The racism of the Midwest is, in part, a fulfillment of the violence inherent in the idea of “settling“ what was already occupied. We’re still settling. Think of those people who moved to Detroit, start a coffee shop, become (even more) comfortably upper - middle – class, and sigh, “Just a few years ago, there was nothing here! “ The writer, Liz Lenz, in her memoir God Land (2019), calls this sort of thing, correctly, a “colonizing impulse”: to look somewhere and see “see a barren landscape that needs your new ideas.” Even long – settled cities become a fund that must be made to pay.

— Midwest Futures by Phil Christman (Page 83)