Changing the Narrative * An Analysis and discussion of “My Happy Detroit”

Ruined streets, echoing car alarms and dilapidated buildings all combine to provide the perfect scenery for a post-apocalyptic film. However, there is nothing dramatized about this image - It is the concerning reality of modern day Detroit. At least, that has been the narrative in the media since the latter part of the sixties. Carolyn Edgar, who spent her childhood in Detroit, tells another story.

Carolyn Edgar graduated with a bachelor degree in English with high distinction, giving her opinion academic reliability. Her work consists mostly of writing for internet blogs. She has worked consistently for the progressive, liberal magazine Salon for the last three years. She was raised in Detroit, and she mostly has fond memories of the city. This is why she wants to dismantle the message in the media.

Edgar appeals to pathos by telling anecdotes of her childhood, in order to rebut the common narrative of the media. She begins by painting an idyllic scene: Children playing at a barbecue. “While the ribs were on the grill, we would play Motown hits on the record player another cousin brought over for the occasion”(ll. 7-8).
This image immediately creates empathy and identification with the reader, and dismantles the image that the common person has of Detroit as a dilapidated city. By anchoring the reader with an emotional standpoint right from the beginning, Carolyn establishes a bond of trust between her and the audience, thereby engaging them in the essay.

This bond of trust is needed for her argumentation to work, because she draws mainly on her own experiences to convince the audience. As she takes the reader on a journey through her upbringing, she commits further to explaining the events leading up to the bankruptcy through a lens of normality.

She also addresses one of the main points of contention within Detroit, that of racial tension. It never becomes hateful or direct blame, but she still skirt around the subject, alluding to, but never directly placing a portion of the blame for the city’s economical crisis at the feet of white people. “Detroit might not be bankrupt if whites had been as willing to spend their dollars within Detroit’s city limits as blacks were willing to spend our dollars outside of it”(ll. 63-64). Aside from engaging the reader through slight provocation if they are white, this point also furthers her dismantling of the common narrative. Detroit is a poor city, with a majority of black citizens. As poor black neighborhoods are commonplace throughout the US, it could easily become the consensus that Detroit’s decline is a fault of theirs.

However, the media doesn’t treat the city as mundanely as Edgar does. In “The Dead Zone” Chuck Holton examines the downfall of Detroit, focusing on the rising crime rate and decaying public services. Where Edgar downplays the issues and grounds them in normality, “The Dead Zone” handles them with dramatized diction. “An area of near, complete destruction, many miles across … Crime is the only growth business here”(At the 0.05 - 0.14 mark). This is another way of engaging the reader, using shocking facts to provoke interest, in place of audience identification. In fact, nowhere exemplifies this stark contrast better than the beginning of the “The Dead Zone” and “My Happy Detroit”. Edgar starts her essay by grounding the reader in the mundaneness of her childhood, while Holton immediately lists the common narrative surrounding Detroit, and tries to surprise the viewer.

In 2006, Mitt Romney wrote an opinion piece titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”.
Where Edgar told her arguments through Pathos, telling anecdotes and imploring that the reader acted to save the inhabitants of the city, Romney is very factual in his approach. “A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs” (ll.69-70).
“Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” also has a more noticeable political message than “My Happy Detroit”, as Romney is writing with the goal of dismissing the bailout that the automobile industry requested in 2006. With a heavy use of logos, he appeals to people’s business sense, whereas Edgar mainly deals with the human aspect of the city. They both use their upbringing in the city to establish Ethos with the reader. While Edgar takes the reader through her upbringing, Romney uses the experience that he got from his dad to garner credibility for his plan to save the automobile industry. “I watched Dad work to turn the company around — and years later at business school, they were still talking about it”(17-18).
He doesn't touch on racial tensions, but instead examines the business decisions that the automobile industry made, and where they went wrong. Although their approach is wildly different, both he and Edgar agree upon this point. They both spend a good deal of their arguments on considering ways that the automobile industry is both of vital importance to Detroit, but also the reason that the city is in its current predicament.

While all three accounts deal with the downfall of Detroit, it is Edgar who seems to have the city’s best interest in mind. Her veiled comments on race are without barbs, and she ultimately wants the city to climb victorious out of the crisis that it finds itself in, by downplaying some of the stigma that has been attached to it. In the conclusion of her essay, she writes about her mother. “She was not to be budged from the place she’d called home for 50 years. She got to know the new people on the block and treated them as they were – as people with problems, not people who themselves were problems”(ll. 85-86). This is what mainly separates Edgar from Holton and Romney. She has no other apparent agenda than helping her birth city, and her message is communicated clearly: In order to solve the crisis, the USA needs to treat the people of Detroit with dignity, instead of viewing them as an inherent lost cause.

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[ 1 ]. http://www.pli.edu/content/Carolyn_Edgar/_/N-1z12o9gZ4o?ID=PE1094450
[ 2 ]. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html