FIRST TRIP TO THE MOTOR CITY
After years of traveling to the Midwest almost exclusively to Chicago. I finally touched down in Detroit for the first time, for the Black Footwear Forum at Pensole University. First things
first: the campus sits right on the water, and the event itself was beautiful. Thoughtful programming, good energy, and a sense of purpose that lingered long after the panels ended. But I’m
not here to write a recap there are far better journalists ( and I am not even a journalist) who’ve covered that in detail. What I want to talk about is downtown.
Detroit is modern. New buildings, clean lines, alot of clearly built within the last decade or so. That was confirmed when I linked with my friend Mamadou, who grew up there but now lives in L.A.
and happened to be home for work. We ate, we talked, and he filled in the blanks between what’s old and what’s new.
What struck me most was the Blackness of it all not just in population, but in energy. I knew Detroit was a Black city from movies, documentaries, and books, but those things rarely capture the
texture, the nuance, the rhythm of how that Blackness actually moves.
The people here are Southern in the way they talk, walk, and greet you not the polished Southern you find in Charlotte or Atlanta, but the raw, rooted kind I grew up around in the Winston Salem projects,
where I spent time with family a lot when I was a kid.
The food hits different too everything tastes like somebody’s auntie still runs the kitchen. This is reminder that the Midwest carries its own kind of Southernness, its own language of Black joy. I’m already
planning my return.