Sons of Detroit Review: A Complicated, Personal Take on Race and Privilege

Sons of Detroit
(USA, 103 min.)
Dir. Jeremy Xido

 

“I want to say something, too,” an offscreen interviewee says after the end title card appears in Sons of Detroit. “People who left the city have so many poignant moments of longing, of just missing the old home in Detroit,” she continues as the image movies from a black screen to an aerial view of a residential street.

“When people see these pictures of old buildings that are devastated and all that, they say ‘That is so sad.’ Why isn’t it sad when the people got up and left it? Why don’t you say ‘it was so sad’ when people got up and left that magnificent house because they were scared that Black people were going to live next door’? And then they’ll say, ‘Is Detroit coming back? Aren’t you happy that Detroit is coming back?’ Detroit never left. You did. Detroit is right here where it’s always been.”

That question of homecoming and romantic memory filters throughout director Jeremy Xido’s return in Sons of Detroit. This deeply personal film sees Xido (The Bones) recognize and confront his blind spots when he comes back home to perform a play after being abroad for many years. His performance piece The Angola Project reflects upon his travels and his strange relationship to Detroit, where his hippie Marxist parents moved from California when he was a boy. However, he recognizes that the Detroit he remembers is hardly the city that exists now.

So begins a period of reflection as one project leads to another. Xido returns to his childhood street, which, like much of Detroit, may have more abandoned houses than occupied ones. One boarded-up and crumbling home makes him especially sad. It’s not his parents’ former house, though. It’s the home of his neighbours, Myrtis and Jimmy. Xido likens them to second parents who basically raised him while witnessing his own mother and father’s absence. They were so close that he still refers to their son Boo as his cousin. But Xido hasn’t seen Boo (or anyone else from the old days) in twenty years, so he begins a Searching for Sugar Man style quest to find him.

There’s one major difference, however, between Jeremy’s family and Boo’s family. Jeremy hails from the only white family on the block. Boo, Myrtis, and Jimmy are Black. This fact inspires Xido to immediately open up his search for Boo into a soul-searching consideration of social determinism and systemic inequity. Boo, see, has also been away for a long time. But while Xido’s been travelling and working abroad on artistic projects, his childhood friend’s been in jail. Xido recognizes that had he stayed in Detroit, he might have been there with Boo. But he’s quick enough to know that two kids from the same street don’t have the same opportunities in America.

As Xido reconnects with folks from his past, including his birth parents and surviving members of his “second family” – both Myrtis and Jimmy have since passed – the conversations situate Detroit as the quintessential American town. It’s a place where Black families came in search of opportunities, with historical roots to northern migration after slavery. It’s a working class town where people could advance in the manufacturing heyday through hard work. Detroit stands as a decaying capsule of the promise of the American dream.

But the conversations evoke a deterioration in the social fabric as white flight set in. White families flocked to the suburbs as more Black people came to town or enjoyed upward mobility, therefore changing the demographics of certain neighbourhoods. Startlingly, Xido even learns that it’s written into the deed of Myrtis and Jimmy’s home that the house could never be sold to Black people. While now empty, the home endures as a stand of defiance against a racist system.

Xido asks some especially tough questions of his parents, who moved him to a new school with fears for his safety. The filmmaker reflects on going from being the only white kid in his class to joining a class with a lily-white make-up. He can’t help but call out his own seemingly progressive parents for white fragility and racial bias.

At the same time, as Xido reconnects with Boo and his second family, Sons of Detroit uses a personal case study to ask why one white child raised by his Black neighbours, who showed more genuine interest in his well-being than his own parents did, can have a vastly different life from that family’s child. It’s white privilege in a nutshell. The film features many direct-address testimonials from Xido as he looks inward to confront this sentiment. However, the longitudinal nature of the film—this story dates back to 2016—admittedly adds a layer of awkwardness to the self-examination. The complexity of race relations and the question of privilege in America have evolved so considerably in the Trump years, with Black Lives Matter, and with COVID and other factors that the white lens on racism may be a bit dated.

Xido reconciles this reality best he can. Thankfully, he affords much of the airtime in Sons of Detroit to his Black neighbours and second family. It’s generally in these moments of looking outward that the film finds its power. He’s looking at a city and the people who continue to give it life, so it’s only fitting that the final word goes to those who stayed.

Sons of Detroit premiered at DOC NYC.

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