Amanda Burr Xido, Atpeace Makita, Austin Amir Phillips-El, Barbara Silverstein, DeCarlo Harris, Detroit, documentaries, Ella Jean Gamble, Ernest Jones, Ezra Donovan Hills, film festivals, Gerron Brown, Igor Dobricic, James Kershaw, Jeremy Xido, Jim Barnard, Lindsey Dietz Marchant, Luke Murphy, Marion Denise Brown, Marsha Battle Philpot, Michael Silverstein, Michella Brown, movies, Pamela Ross, Patricia Johnson, reviews, Ruben McCray, Russell Stewart, Sons of Detroit, Vanessa Ward, William Brown
November 21, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Jeremy Xido
Some language in Spanish with subtitles
Culture Representation: The documentary film “Sons of Detroit” features a predominantly African American group of people (with some white people), who discuss director Jeremy Xido’s connection to a predominantly African American neighborhood in Detroit, the city where he was raised from the 1970s to the early 1980s.
Culture Clash: Xido, who says he was the only white kid in this Detroit neighborhood at the time, goes back to this neighborhood in the documentary to reunite with people he knew there (include his former best friend), and to make sense of how racial identities and socioeconomic differences affected him in his childhood and later in life
Culture Audience: “Sons of Detroit” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries about Detroit and what it’s like to be a white kid in a place where mostly black people live.
The documentary “Sons of Detroit” is director Jeremy Xido’s insightful look back at his Detroit childhood as a white kid in a predominantly African American community. The movie can be a bit self-indulgent but has an authentically personal narrative. “Sons of Detroit” needed tighter editing, because the story’s timeline is jumbled and tends to ramble. However, the story is engaging and offers unique perspectives.
“Sons of Detroit” had its world premiere at the 2025 edition of DOC NYC. Xido is also the documentary’s narrator. The movie is partly a retrospective of his childhood in the 1970s, partly a search for his long-lost best friend, and partly a personal testimonial of a side of Detroit that often doesn’t make the news.
Xido, who was born in 1970, lived in Detroit from 1973 until sometime in the early 1980s. His childhood memories that he discusses in the documentary are mainly from when he was 3 to 9 years old. Not only was Xido the only white kid in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood (which is on the east side of Detroit), he was also raised by a second family who was African American, who helped take care of Xido when his parents were at work.
“Sons of Detroit” begins by showing Xido and his daughter Sovanni (who was about 3 or 4 years old at the time) speaking Spanish to each other. Xido says in a voiceover, “No matter what happens to you in the world, from the outside and in … you are suddenly transported back to being a child.”
Xido then explains that even though he hasn’t lived in Detroit since he was a child, his experiences in Detroit helped define who he is, and he still considers Detroit to be his “hometown,” in many ways. For years, Xido traveled around the world doing a one-man performing arts show called “The Angola Project,” where he discussed his complicated and sometimes-confusing relationship he had with racial identities and Detroit. The “Sons of Detroit” documentary has a few brief clips of Xido performing “The Angola Project.”
Xido has since ended his performances of “The Angola Project,” but “Sons of Detroit” can be considered a cinematic extension of that project. He says in the documentary that while he was doing a performance of “The Angola Project” in Berlin, he had a heart attack. During the heart attack, he had a vision of a house that was near his childhood home in Detroit.
This house was the home of married couple Ethel Myrtis Brown and Claudis Jimmy Brown, who were more commonly known by their middle names. Myrtis and Jimmy (who are now deceased) were considered the charismatic surrogate parents of the neighborhood because the Brown household is where a lot of the neighborhood kids would stay when no one else could look after the kids. Several people in the documentary describe Myrtis and Jimmy as the neighborhood “stars,” who were welcoming, friendly and all-around great people.
Xido says that during his heart attack, he had vivid memories of smelling grease fat in “hungry winds,” as a reminder of having meals at the Brown house. Xido says he knew during and after his heart attack that he had unresolved issues from his childhood. “Something at my core was still rotting,” Xido comments in the narration. “And if I didn’t figure it out, it would kill me.”
Xido doesn’t tell the story of how he and his parents moved to Detroit until almost halfway through the movie. His father Michael Silverstein (a medical doctor) and Barbara Silverstein (who worked for non-profits aimed at helping low-income people) were self-described left-wing Marxists who met and fell in love in the 1968, when they were both medical students and anti-war activists in San Francisco. Michael was Jewish. Barbara was raised as a Baptist and a Presbyterian.
Michael and Barbara (who are now deceased but are interviewed in the documentary) got married in 1969. Xido talks about how his mother had a lot of trauma in her life that affected how he was raised. As a child, she was sexually abused by an unnamed relative. Her father was an abusive alcoholic. And when Xido was about 2 years old, his mother was brutally raped by men who met her through the clinic where she worked at the time.
Michael and Barbara were separated at the time of the rape, but they got back together after this rape, and they decided to start over in a completely different city. They chose to live in Detroit, in a predominantly African American neighborhood. Xido went to a public school where he was the only white kid in his class.
Xido says that from an early age, especially when he began living in Detroit, he was taught to fear white people, even though he had no concept when he was very young that he was white too. At the same time, he didn’t understand until he was an older child that this fear came from white supremacist racism passed down through generations and couldn’t be completely erased simply because some civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s.
Even though Xido and his parents were racial minorities in their part of Detroit, he says he didn’t understand until he was older that they still had “white privilege,” which was also bolstered by the fact that his father was in a respected profession that usually pays well. Xido says he remembers that his father was the only person in the neighborhood who worked as a doctor. It was another reason why his family stood out in the community.
The kids who stayed in the Brown household were often referred to as “cousins,” even though they were not biologically related. Xido’s best friend at the time was a rebellious kid named William “Scooboo” Brown, also nicknamed Boo, who was a grandson of Myrtis and Jimmy. Boo’s racial identity is biracial (his mother was white), but he was dark-skinned enough for people to treat him as a black person.
Xido and Boo lost touch with each other and grew apart when Xido’s parents decided that the school that Xido attended was getting too dangerous, so they transferred him to a school with predominantly white students. Eventually, Xido and his family moved out of the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood and to a neighborhood where white people were not a racial minority.
Xido says that going to a predominantly white school gave him a rude awakening and somewhat of an identity crisis because he frequently heard racist comments about black people. Up until that point, Xido had always seen black people as an extension of his own family, so it was hurtful and confusing to him to hear black people described as enemies.
Xido remembers one particular incident when he got a car ride home with a white schoolmate, whose father was driving. Xido was still living in the Jefferson Chalmers neighbhorhood at the time, and the father was shocked that Xido was living there. Xido remembers the father making a racist comment that stung Xido to the core: The father said that black people ruined Detroit.
The documentary keeps viewers guessing about whether or not Xido will find his long-lost friend Boo. It should come as no surprise that through various people who still live in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood, Xido eventually tracks down Boo, whose life took a very different turn from Xido’s. The reunion between these two friends is shown in the last third of the documentary and has several emotionally touching moments that won’t be revealed in this review, since it’s better for viewers to see these moments for themselves. However, it should be noted that Xido and Bo talk about the contrasts in their lives and how race played a role in things that they experienced.
“Sons of Detroit” responsibly addresses the negative image that Detroit has of being a crime-ridden city. One of the people who is prominently featured in the documentary is Marsha “Music” Battle Philpot, a writer and poet, who is an outspoken loyalist of Detroit. She says it’s inaccurate to say that Detroit went downhill after the race-related Uprising of 1967, also known as the Detroit Rebellion or the 12th Street Riot. Philpot is seen giving a speaking appearance about the vibrant culture of Detroit, which is a city that isn’t just about the gloom and doom of crime-ridden neighborhoods or faltering auto industries.
Philpot also watches Xido do a rehearsal of his “Angola Project” performance and gives him this stinging critique: She cautions Xido to “do better” in how he describes his relationship to Detroit, because it comes across as “Tarzan syndrome: a white man coming back to the jungle.” Xido is taken aback by this criticism and gets teary-eyed, but he promises that he’ll investigate how to give a more appropriate presentation that won’t be racially condescending.
Most of the interviews that Xido does in the documentary are with the people he knew when he was a child in Detroit. People who are interviewed or make appearances in the documentary include Michella Brown, Pamela Ross, James Kershaw, Ella Jean Gamble, Patricia Johnson, Ernest Jones, Gerron Brown, Marion Denise “Niecy” Brown, Austin Amir Phillips-El, Russell Stewart, Vanessa Ward, Atpeace Makita, Igor Dobricic, Ezra Donovan Hills, Ruben McCray, DeCarlo Harris, Luke Murphy, Lindsey Dietz Marchant and Jim Barnard. Xido’s wife Amanda Burr Xido (who is one of the documentary’s producers) is seen briefly in the movie, but she is not interviewed.
The people who knew Xido and the Brown family back in the 1970s would rather reflect on the good memories and not troubled times affected by low incomes or family problems. “Sons of Detroit” is ultimately an intimate chronicle of one person’s journey into confronting his past and reconciling it with who he is in the present. The documentary is a meaningful testament about how people are not defined by their childhoods but shouldn’t deny that a childhood is an essential part of everyone who’s experienced it.