By Kasey Helton
“When will the statute of limitations run out on Howell’s racist reputation?” Maria Stuart asks in her recent Livingston Post column, rehashing a decades-old question that remains incomplete and unanswered.
But what if the reason we keep asking this question repeatedly over the years hoping for a different answer every time is because we’ve been asking the wrong question all along?
As MLK Day approaches, I can’t help but consider that a satisfactory answer to this question ought to have nothing at all to do with “reputation” — a surface metric to say the least, often afforded by default based on public perception to the undeserved yet influential. What if instead, we reframed the question in a way that respected concrete outcomes, one that demanded action as an answer? What if the question isn’t “when,” but rather, “how”? What if the real issue at the heart of the question isn’t reputation at all, but rather restoration?
Are we as a community willing to examine and re-frame the question we ask ourselves every single time our feelings are wounded over a bad headline surrounding a racial incident here? Because there are concrete answers aplenty to be found if we are, but none of them are comfortable and they require action to address. The dilemma of race relations in Livingston County won’t be answered without substance and a commitment to the here and now, and a willingness to address the issue of economic justice alongside it, as MLK himself came to recognize in his final days.
Consider the three main challenges the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments identified facing Livingston County’s economic development, as cited in Stuart’s Op-Ed from Howell Mayor Bob Ellis: a lack of public transportation; a lack of affordable housing; and its racist reputation.
I was disappointed that no attempt was made to connect the socioeconomic dots between these three challenges in Stuart’s analysis. We know – and have known for years – that greater access to affordable housing is critical to addressing a sustainable economic future in this county. Yet local leaders from individual townships to the county commission haven’t lifted a finger to address it. They are asleep on this issue, as the median home value Livingston County surpasses a quarter million dollars as working class wages from all racial groups remain stagnant.
A robust commitment to affordable starter homes for a greater number of working class/middle class individuals and families would send a strong message to those in surrounding counties that Livingston welcomes a more economically and racially blended community. Our racially diverse neighbors who comprise much of the working class in surrounding counties aren’t stupid: they know how to read between the lines. When a community is 97 percent white and affordable homes are unattainable, we may as well put a locked gate around the entire county for the unsubtle message we’re sending: “Your kind are not welcome here.”
The lack of affordable housing in Livingston County has real world consequences for both white and non-white members of the working class, but it seems Black workers here are disproportionately affected in noteworthy ways. Back in 2017 The Livingston Daily published a story about hundreds of Flint area workers – the majority of whom are Black men and women – who travel 84 miles round trip by bus to work 10-12 hour shifts for $12.50 an hour at non-union manufacturing plants in and around Livingston County that are starved of a viable workforce. The article presented it as a win-win situation for both worker and employer, but is it? It certainly made me uneasy.
What message does it send to those outside of this community that the people we elect to local office here are so stubborn in their refusal to provide a concrete plan for affordable housing that it means a majority-Black workforce must be gone for upward of 16 hours a day to provide for their families as the labor they provide remains critical to sustaining our local tax base. Meanwhile, our city, township and county elected officials won’t lift a finger to give these honest workers the means to live in proximity to where they work so they can care for their families and have some semblance of work life balance. What message does it send that our county leadership won’t provide beyond the minimal investment required of them for public transit to help workers get back and forth to the job if they somehow manage to find housing here?
Sometimes I wonder if the real damage of the once very local and now very dead Robert Miles who led the KKK in the 70s and 80s in Michigan is that he keeps us frozen in time, endlessly and exhaustively debating an issue from the framework of forty years ago, as opposed to what the real socioeconomic issues are today here as they pertain to racial injustice and the economic injustice that goes hand in hand with it. Not all villains wear pointy hats and swastikas. Not all villains are even people; sometimes the villain rests in systems and patterns of belief and behaviors. Those who don’t think we have more work to do on the issue of racial justice are happy to use the corpse of Robert Miles to dismiss and deny the lingering issues, as if that was ever only the extent of the problem, while those who think his presence here and all the insipid ignorant creeps he’s inspired that have shown up after him matter in some way keep resurrecting that corpse, but to what end? There has to be more.
That name and the way people use it is a distraction that keeps us from having a substantial discussion of what it will take to bring about a change in this abstract idea of our regional “reputation” as it pertains to race, which is ultimately meaningless if our local leaders do not do more to bridge the gaps of socioeconomic inequality that exist here.
We do not need to wait for an act of “divine intervention” as Stuart bemoaned in her column. Thankfully, none of us have to wait for the righteous hand of the Almighty to fix things; we simply need to summon the collective will within ourselves. Wasting an ungodly amount of taxpayer money on a public relations firm for the City of Howell isn’t going to fix this issue beyond a band aid, and neither will a pontificating roundtable of Very Important People, nor even will a statue of Lulu Childers, although I certainly would support that last endeavor.
Turning the question toward restoration over reputation will require a broad, sincere, unified commitment from our local leadership to bring about meaningful policies in housing, transportation and other related socioeconomic areas that will restore the socioeconomic inequities that seem to exist everywhere in these times and affect the entire middle and working class. If we summon the will to tackle these issues head on in ways that matter, over time our reputation will heal itself.
Kasey Helton is a former three time candidate for the Livingston County Board of Commissioners and a Howell resident. She is a also a union steward for SEIU Healthcare MI.
