought by wanna-be mega-churches.
Then there’s real estate agents wanting in on the Suburban craze, and utilized Blockbusting as a strategy to get white families to sell their homes.
Because the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ 1924 code of ethics was the one that planted the idea that black folk moving into a white neighborhood would ruin the property value in the first place, agents would cause fear and panic from white homeowners seeing a black family move into a house they purposely sold to them after securing the house for themselves. This would cause the white homeowners to sell their property as quickly as possible -- usually at a loss -- and then move to the suburbs, while the realtors sold the inner city homes abandoned by the middle class white families to black families at non-GI Bill regulated pricing to make a profit.
As you can see, the majority of the White Flight started to happen across the country from the 1950’s to the 1960’s, near the end of the redlining era, and timely enough so that those who did move to the suburban cities and townships could still benefit from programs to establish generational wealth that black families were locked out of before the Fair Housing Act put an end to it in 1968. Detroit’s White Flight however, is more prominent and lasted longer than other cities' period due to the Riot of 67.
So much built up to the riot; police brutality and corruption in redlined black neighborhoods, job loss and discrimination against black workers when the auto plants relocated to the suburbs, housing projects for the city’s black residents and white citizens in green and blue zones complaining about it at every turn.
A lot of problems, that -- speaking as someone who was born, raised and lived in Detroit in the entirety of the 1990’s and 2000’s -- have been EXTREMELY slow to be fixed.
But the reason why Detroit’s White Flight extends past the time that other cities had theirs is because white folk used the Riot of 67 as the perfect excuse to finally leave the city proper. 173,000 white citizens left the city immediately after the riot from 67 to 69 (nice). Then between 1970 and 1980, over 300,000 of them left for the suburbs.
And, as I need to remind you, a lot of those suburban cities and townships even near the beginning of the Fair Housing Act had people and policies in power that made sure that the most black folk and other people of color could do, was visit. And even then for some of them, their welcome was worn by sundown.
/This is what Barbarian is implying happened with the real Detroit neighborhood of Brightmoor during the 1908’s. That it was once a white only, blue zone at best -- blue meant middle class and green meant upper on the HOLC redlining maps./
Then thanks to the combination of the Detroit riots of 1967, and then the signing of the Fair Housing Act a year later allowing black citizens of Detroit to move in, the predominately white residents of Brightmoor participated in the Detroit White Flight that lasted till the 1980’s and abandoned ship to that of Redford, Livonia, Dearborn, Farmington, Farmington Hills, Ferndale, Southfield, Royal Oak, and other surrounding Metro-Detroit suburban cities and townships.
/Meanwhile, thanks to the multiple factors that resulted in inner-city neighborhoods being cut off from jobs, goods and services, and other means that all also migrated to the suburbs, Brightmoor became a blight./
What sucks is that it’s the perception of these series of events and the very nature of this form of segregation ala the NHA and the HOLC that have shaped so many opinions about not just the Brightmoor community, but about the city of Detroit itself...
Both inside and out.
As you would expect, those white citizens that abandoned Detroit for the suburbs -- both during the time that other cities had their initial white flights in the 50’s and 60’s and the one that was generated from the 70’s and 80’s due to the ‘67 riots -- would continue to live in said suburbs, while only commuting to Detroit for their jobs and whenever the Detroit Tigers and the Detroit Red Wings had a home game.
This was before Little Caesars Arena and Ford Field were built, so the Pistons and the Lions were still in Auburn Hills and Pontiac respectively; two other suburban cities that made up Metro Detroit.
Over the course of that combined 35+ year time period consisting of legalized segregation and fear mongering, some of those white citizens had families of their own if they didn’t have them already upon their initial move.
Some of the children whose parents made the flight to the suburbs claimed the city of Detroit for themselves, but they did so despite not knowing anything about the city and those actually living in it, its and their struggles, or making the active choice to live there, real talk. They only ever entered it to go to Tigers Stadium in Corktown and Joe Louis Arena in downtown for baseball and hockey respectively, back when those stadiums existed.
Others, thanks to the fabricated stories about how the crime rates were, and the fear mongering that conservative racists fed their parents during the 67 riots regarding how the inner city dangers would potentially reach their safe and secure suburban lifestyle, feared the city as a whole. They would avoid it completely if they could, holding their purses tight with every moment they spent there if they had no other choice but to go.
But while both of these type of white Metro Detroit suburbanites exist -- boomer, X, and millennial generations alike -- the fact that these families had an abundance of generational wealth that was burning a hole in their pockets due to the segregationist acts of yesteryear and the fear mongering of the late 60’s didn’t go unnoticed.
With the 2013 conviction of Detroit’s previous mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for racketeering, and both mail and wire fraud -- all of those things he actually did, and needed to pay his penance for, by the way -- along with the election of Mike Duggan as Kilpatrick’s replacement that same year...
Getting the offspring of the white suburbanites who left Detroit during its white flight to move back via the gentrification of Downtown Detroit and its immediate surrounding neighborhoods seemed to be the main priority.
Downtown Detroit, Midtown Detroit, even the historic Irish neighborhood of Corktown. Nearly every neighborhood centered around business and entertainment venues -- Rocket Mortgage, Fox Theater, Ford Field, Comerica Park, Greektown Casino, Motor City Casino, MGM Grand Casino, and even the land surrounding the future home of the Little Caesars Arena where both The Detroit Pistons and Red Wings would be playing basketball and hockey games respectively from now on -- got developed and redeveloped in order to lure in the offspring of white flighters, willing to pay bank for the likes of either newly constructed or completely renovated modern to luxury apartments, homes and condos.
And both their safety and -- most importantly -- the property is secured thanks to an influx of Detroit Police officers -- a good chunk not even FROM Detroit -- that secure these neighborhoods in droves -- especially on the weekends -- in order to make sure that neither the property or its alabaster inhabitants are damaged.
Meanwhile, the gentrification of these neighborhoods are forcing its longterm citizens -- especially those who lived in complexes located on the land that was being developed for these very reasons -- out of their homes because they cant afford the landlords doubling, even tripling the cost of rent to try and appeal to this same incoming demographic of white flight offspring.
My one bedroom midtown apartment that I paid $520 a month for in 2012 with no central air and radiator heat because of how old the building is, now in 2023 goes for over $1000 a month and you STILL need to provide your own window unit if you want AC.
Not to mention that the inner city neighborhoods that have been ravished by the segregationist days of Herbert Hoover and redlining are not being “revitalized” as quickly as the surrounding downtown neighborhoods are, and are just as impoverished -- if not a few steps above it -- as Barbarian depicts the neighborhood of Brightmoor.
And surprising no one, the offspring of white flighters stay away from those neighborhoods for the same racist, classist and privilege-based reasons their parents possibly avoided Detroit altogether while living either part of, or their entire lives in the suburbs.
I know this, because I’ve witnessed suburban white millennials that have these same mixed implications about Detroit, and saw their grand suburban upbringing that brought about their opinions about a lot of things first-hand as a student of Detroit’s in-city college Wayne State University...
All because I stayed in the dormitories my freshman year and became acquaintances of a good amount of them back when I dealt with internalized racism and sought white acceptance.
/Which is why when Tess told the woman she was being interviewed by that she was staying in Brightmoor, and she reacted the way that she did, I could literally feel my blood pressure rise in anger because of how accurate her portrayal of a white flight child was./ (You’re staying in Brightmoor? You shouldn’t be there)
(D20: I don’t hate women, I HATE that bitch)
Now don’t think that I just revealed all of that history about Detroit just to talk shit about that one character who, in my opinion, is a great representative of the type of White Flighter offspring that the city is trying to reclaim now that they have their family’s money to spend.
/Because Barbarian has another character that proves to be another product of Detroit’s White Flight that I can’t stand, and is honestly WAY more dangerous./ (What up, faggot??)
AJ Gilbride, played by Justin Long, has multiple layers of this overtly privileged “Detroit vs Everybody but I was born and raised in Royal Oak” ass mindset embedded in his character, while also being a great depiction of what happens when outside forces come into the city of Detroit that could care less about it and only about the profit their in-city investments make.
While the movie never says it outright, AJ was a born and raised Metro-Detroit suburbanite with parents that gained generational wealth from the city’s extensive 30+ year White Flight period.
They accumulated generational wealth from the suburbs being listed as green and blue zones that constantly invested in their communities and locked out people of color from the same opportunities in which the I-75, I-94, and I-96 freeways allowed them access to the city proper in order to keep their jobs but not have to pay city taxes.
/And in doing so, AJ was able to purchase -- more than likely with his parents money -- the Brightmoor home that the film’s villain Frank resided in,/
Which he lost more than likely due to a foreclosure from the same recent overtaxation scandal that resulted in my mother losing my childhood home despite my parents fully paying off both the mortgages they took on the house before their divorce.
/If you want a video to watch on how Detroit got away with THAT one, I highly recommend you watch Abigail Thorne’s video on the subject on Philosophy Tube once you’re done here./
The privilege portion that’s embedded in his character is because of Detroit’s law regarding owning an AirBnB in the city; that along with regular inspections and constant approvals by the City of Detroit Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department, the home must be your primary residence in order to list it.
/But as we see in Barbarian, AJ’s primary residency is in Los Angeles because he was an actor making a name for himself until the co-star on the pilot he was pitching filed a sexual assault charge against him and he was fired from it before the series was ordered./
AJ only purchased this house -- just like a slew of the current wave of landlords across the country -- primarily as a source of income with no regards to the actual property or the tenants inside, let alone the very city.
/If he did, then he would’ve known that Frank’s handmade catacombs were on the grounds WAY sooner than discovering them two weeks after Keith’s death and Tess’s capture. If anything, he would’ve learned about it during the initial renovation of the property from what it looked like when Frank lived there to what it looked like at the time of Tess’s stay, if he actually gave a fuck./
And what reinforces all of this, while also making him no better than the foreign investors that were looking to scoop up land within the city for dirt cheap after filing for chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2013...
/Is where his mind immediately went the moment he discovered Frank’s catacombs in the first place./
And while a good portion of individuals got a good laugh at seeing AJ take out his tape measure and -- most importantly -- /get what was coming to him by the hands of The Mother,/
Barbarian does a great job bringing all these issues about Detroit’s White Flight and how the relocation of job opportunities to places where only white families and the like that were middle class and higher could reach have done to neighborhoods like Brightmoor to light, especially if you know the history regarding why Detroit’s White Flight was so lengthy in comparison to other cities across America.
And it does so all while highlighting how the city’s extensive white flight has altered the perspective of lots of white-identifying individuals who grew up with the privileged benefits that the likes of redlining had to offer their families in the city’s attempts to get them to spend their generational wealth inheritance inside its borders.
There’s just one problem, though.
Yes, there’s accuracy in Barbarian’s depiction of how the city of Detroit and its predominantly black neighborhoods suffered from evolved forms of segregation. And it especially succeeds in showing how parts of it are viewed by the suburban children of the caucasians that abandoned it when people of color began to move next door to their parents and grandparents.
However, the reason why the neighborhood of Brightmoor is the way that it is, isn’t as black and white as Barbarian makes it out to be. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t that white to begin with.
You see, as I stated earlier, the Brightmoor depicted in Barbarian’s flashback to the 80’s was all white; a blue-zoned middle class neighborhood according to the color zoned map for the Detroit area produced by the NHA and the HOLC of the mid 1930’s.
/Because of the time of the flashback and the dialogue between the serial assaultist father of the inbred Mother character Frank and a neighbor of his, the film implies that the all-white residents of Brightmoor chose to participate in Detroit’s unique White Flight period, when over 300,000 white citizens of the city fled to the suburbs in the decade that followed the 67 riots./ (The neighborhood’s going to hell, Frank)
The thing is, the ACTUAL Brightmoor was never all-white. Hell, it wasn’t even a middle-class blue zone. Detroit’s neighborhood of Brightmoor was a red zone back in the day whose residents consisted of immigrants that didn’t meet the qualifications of being accepted as “white” at the time, and black southerners who migrated from the south escaping Jim Crow.
Both populations were working class, kept employed by Detroit’s auto industry before certain plants and offices either closed from company buyouts, or relocated elsewhere in Michigan that they couldn’t follow because of the concept of whiteness.
/The only thing that was correct about Barbarian’s 80’s flashback was the implication of Reaganomics about to ruin everything for everybody that wasn’t already middle class or higher, which did play a huge role in the blight and urban decay of a lot of red zoned neighborhoods and the poor to lower class citizens within them not just in Detroit, but across the country./
I grew up in the neighborhood of Weatherby, named after Mary Emmet Weatherby -- a respected educator and school principal that lived in the 1900’s.
As I explained in my video on They Cloned Tyrone, my childhood home was literally down the street and around the corner from the elementary school named after her and its population was mostly black because my neighborhood was also redzoned.
Also as I explained, the reason why it was constantly overcrowded was because it had to accommodate children from other neighborhoods whose schools had closed because of limited funding. And the bigger and just as red zoned neighborhood of Brightmoor was north of us in Weatherby, right across the freeway.
Even in the early 90’s, I’ve witnessed that while this neighborhood was definitely a victim of the one-two combo of Hoover and redlining, I’ve never seen any indication of it being a blue-zoned neighborhood that was abandoned by the white people that once lived there.
But even if I didn’t have that first-hand knowledge of growing up next door to the neighborhood and visiting it frequently via family car rides and to see friends, plenty of information regarding the truth about Brightmoor is available about its population and status as a neighborhood that’s easily accessible to the public. So why couldn’t the movie’s writer and director Zach Cregger follow suit?
Now I’m sure there are PLENTY of “benefit of the doubt” answers to that question. One could be that in order to avoid villainizing the black citizens of Brightmoor, he decided to adjust things so that it was a neighborhood filled with overly-privileged white citizens in order for Frank’s vileness and audacity to be plausible over the course of his time as a predator. This is a work of fiction, after all.
/But that theory kinda goes out the window when he decides to set up a black homeless man in the narrative to deliver a cheap scare surrounding neighborhood safety that plays on the fear of why a good chunk of Detroit’s white citizens left the city in the first place./
And while Tess’s interaction with the police after she escaped The Mother the first time showed that Cregger has knowledge about police across America only really caring about protecting property and serving the bourgeoisie...
/Their initial depiction of Tess considering the neighborhood she was in very much gave off that this was written by someone who only has limited to negative opinions about this location./ (I am not a crackhead, I am not a crazy person. I am a woman who was held prisoner and has escaped)
But maybe there’s a bit of unfortunate truth behind why Zach did what he did to Brightmoor for Barbarian. That maybe this white kid born and raised in Arlington, VA who -- through either his own means or that of his parents -- was able to move to and live in Brooklyn, NY only to eventually help form the sketch comedy group “The Whitest Kids U Know”
/Only kept Detroit in mind because whatever amount of time he spent here made him comfortable and confident enough to produce an interesting depiction of how the inner city’s blight came to be./
And while he also says that it could’ve taken place in any city that had history of blight and urban decay, the decision to choose Detroit without digging as deep into why said blight and urban decay exists in the neighborhood he focused on is very much telling of his privilege and his misdirection in trying to use it positively.
/Because while the film does a great job regarding the walls and barriers a woman of color has to put up regarding her own safety around men to then immediately transition to the narrative of The Mother, and how property takes precedence over the protection of people when it comes to cops across the country, the history and the people, the REAL people, of Detroit’s Brightmoor -- like Chicago’s Cabrini Green projects in the original Candyman before it -- are simply used as a convenient backdrop. Even less so, because the faces of those who actually stayed there are replaced by those who were never there to begin with./
You know what that is? White liberalism.
Conclusion
Knowing what I know about what Herbert Hoover's zoning advisory committee did to keep segregation established across this country, and how redlining played a factor after that, made it hard for me to see this depiction of a neighborhood like Brightmoor -- fictional or otherwise -- as an all-white middle class neighborhood during the end of the White Flight era caused by the Detroit riots in the 80’s and find that believable.
Working in the auto industry during its boom in the city didn’t immediately make workers middle class. Especially since Brightmoor specialized in low income housing because of who it catered to.
After all, the reason why census reporters of today list the immigrant population it had as mostly white is because -- as I explained in my body snatchers video -- the list of ethnicities that are allowed to claim the concept of Americanized homogenized whiteness has grown since the neighborhood was founded in the 1920’s.
I applaud Barbarian’s writer/director Zach Cregger for accurately portraying white suburbanites that were born into privilege and wealth because of their parents or grandparents fleeing the city while they could still benefit from the NHA and the HOLC, even if it was unintentional.
I also applaud him for catching the range of feelings, opinions and lack of care for the city and its underdeveloped neighborhoods upon them moving back in, even if it was unintentional.
/But while watching Barbarian knowing how segregation affected housing country-wide combined with knowing the history of my city, I, like Tess, couldn’t help but go “something doesn’t sit right with me.”/
But, I digress, Readers. Your homework assignment for the day:
Write in the comment section below what you thought of 2022’s Barbarian if you’ve seen it.
Or, if you feel like sharing with the rest of the class, what film or television show you’ve seen that tried to make a social commentary on someone or something you’re familiar with, only for them to go a bit too liberal on the details in order to make their point.
Whichever question you decide to answer, I’d love to know your thoughts.
/A HUGE shoutout to my Patrons both big and small for helping make this channel possible.
Make sure you check out the card at the end of the video to join, or click the link to it or any of my affiliates in the description box below.
But until then, this is Readus 101. Class dismissed./
Comments
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I have never heard of this, but you bring a great perspective to every piece and your scripts are excellent!!
