During the last years of apartheid, the brutally racist “old world order” in South Africa, many young people protesting the regime used as their anthem the music of a mysterious American folk singer whose they knew only as Rodriguez.
After the fall of the hated regime, and the birth of the World Wide Web, a few music critics and journalists began hunting for more clues about the identity of the mysterious singer, who they mistakenly believed dead. The only clue they had was a line from his song Inner City Blues: Met a girl from Dearborn, early six o’clock this morn: Cold Fact.
As the movie Searching for Sugarman tells, eventually they realized Dearborn was a place, and they learned Sixto Rodriguez was alive, well and living in Detroit.
Dearborn is, indeed, an important place. In the same month as the battle of Gettysburg, a baby was born on a Dearborn farm who would change the world. His name was Henry Ford. Today, more than a century and a half later, it is hard to imagine Dearborn without Ford; the automaker employs 44,000 people, four times as many as the next largest employer.
The city has gone through several remarkable incarnations. Old-timers remember Dearborn as the fiefdom of Mayor Orville Hubbard, a rolypoly man in a bow tie who often acted like a clown, whose administration provided excellent city services but with an embarrassing reek of racism. Yet even he was more complex than often known. He gave the key to the city to an early transgender pioneer, and was one of the first to oppose the Vietnam War.
Hubbard died forty years ago, and since then, Dearborn has become better known as home to the largest Arab-American community in the United States. This has caused the city to become nationally famous, though often in a distorted way. Anti-immigration politicians, including a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Nevada, have claimed Dearborn is under sharia law.
There are all sorts of spurious videos on the Internet meant to prove this nonsense claim. In truth, while more than 40 percent of Dearborn’s 100,000 people are of Arab ancestry, the community is anything but a monolith. Many are Lebanese Christians, some of whose families have been in Dearborn for a century. Today there are more Muslims, many of whom have fled the wars in the Middle East in recent years, and came here to be with family.
Some of the new arrivals have shown little desire to assimilate, and live in self-contained micro-communities where only Arabic is spoken, and which could pass for Yemen, if the climate were different. But there is remarkably little friction.
Yes, Dearborn is home to the stunning Arab-American National Museum. But otherwise, it has as much sharia law as any other town with a mayor named Jack O’Reilly.
Three years ago, Brian Stone, an activist with a plucky sense of humor, sought to defuse the nonsense by posting a series of pictures he said were designed to illustrate “Dearborn sharia law.” They showed him in front of a strip club, a bar and a Honeybaked Ham store – all things which, of course, would be anathema under sharia law.
There aren’t many cities with as rich and varied a history as Dearborn, which is, for most people, a rather pleasant place to live, with more cultural attractions and somewhat less income disparity than most places. Actually, in many ways, we shouldn’t be defending Dearborn.
We should be celebrating it.
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