On one of my routes home, there’s a signpost to which has been affixed a stuffed animal and a plastic figurine of an angel with the head of a little black girl. It’s bleached now from the sun, and the stuffed animal has gotten raggedy from the weather, and the desolation of it gives me a momentary pause that my life could be worse, that somewhere someone lost a child to tragedy near that corner. Today, it was even more poignant because a block later I saw a homeless man asleep on the sidewalk, tucked into the shadow of a building. Meanwhile, several miles south on Woodward, the Qline opens up this weekend, not far from where Mike Ilitch failed to live long enough to see the opening of the joint Red Wings/Pistons sports arena in the increasingly regentrified Heart of Detroit. How many of those gentrifying hipsters drive past the homeless black men hiding in the shadows of buildings without even noticing their existence? Meanwhile, a sunbleached angel remains in testimony that the lives of the invisible and displaced matter, too.
And tomorrow, I’ll wake up white again.