Employment figures/jobs
Decaying/falling infrastructure imposing the landscape of the town
The body of these toxic factories. I keep thinking about “washing away” the chemical toxicity after work each day, but how people I know, my own father included, sweat out dyes and chemicals, staining their clothes, sheets, pillows, etc. What does it mean to sweat out toxicity knowing it will never go away?
Unity of a downtown for everyone, when housing prices downtown are some of the highest in the county. Downtown housing development
2016 election.. Many toxics came to a bubble. My problem here is I don’t want to exceptionalize 2016 too much because I actually don’t think it was an exception in many ways. But there was something about this particular moment.. So, trying to work through how we can think about this election and concurrent events around the world as exceptional, but not an exception.
In terms of local organizing, the duetero capacity comes in waves. I think post-2008 there was a wake up call and after the 2010 census several organizations (mostly NGOs and private businesses in town) attempted to organize around “unity” in Muskegon, capitalizing on the narrative of the economic crisis hitting Muskegon at-large and this propulated myth that no was immune to the crisis.
Thinking of archiving the toxic histories in Muskegon, only one project really comes to mind. The documentary Up From the Bottoms: The Search for the American Dream which follows “the personal stories of African-Americans, now in their 80s and 90s who migrated north in the 1940sto the war factories of Muskegon, Mi. This film was done by a local school teacher (one of mine actually).
But also, this is from the same side of the state as Betsey Devos and Bill Huizenga. What does the defunding of public schools and the defunding of environmental agencies do for undercutting deutero capacity?