"I think Detroit is the place where — to be frank and blunt with you — where certain pundits go when they want to lie to themselves. There's a narrative about Detroit that I think is not too separate from the standard narrative about mass incarceration, and it holds that everything in Detroit was great until the late 1960s when we had riots and when we eventually elected a black mayor. There's a sort of dreamy notion that people have about Detroit — and I would use other language were I not on the radio — about Detroit and what actually happened. I think we use that to obscure the fact that we actually do certain things to make a city like Detroit look the way it looks."
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