You can hear a lot about racism in the news and when it’s in the South, the news person usually has an attitude of, “Well, the south is known to be racist.” If it’s in the north or west, everyone acts like it’s a shock.
I have lived all over the country while working as a consultant. The worst racism I ever saw was in New Haven Connecticut. Of course, not everyone was a racist, anymore than everyone in the south is a racist. I did see some very ugly stuff though.
The thing that amazed me was how secret and sneaky it was. In New Orleans, there was segregation. White lakefront and black lakefront, for example. I didn’t even realize that was weird until I was in my 20s. I thought that was just the standard. White lakefront wasn’t any better or any worse than black lakefront, it was just segregated by the Bayou St John bridge. That bridge was out of order all through my teens.
Anyway, my point is that the white people who didn’t like black people were pretty blatant and outspoken about it. The black people who didn’t like white people were just as outspoken. You knew where you stood.
In New Haven, it was sneaky. I was in an elevator with a guy I worked with. A black guy was in the elevator with us. When the black guy got off, my co-worker went off on a racist tirade that was embarrassing to watch. And the black guy hadn’t even said anything on the ride. I saw a lot of that.
Now, on to my point. I don’t really think much about racism. I try to avoid racists where I can. Color, religion, culture, etc just don’t drive my reactions. But hearing constantly about how the South was so much more racist than anywhere else has colored my views.
I had convinced myself that New Haven was an abberation and that the south really was that much worse. Turns out, that’s not true. At least not in the last and past behavior is the best indicator of future performance, as they say.
That’s why I was interested when I ran across this post on Orcinux, Truth & Reconciliation, Part II: James Loewen on Sundown Towns. I had never heard of a sundown town and that’s because it is a uniquely northern and western phenomona.
If you think the town you grew up in didn’t have a race problem because either a) it wasn’t in the South, or b) it was all white, Loewen — the author of “Sundown Towns” and an active Unitarian himself — has news for you.
“When I started researching this subject, I expected to find three types of sundown towns,” Loewen recalled. “I expected to find small towns that were all-white because they’d expelled their black populations; suburbs that were all-white because they excluded blacks (and usually Asians and Jews, as well) from the very beginning; and then a third class of places that were all-white simply because African-Americans never got around to coming there.
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