there's actually a sort of a pattern, here.

these venues set up in detroit and, because they are capitalist enterprises that are ultimately trying to make money, they make marketing decisions to try and appeal to the people that have money to spend, which, in detroit, is going to mostly be people past a certain age - and these people are either going to be mostly white, or mostly asian. i mean, if you really want to make money in detroit, or most other places, then go full asian...

then, the community - which everybody knows is overwhelmingly black - starts complaining that the programming doesn't appeal to them, is racist, etc, when the truth is that they're just trying to make money and just trying to appeal to where the money is.

but, people mostly aren't racist anymore (i understand that this doesn't apply in this specific case.), it isn't accepted socially in any context anywhere, and nobody wants to be seen as racist, so they listen and adjust and try to make the programming more appealing to broader demographics in order to try and prevent the pr fallout that comes from everybody thinking you're a fucking racist, even while knowing that they made the choice they made in the first place for good financial reasons.

then, once they've made their programming adjustments to be more inclusive, the thing that actually happens is that the place empties out; the people that used to go there are no longer interested, and there's just not enough disposable income in the market they're trying to tap into, which is why they didn't go after it in the first place. so, they lose money, and they either close or have to find a way back to where they were.

if i was an asshole i'd say fine: white people out of detroit. they don't want us here, let's go. but, i know that this is what caused the city's problems in the first place, it's just been inverted. what we used to call white flight has been converted into black slight; what was once a bunch of white people fleeing the scary black areas has become those black areas erecting fences and saying "this is ours". and, it's not any better when the blacks are pushing the whites out than it was when the whites were trying to escape.

there will be another attempt to set up a rock venue in downtown detroit, and it will have a mostly white audience when it happens. i just want to stress the importance of being racially sensitive from the start, in understanding that the person or group that does this next is walking into a situation that is already damaged from so many decades of conflict, that you can't start from a point of mutual understanding and that you have to take special steps to reach out from the start.

but, we want this to work, in the end. we don't want segregated communities, and we don't want ghettos.