Detroiter who works at a tech startup here in the city: great bit of photography and a really interesting message, but there is one notable absence in the contrast between the haves and have-nots is in the city of Detroit. There's a huge wealth gap between Detroit and the surrounding suburbs, but there's a pretty big one in the city as well.
There's plenty of investment and activity happening in the "Downtown Development District" than the surrounding neighborhoods, which were hit the hardest from population decline. There's plenty of money and attention that goes to typically young and white tech startups that have recently located (myself included) while other (typically minority) entrepreneurs are left out of the narrative of the "rebirth" of Detroit. It's a lot about race, politics, and access to capital, but it's going to be readily apparent in a few years which areas have been given preferential treatment from state oversight (and tax-write-offs) and local investment.
It also heavily depends on the customers you are selling to in Detroit. Basically all state/local government agencies and a large percentage of big local business have "minority owned business" preferences written into their purchasing process. As a result, you'll find a number of small shops whose sole purpose is to be owned by a minority and then subcontract out jobs to other companies who might not otherwise be able to compete for those contracts. Alternately, I've encountered companies entirely staffed by non-minorities but the company is "owned" by the wife of the CEO who happens to be Asian or whatever.
Michigan has a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) certification process to attempt to reign in some these shenanigans (used by MDOT for road construction projects) but I still see this sort of thing all over the place.
I'm not sure about numbers of those business, so I can't really speak to how prevalent that is, but I'd imagine that sort of fraud is pretty small in both number and dollar value compared to the higher-profile and the larger tax breaks given to the Ilitches and the like. There just isn't the same amount of money going to minority business owners/neighborhoods vs. white business owners/white(r) neighborhoods in a city that is 92% Non-white.
You just made it about race, but really it's talent pool and demographics and education/skill levels. If a software group moves to downtown Detroit, it seems destructive to hold that as a negative, as if having some bright spots is somehow a negative because that software group doesn't hire the pipe fitter with the a grade 7 education.
One thing you definitely see is the problem with professional networks. They're pretty racially divided. You walk around the tech hubs in Detroit and you'll find that one is primarily white, and another primarily black. Networking events are often pretty similar. I don't think a lot of the lack of hiring of minorities in Tech Startups in Detroit is anything malevolent, but more a product of a lack of awareness of people who exist outside their professional networks. There are a number of great colleges in the Detroit area (Wayne State, Lawrence Tech, UofD Mercy) but I've rarely seen people get hired out of those colleges and into the tech startups around town. It's often the interpersonal networks which tend to align themselves around the race and class of the person hiring.
tl;dr It's not about racism, but about personal networks that often align with race
No. The story of Detroit's decline and it's comeback has been about race for decades. Talent pool, education, demographics, and skill levels in Detroit are a function of race, which dylanbox has experienced first hand and shared.
The context of this discussion is the "rebirth" of Detroit, not race riots or the 1950s. If Detroit's rebirth is a high-skill, high-tech industry, the exclusion of many Detroit residents has everything to do with skills and education, and absolutely nothing to do with race.
Quoting Wikipedia: "Detroit remains one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States."
This is about today, not about the 1950s. The rebirth of Detroit depends in part on the racial conditions that led to today, and the racial conditions we have today.
"De facto educational segregation in Detroit (and by extension elsewhere) was legally permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).[42]"
How do you expect skills and education to have nothing to do with race when Detroit's education system is bounded and defined by race?
There's plenty of investment and activity happening in the "Downtown Development District" than the surrounding neighborhoods, which were hit the hardest from population decline. There's plenty of money and attention that goes to typically young and white tech startups that have recently located (myself included) while other (typically minority) entrepreneurs are left out of the narrative of the "rebirth" of Detroit. It's a lot about race, politics, and access to capital, but it's going to be readily apparent in a few years which areas have been given preferential treatment from state oversight (and tax-write-offs) and local investment.