Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: When Henry Ford refused to bow to the pressure of mass consumption by providing for variation in the style or look of the cars his factories produced, he famously told his managers they could make cars “any color as long as…” they were “…black.” Drawing on Ford’s evocation of black as the universal color for the Model T, which by the mid 1920s represented more than half the cars and trucks on the planet, this paper explores how Ford universalized white as the color of its workers, who worked in over 20 countries in this period. As the industrialist who was most responsible for furthering the goals of standardization in the workplace, Ford and his managers applied the ideals of standardization to its workers, promoting white as the universal color of efficiency and progress. By examining the racial structuring of Ford’s Rouge plant in Detroit and the Port Elizabeth Assembly Plant in Port Elizabeth South Africa – called the “Detroit of South Africa” - the paper argues that the idea of white supremacy found literal expression in workplace segregation, hiring and possibilities for mass consumption in Detroit and Port Elizabeth, and was an important Ford export.

In considering the contradictions and complexities of the emergent mass society, this paper explores how Ford understood race as structuring both mass consumption and mass production. Seeing some workers as more “ready” for mass consumption than others, Ford brought ideas about the usefulness of racial segregation learned in its Detroit workplaces to South Africa, where “solving the problem of poor whites” was accomplished through work in Ford’s plant and the mobilization of the company’s notoriously high wages. The company clearly understood white civility as measurable through participation in forms of work and forms of leisure.

The crossroads thus considered in this essay is a transnational place of production and consumption, where the white worker emerged as a standard through which racialized others would be measured, controlled and excluded. Such a crossroads was necessarily both real and imagined. Simultaneously real, backed by the power of U.S. corporate capital, and imagined, as the white worker used as a global standard lived also only in the imagination of Ford managers and owners, the crossroads of Ford’s global empire offers an excellent starting place for understanding how the company exported not just wealth, jobs and cars, but the idea and practice of white supremacy as well.

Publication Type: Individual Presentation
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In 1963 Malcolm X delivered a speech to the Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference in Detroit, MI. His speech was drastically different from any other he had previous given. The seed of separation were evident in his speech. Two weeks later, Malcolm was suspended from his duties in the Nation of Islam—an organization he helped to cultivate.

Malcolm X’s transformation from Elijah Muhammad messenger of to a dialectical thinker has rarely been examined. The scholars who have delved into the Malcolm’s transformation sought to answer the following questions: What are the origins of Malcolm’s ideological shift? Who were the people instrumental in nurturing his new political ideology? What theoretical framework was Malcolm introduced to that helped him to articulate a program to solve the problems facing Black people in America. These scholars have typically attributed Malcolm’s development to his travels abroad and congregation amongst African revolutionaries, without acknowledging his interactions with revolutionaries in the United States. I contend that Malcolm’s political and personal relationships with intellectual activists in Detroit contributed to Malcolm’s political development. Central to the conversation about Malcolm's development are Max Stanford, Grace and James Boggs, Rev. Albert Cleague, Milton and Richard Henry.

To explore this topic further both primary and secondary resources will be utilized to demonstrate the political climate of Detroit and Malcolm’s political shift within it. By examining speeches, interviews and publications of Malcolm X and those close to him, I will document, as Grace Lee Boggs describes, “Malcolm’s transformation from a religious nationalist, viewing white people as the devils, to a political internationalist attacking the global capitalist system as the main enemy of black people,” (pg 125).

This research will serve to expand our understanding of the origins of the Black Power Movement. As researchers strive to rethink, re-articulate and restructure the Black Power Movement, my research on Malcolm X is not only timely but necessary. Malcolm X has been a historical marker for Black Nationalism in America; numerous organizations have emerged in his name, however, does re-envisioning Malcolm, change the strategies need to employ liberation? I contend that a revision of Malcolm is essential to understanding the centrality of transformation to liberation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The objective of this research proposal is to examine the process of day labor in the United States. Contingent work and day labor are becoming a common form of employment in U.S. metropolitan areas with rapidly growing Mexican, Central American, and South American communities. Contingent workers such as day laborers, often lack legal U.S. residency and are thus vulnerable to exploitation from employers. I intend to conduct a comparative analysis of day labor workers in Detroit, Michigan and Los Angeles, California. Both cities attract undocumented labor, however each is in a unique stage of urban development. Detroit is a post-industrial city in economic decline while Los Angeles is the prototype of the new global city. Given these facts, my research will focus on the everyday lived experiences of day labor workers and how the process of day labor functions within distinct urban structures.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study examines the association between residential proximity to industrial activity and psychological distress. Using individual level data from the 1995 Detroit Area Study, industrial activity data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory, and demographic data from the U.S. census, we find that residential proximity to industrial activity increases psychological distress among survey respondents. This association holds after controlling for individual and neighborhood level correlates.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Over the course of the 1930s, middle-class, working-class, and unemployed black Detroiters began to make more consistent and more successful demands on the state, using new strategies to fight for the promises of full urban citizenship. In this paper, I look at black political participation, organizations and leaders in Detroit during the 1930s. I argue that the Great Depression did not create a fundamental rupture in the direction of black political activism. Instead, it contributed to a shift in the reigning political discourse that was already under way—from a voluntarist politics of patronage and uplift to a “funny” politics informed by liberalism. I demonstrate that black liberals became popular and important leaders during this period. I distinguish them and their activism from the radicals and communists whose politics also proved popular in the 1930s. I focus on Snow Flake Grigsby, who was more confrontational in his approach than more traditional leaders in his emphasis on civil rights and confrontation, but who sustained a “liberal” black politics.

This new approach to civil rights politics took for granted the idea that Detroit’s reigning political consensus included a commitment to racial liberalism. This does not mean that proponents of this confrontational style maintained a naive faith in the city’s white leaders. Instead, it indicates that an emerging generation of “liberal” activists saw racial liberalism as an available political discourse that they could use to support their claims within the city’s political sphere.