James Loewen : Sundown Towns

Ok, so apparently I wasn’t ready to take the time to write the answer to that question and managed to avoid writing altogether. Oops.

Fair enough, I wrote until I puked last Monday and opted to give it a rest on Tuesday, and then Wednesday was lost largely to driving to Berkeley to meet with advisor Laura and buy Even in Sweden. Ever since starting said book, I’ve been in a bit of elevated anxiety about this whole thing, since that book is poetic and beautiful and sort of ethereal when I was just getting the hang of hard and dense, and I suspect that whatever Laura asks me is going to come from that book and I don’t know how to work it yet.

So I had myself a little freakout. No big deal. Get back to it.

Sundown Towns is a really great, useful book. It’s sort of written in this tone that seems to aim to be a New York Times bestseller instead of an academic staple—and this is maybe why academics don’t know/love James Loewen as much as I think they should. Things I like the best:

• His account of the Nadir of race relations:

To express that US history has been one improvement upon the next, marching ever forward to the luminous future is to really mislead and misrepresent the truth about where we’ve been as a nation and it particularly confounds the state of race (mostly black-white) relations. There were moral advocates for the liberation of black slaves in the 1840s and 1850s, and while ultimately the elimination of slavery was done in an effort to save the Union (important mostly to economics and, in some ways, a move to keep more power in the hands of fewer people) there were real efforts to incorporate blacks into mainstream society because it was the moral thing to do, and it was a strength of the Republican party. Due to political forces that he spells out better than I can remember without the book in front of me, things started reversing for blacks starting around 1890 and continued to rescind until the civil rights movement. Which wasn’t that long ago. Which my parents lived through. Which ran deep and can’t be corrected overnight, especially when it had such huge impacts on spatial segregation and a huge gaping divide between 2 races/cultures who have now gigantic obstacles in getting to know one another. (Well, whites have trouble getting to know black culture in any sort of honest way. Blacks have to know white culture to a larger degree because they have to come to it and work within it to survive in many ways, but I think it could be said that this isn’t the most honest way to know white culture either.)

• The way you try to solve a problem depends entirely on how you understand or frame the problem:

This is obvious, but it starts to explain why running black folks out of towns came to be—because the problem was black people, and the solution is to get black people out. If the problem was racism, the solution would have to be something else. Why was the problem black people? I’ll have to go back and dig for Loewen’s unraveling of this. George Fredrickson is helpful here, too, in explaining that racist ideologies were in place from a history of exclusion, rationalizing slavery by considering black folks sub-human, and eugenics (scientific linking of genetic traits to moral traits).

• Black people showed up in, and were run out of towns in every state in the US. Racism and exclusion was not just a southern problem.

• Often, there’s a story of one black criminal (substantiated or not) that served as the catalyst to ridding a town of all blacks and becoming sundown towns. These catalyst stories don’t account for drawing the conclusion that if one black person committed a crime, this somehow means that all black people need to go. There’s that issue of framing the problem again.

• Black people were written out of suburban CC&Rs explicitly. They were also denied access to federal housing assistance after WWII.

RANDOM THOUGHT: The fact that this shit isn’t taught to everyone is a fucking travesty. My mom didn’t know this!! I forget that other people don’t know. And the implications are HUGE—not knowing that black people were explicitly excluded from advantages offered to white people within my parents’ lifetime makes it so much easier to assess that POC, especially blacks, are poor because they’re not motivated/don’t work hard enough/prefer living off of handouts even though this flies in the face of real rational self-interest that our current economic theory is founded upon. (See also Elizabeth Blackmar’s free riders and shirkers.) Blacks were relegated to inferior housing in urban centers in a system that uses property tax to fund schools (so sent to schools with less resources) and denied access to decent wage-paying jobs until … well, until civil rights, but spatial segregation, hollowed cities, shitty school system structures, and still alive-and-well prejudice means that blacks still earn less than whites on average in the same positions and have more obstacles to becoming qualified for jobs with decent earning potential in a cut-throat economy exporting labor and expecting government to act like a private agency and sell to the lowest bidder instead of guaranteeing a living wage. Fuck. It also pushes racism into this reaaallly insidious, underground victim-blaming place. I think this is what Racism Without Racists is about, and some of what’s behind the part of the cabrini green question that wonders why ‘they just didn’t take care of what they were given.’ If ‘they’ would just behave like the rest of us [white people], they’d get along fine. I’m not racist, I just think they need to try harder and quit being so lazy. Uh, ok.

• Impacts on black people/impacts on white people:

I need to finish reading these chapters, but he offers pretty familiar-to-me-sounding accounts of white people growing up without any real contact to black people saying all sorts of racist stuff and using epithets while claiming to not be racist or not mean anything by it.

RANDOM THOUGHT AGAIN: Racism is more than a black/white issue, but lots of what I’m reading is focusing there. Even in Sweden will be an important addition because it talks so much more about immigrants, mostly Arab/Muslim, being ‘problematic’ and the issue of national identity and national culture being something to investigate. This means also re-reading Bellah and that ‘On Nationalism’ article from Ari Kelman’s class. Maybe I can talk Rebecca into re-reading it too and having dinner with me one day…