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The vandalizing of Monument to Joe Louis initiated efforts in the media to explain both the meaning of the vandalism and of the monument itself. This article engages those efforts to find an explanation linking act to object. Proceeding through the joining of acts, objects, and words, this article works toward a non-reductive account of the embodiment of rhetoric.
In February 2004 I came about as close as I probably ever will to my fifteen minutes of fame. A reporter from the Associated Press (AP) called me asking questions about Monument to Joe Louis, which had just been vandalized. Vandalism would not otherwise be of interest nationally except that, on the surface of it, this particular act of vandalism expressed racial divisiveness expected in news from Detroit. Two white men from Redford, a close-in suburb of Detroit, had poured white paint over the monument in response to the shooting deaths of two white Detroit police officers. As the two men explained to police at the time of their arrest, "We did it to support you guys" (Schmitt). To write her story the AP reporter wanted from me some background on the monument. Specifically she wanted to know if Monument to Joe Louis, a 40-foot bronze fist and forearm, suspended from cables and thrust horizontally across the median of Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit, represented Black Power.
My heart sank as I realized my answer-"Not exactly"-did not give her the quote she wanted for her story. And so the next day as I read the AP story I thought yet again about the interconnectedness of actions, objects, and words. The vandals affirmed Monument to Joe Louis as a point of focus for anxieties about racial tensions in the urban environment of the greater Detroit area. But to say the monument was targeted because it symbolizes Black Power would have been both reductive and unproductive. The Fist, as it is known locally, became a target less because it is a monument representing some notion of Black Power and more because it is a gesture that defines-at the same time it defies-the city's racial segregation. Detroit is a clear example of the spatial isolation of blacks in urban centers from whites in suburban peripheries, an isolation used...