Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Our 12 previous winners—a mix of distinguished historians, social scientists, journalists, and public thinkers—include Michael Ignatieff, Sherry Turkle, Jia Lynn Yang, and, most recently, Heather McGhee. Anderson is a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School.

The Fight to Save the Town chronicles the stories of Stockton, California; Josephine County, Oregon; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Detroit, Michigan—four places with histories of booms and busts, places that the rest of the nation often readily dismisses for their high levels of poverty and violence. But Anderson, who came across these communities as part of a larger research project on cities that had gone through municipal bankruptcy or state receivership during the Great Recession, found them to be places of hope. Here, people were coming together—to train trauma recovery counselors, to rebuild a broken-down library, to make parkland out of industrial wasteland, to stop foreclosures.

One of our Book Prize judges wrote that in telling these stories, Anderson is able “to explain how much place matters to humans, and what they’re willing to do to save a place buffeted by global forces rather than abandon it. … Anderson’s portraits are a stirring antidote to anti-government cynicism and a call to action against wealth inequality and the disinvestment from public goods.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Anderson, who will also be interviewed by Community Coalition CEO and President Alberto Retana, will take place on June 15, 2023, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2023 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Anderson to talk about communities as teachers, the push and pull between federal policy and local problem-solving, and what it takes to build trust in a place of scarcity.

The post Michelle Wilde Anderson Wins the 2023 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At my age, some physiological organ system was bound to go awry. I could have had a heart attack. I didn’t. Now I’m almost grateful for heart disease because it inoculates me from teaching in a classroom this fall. Letters from my physicians to Northern Michigan University, where I teach journalism, allowed me to obtain a medical deferral, to opt out of face-to-face instruction and deliver my lessons virtually.

I’m close to retirement, and this pandemic is far from over. I suspect I will never return to a classroom. This year, I certainly won’t be dropping into the newsroom of the school newspaper on production night, gathering students in a circle to workshop essays. And I won’t be standing in my cap and gown extending handshakes to seniors coming down the commencement aisle.

I came into the academy for the final third of my career after having been a magazine editor at a publishing company in Pennsylvania. Teaching has been a splendid profession—tenure track, a ninth-month schedule, funding for travel and professional development, time to research and write, young people to mentor, and summers to spend with my three sons.

I arrived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a remote, sparsely populated and largely forgotten part of America, in 2001. Residents here scrutinize maps of the United States on television, in newspapers, and on products to find if the U.P. is missing or perhaps drawn in as part of Wisconsin or Canada. Often it is. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, my then 8-year-old son came home from his new grade school and asked if terrorists would come to the U.P. I shook my head, “Not a chance. Don’t worry.”

Not so with disease. In March, the virus, carried by a worker, infected a nursing home a few blocks from my house and killed several residents. A well-known township official who got infected did a phone interview on the local TV, advised listeners to obey the quarantine, and then died two days later.

The regional medical center is here in Marquette—about a half mile from me—where the most severe cases come for intensive care. In this small college town, most people mask up. But when I venture into the hinterlands and the national forests and stop into little grocery stores for supplies and fishing bait, my mask and I get stares. What are you afraid of? Gradually attitudes are changing, but it’s taken far too long.

This summer, the virus put the kibosh on all the beer, music, food, blues, lumberjack, art, fishing and folk music festivals, as well as the Upper Peninsula State Fair. Yet tourists from “down below”—what we call the rest of Michigan and the Midwest—flood across the Mackinac Bridge, hauling campers and boats, disgorging kids and dogs, renting cottages, and jamming the campgrounds. Going up north is what Michiganders do in summer, and after the lockdowns and the COVID carnage downstate, the U.P., with fewer than 1,000 lab-tested cases and just 18 deaths as of late August, probably seems safe and disease free.

Thousands of miles of shoreline rim this peninsula—lots of beach for physical distancing—but several times this summer young people collected on public bathing areas and grooved like there was no tomorrow and no coronavirus. It was akin to the super-spreader scenes we’ve all gawked at on television, and a portent of the conduct occurring as undergrads return to the university, swelling the population of Marquette by one-third. Students fuel the economy and provide labor in restaurants, coffee shops and bars, but do we really want them back? And do their parents want to pack them into those petri-dish dorms?

I’m a parent, too. My youngest son, about to turn 21, has asthma, and is moving into a house with three other students at Michigan Tech. Another son, living at home, works a summer parks-and-rec job for the city and encounters maskless knuckleheads drinking and picnicking in park pavilions. My oldest son, in Colorado, operates video production for the Professional Bull Riders. Flying on airplanes and working in partially filled arenas in Vegas, Sioux Falls, and Tulsa, he plays lab rat for the “let’s bring back sports” experiment. Cowboy up, they tell him.

I am not sanguine about any of it.

In all of the back-to-school rhetoric, it has been gratifying to hear students pine for the classroom and personal interaction with professors. When I first came to campus 20 years ago, students routinely knocked at my office unsolicited to chat about writing and get extra help. As technology advanced, later generations preferred to text, e-mail, or call rather than talk in person. That way, they didn’t have to lift their faces from their phones.

Personal conferences now typically require coercion or messages like “you better come see me because you are flunking this class.” As professors, we are just as complicit. We have “retention software” that sends “Red Flag” warnings with canned responses to alert students of poor academic performance. Oddly enough, it seems to work.

For years, universities peddled online education with superlatives about the efficacy of instruction, improving outcomes, and providing content to far-flung students. Universities drove down operation costs by running virtual classes, and yet still tacked on new, online fees.

Once upon a summer session, Northern Michigan University held in-person classes. It was a lovely time to teach. No icy sidewalks and mountains of plowed snow. Lake breezes wafted through open windows. We wore our summer clothes and led our classes outside, where students sat cross legged beneath shade trees, and chattered about books. We studied nature writing and trekked into the national forests on field trips. The school’s motto was “Northern Naturally.” Over the last ten years, the majority of summer classes have moved online. Campus is nearly undergrad free. Teach English in summer and you’re tethered to a computer checking e-mails and monitoring discussion forums.

Virtual instruction has its place, especially in a pandemic, and some students clearly flourish in such an environment. I volunteered early on to learn the tools and the lingo of remote learning—synchronous and asynchronous, the Moodle platform, audio conferencing—and then after a few classes decided it wasn’t my cup of pedagogy. The experience served me well, however, when the shutdowns came in March. I delivered what I felt was an effective remote learning course while some professors struggled to post to the gradebook and learn Zoom.

My home office now resembles a recording studio, with cameras and microphones to produce instructional videos and narrate PowerPoint presentations for my classes. My colleagues in the English department were supposed to begin face-to-face teaching last week, but now have to wait; a laboratory in Chicago could not process all the COVID test results from thousands of incoming students and faculty in time. My own test took six days to come back—useless for contact tracing. As I write this, already some 40 students have tested positive and are holed up in quarantine. I read daily missives from the university about its reopening plans. No doubt, administrators are sincere with their task forces, safety protocols, quarantine dorms, Plexiglas panels, and school-branded masks. They canceled all fall sports. Yet there are no guarantees.

The county health departments are underfunded and understaffed for testing and contact tracing. The governor of Michigan issues public health orders only to be sued by the legislature. Wacky militias with heavy weaponry threaten to again invade the capitol building in Lansing. The federal Center for Disease Control weakens recommendations for school openings. Arrogance, incompetency, and sheer lunacy reign at the national level. There’s no plan. We are on our own.

I won’t go back to the classroom—not until there’s a vaccine, an antiviral treatment, a coordinated national policy, and some end to the selfish behavior I see in the streets. Until then, I just don’t have the heart for it.

The post A Letter From Northern Michigan, Where Remote Is Not Remote Enough to Escape COVID appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the question I often get when I enter the office of a feed mill or grain elevator, asking permission to make photographs on the property or inside the buildings.

Showing other photos that I’ve taken usually satisfies the operator that I’m not working for the local tax assessor or real estate agent, and I receive permission to proceed.

But it’s a good question: Why do I keep up with this activity? What is the motivation? There is no coherent explanation except to say that it is something I feel must be done.

For more than 45 years, I’ve been taking pictures of feed mills and grain elevators in the towns of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Here, the mills—plants that turn grain and other materials into food for farm animals—were once common enough to be taken for granted, even as they often provided a town landmark.

Now, changes in the scale and economics of the agricultural industry have made smaller mills and elevators redundant or inefficient. Some small town mills are still in operation—they might hang on by doing custom grinding (special mixes that depart from the standard recipe to treat particular conditions in animals), or selling lawn and garden products, or mixing for horses and other pets. One I visited even serves ostriches and llamas. But many smaller facilities have been replaced or engulfed by larger ones. Some have been torn down. Some have fallen into disrepair. A portion of history is slipping away.

My documentation of this history began as a passing interest. I worked—I’m now retired—as an industrial photographer, filmmaker, and later, video producer. I have no personal connections to farming or milling. But I like to get outside, and I take pictures of everything that catches my eye. One day in the late 1960s I photographed a beautiful porcelain door knob on a dilapidated building. Later, I saw a similar building while out riding my bike, and I asked someone if she knew what it was. “Oh, that’s the old feed mill,” she told me, and added that it had closed a couple of years before. It was scheduled for demolition. “They’re going to put some stores on the lot.” 

A few days later I drove back with camera gear.

I went to the library. I researched. I became a regular reader of Michigan Farmer magazine and the trade journals like the Milling Journal. I learned that 19th-century feed mills were almost always located alongside a railroad track, usually about seven or eight miles apart—about as far as a farmer would want to drive a team of horses on a hot summer day. My collection of pictures grew. I used photos on Google maps to follow train tracks to a likely mill. Often, I’d be directed to my next location by a conversation with a worker at the previous: “Have you photographed the mill in Jamestown? It’s back off the road on 180th Street … Better hurry though, they’re going to get rid of it pretty soon.”

I now have thousands of images of feed mills and grain elevators. I came to know the workers at various places. The owner-operator of a mill in Carson City still remembers when, just a boy, he left a tank of slow-moving molasses unattended, and it overflowed to coat everything—floors, machinery, stored feed. (He had to clean up the mess.) I’ve been told many tales, many as humorous as this one, but also some that bordered on the tragic. These include workers’ anxiety about a passing way of life, their resignation at changes, and their grief over accidents in mills and elevators—which are still more common than they should be.

My photographer’s eye remains fascinated by the variety of the structures. They’re true examples of vernacular architecture. As they age and undergo repairs, they often acquire a mix of building materials. One section might include wood shiplap siding, wood clapboard siding, metal siding and a metal roof, corrugated steel, brick, tar paper, and even a car license plate used to patch a hole.

What they don’t include is ornament or decoration. Except for the Christmas Stars. They are made on a framework of metal pipe with lightbulbs attached, mounted at the top of the tallest elevator. The lights are lit eight days before Christmas and are left on until New Year’s Eve. (I have asked a number of times about the reason for the eight days, and the only answer I’ve gotten is “custom.”) When I’m driving on an interstate in December, look out over the snow-covered farm fields, and see one of those stars glowing in the dark, I know that I am in the right place for me.

I’ve photographed mills in every season, even in the rain and snow. I focus most on light. At times, I prefer the low raking angle of a winter sun, which accentuates the deeply engraved textures of an old building. At times, I prefer to photograph when clouds veil the sun to produce a misty cloak over a sharply detailed structure. I capture the pattern of dappled sunlight coming through tree leaves, or I open a door to let bright outdoor light spill across the floor inside.

One of my influences is the French photographer Eugène Atget, who took pictures of Paris and its environs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrating on old and medieval parts of the city. He eked out a precarious living by selling prints to artist supply shops (who resold them to painters as references for quaint old scenes). Atget “viewed the whole world as a finished work of art,” said Berenice Abbott, the American artist who saved his negatives and helped his work achieve recognition, “and photography was just the act of pointing.”

So many old mills have been waiting a long time for me to appreciate them. For my part, I’m only pointing.

The post Capturing the Architecture of American Agriculture—and a Passing Way of Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When people used to walk the streets of my hometown of Detroit, they knew exactly where they were. They were in Hitsville, the home of Motown Records. They were in the Motor City, the auto capital that put the world on wheels. They were in union country, a workingman’s paradise, one of the ventricles of the nation’s industrial heart.

We ain’t that no more. Ain’t been it for a long, long time, to be frank–so long, in fact, that I don’t think I ever knew that Detroit.

Sure, like a lot of kids here in the ’70s, I grew up listening to the Temps and Marvin Gaye. But the “Motown Sound” was by then so much corporate ventriloquism. Berry Gordy had moved the label to Los Angeles in 1972.

Likewise, the auto manufacturing that I knew was fast losing ground as the fount of great jobs, upward mobility, and blue-collar dreams. Instead, it was the business that taught me about “layoffs,” “planned obsolescence,” and, ultimately,
“de-industrialization.”

By the 1980s, the “Motown” and “Motor City” monikers seemed at best quaint and, at worst, laughable. As the world turned to Japanese manufacturers for efficient, quality cars, American carmakers embarrassed themselves with rolling jokes like the Dodge Shadow, the Chevy Cavalier, the Plymouth Caravelle, and the Cadillac Allante.

Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan had launched a wholesale disinvestment from urban America that continues to this day. Social programs were gutted. Crack cocaine took over the streets. A city that had been dogged by a blood-soaked reputation as the “Murder Capital” since the heyday of the Purple Gang in the 1920s was now awash in a new, more youthful brand of carnage that was exacerbated by the policy of turning poor, teetering neighborhoods in Detroit into a battlefront in the new “war on drugs.”

The white flight that had begun in the 1950s accelerated in the ’70s and ’80s, turning metro Detroit into one of the most segregated regions in the country. Race-baiters like Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson sold the city’s northern suburbs as a safe haven for whites who refused to be governed by Detroit’s new black political class. Department stores and other businesses followed, taking with them jobs and any hope of maintaining downtown Detroit as a retail center. The city’s tax base dwindled. Many of the black families whose patriarchs had moved “up South” to work the city’s auto plants, and who had become the cornerstones of a thriving middle class along the way, also began to leave–first in a trickle, and then, by the 2000s, in a deluge.

Once a city of nearly 2 million, Detroit today has a population of less than 800,000. The city has a $300-million budget deficit. The school system has been taken over by an equally inept, even hostile, state government.

Yet when people talk about what it will take to bring Detroit back, many of them–from President Obama to local city councilmen–spend their time dwelling on its long-gone auto industry. While domestic manufacturing remains critical, and Detroit should be part of it, people need to let the city move on.

We can’t keep thinking what’s good for GM is good for Detroit. Of course, this notion was never entirely true. The car companies encouraged the gutting of street-car systems and the expansion of local freeways that destroyed many of Detroit’s neighborhoods. But if it wasn’t entirely true in the past, it’s an outright falsehood today.

Yes, General Motors maintains headquarters in downtown Detroit (the Obama administration almost demanded it), while Ford and Chrysler are headquartered in nearby suburbs. But only a couple of plants remain in the city proper and thus on Detroit property tax rolls, and fewer Detroiters than ever work in the auto industry. Certainly, these companies are important to the region and the rest of the country, but they cannot be the salvation of Detroit. Just last year, GM enjoyed its largest profit ever, $7.6 billion in revenue, but it meant little for conditions in the city. Unemployment remained sky-high. Residents kept moving away. GM has been booming the past year or so, but Detroit has continued its death spiral.

Years ago, men with only high school educations–sometimes not even that–could earn wages comparable to those of many white-collar professionals. They worked hard and they thrived. That isn’t the reality anymore, but, in Detroit, too many people act as if nothing has changed. Higher learning still gets short shrift. Consider: Only about 11 percent of Detroit residents have college degrees, in contrast to about 25 percent of Americans nationally.

So when car companies air Super Bowl commercials extolling Detroit’s “toughness” and “grit,” they feed a dangerous misperception that all we need to be good at is manual labor, that we don’t have to be thoughtful, nuanced, or informed. A couple of years ago, Detroit-area musician Kid Rock, considered by many to be a personification of the area’s blue-collar aesthetic, told Fox News, “I have nightmares that I’m going to wake up and everyone’s driving a Prius and living in a condo, and we’re all getting health insurance.”

How ridiculous is that? You’re afraid of cars that don’t pollute the air? Detroiters don’t need healthcare? Is that too soft, too liberal, for those of us who live in overworked industrial wastelands? No, that’s what you get when your identity as a Detroiter goes no further than the stereotype of an anti-intellectual meathead too busy putting together gas-guzzlers to care about the social contract.

But it’s not just muddled pseudo-conservative illogic that’s the problem. Whenever President Obama pops into town, he seems to be concerned only with visiting car factories. I know, I know: It’s all about touting the success of the car bailout. But damn, man, take a trip around the rest of the city. See how the city’s once-vibrant eastside–where Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue plant towers above vacant lots and ramshackle homes–is wasting away amid blight and violence. Look at how the enclave of Hamtramck teeters on the brink of bankruptcy despite GM’s Detroit/Hamtramck assembly plant. Take a look at the full picture, not just the shots with smokestacks in the background. If pols and others want Detroit to embrace a brighter future, they need to stop harping on the symbols of its past.

Darrell Dawsey is a book author and freelance journalist who lives in metro Detroit. His work will appear on the soon-to-launch website Deadline Detroit.

*Photo courtesy of Bernt Rostad.

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