Hey there, today's episode is hosted by the poet Samia Bashir.

Enjoy, and I'll be back on February 18th.

I'm Samia Bashir, and this is the slowdown.

Thank you. Samia Bashir, and this is the slowdown. Recently, feeling fractured by competing deadlines,

I found myself distractedly stuck in the loop of a particular cinematic moment.

The rap battle between Eminem's character B. Rabbit

and Anthony Mackie's character, Papa Doc, aka Clarence,

in the 2002 hip-hop biomethographical movie, 8 Mile.

Detroit is an uncredited star of 8 Mile. It's also one of my homes, my mother's home.

I've been thinking of her lineage, as I often am, but especially during Black History Month.

Infamously, the shortest honorific of a month each year, it grew out of Negro History Week,

created by Carter G. Woodson, one of my

own ancestors, a cousin on the Woodson side of my family, her side. A thing that is often

missed about Detroit, a so-called chocolate city if there ever was one, is that it is actually

and historically one of the more notably and spectacularly

diverse cities in the country. Long before, and ever since, the great migration north of African

Americans, driven significantly by the auto industry's unusual for the time decision to recruit

and hire black workers, Detroit was marked by deeply entrenched

ethnic diversity. Irish, Jewish, Syrian, Greek, Anishinaabe, Ottawa, Ojibwe, Polish, Italian, and

German residents together built and expanded the city from its roots as a French trading post

to one of the most powerful metropolitan areas in the country.

Detroit was so powerful it bent time.

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