The real-life 'negro removals' behind HBO mini-series Show Me a Hero
The real-life 'negro removals' behind HBO mini-series Show Me a Hero
David Simon’s TV series follows the fight against social housing in 1980s Yonkers, New York – but, as Kevin Baker reveals, it’s just the tip of the iceberg of the sordid American history of kicking black people out of their neighbourhoods
Kevin Baker
Thursday 24 September 2015 07.31 EDT
Show Me a Hero, David Simon’s TV adaptation of Lisa Belkin’s book of the same name, takes an unsparing look at one of the most corrosive issues in American life: the question of how we learn, literally, to live with each other.
Simon and co-writer William F Zorzi do this brilliantly, which should be no surprise. Their previous collaboration, The Wire, about life in Baltimore’s inner city, was the best show ever on American television. They are just as unflinching here, their canvas an endless, real-life fight over public housing in Yonkers, a small city just north of New York. Its overwhelmingly white, working-class population had already been battered by de-industrialisation when the fight began in 1980, and Simon and Zorzi are sympathetic to their fears. They never soft-soap the crime and dysfunction prevalent in Yonkers’ predominantly black and Hispanic public housing projects, while at the same time, they deftly uncover white Yonkers’ true sin: the inability to see the people of colour in the projects as human beings, just as desperate as they are to build a better life for themselves and their children.
Yonkers was just one of many such fights over public housing that went on throughout the United States for decades – and are still going on. But there is another dimension to the story, one that is probably beyond the scope of any six-hour TV series to tell.
That is, our past. Not only the refusal of white people to live with people of colour, but their conviction, running back through the history of the US, that any black space is not legitimate – that whatever black people own can and should be expropriated by whites, if they so desire it. During the second world war, this idea of white primacy sparked one of the worst race riots in American history, after white people insisted not only that Detroit’s federal housing built for war workers be segregated, but that all of it be turned over to white residents.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/24/hbo-series-show-me-a-hero-real-life-negro-removals-david-simon
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