Some high school students from sundown towns imagine somehow that even in interracial situations in the big city, they can behave as they do at home, where they enjoy the privilege of living in a world of white rhetoric. They behave with a paradoxical combination of inappropriate, even dangerous arrogance and inappropriate, even fearful timidity. First they dread going into an interracial restaurant; then they feel they can get away with saying
nigger
in it. Roger Karns, who has taught social studies in several all-white towns in northern Indiana and also coaches swimming, supplied a rich and complex account of the rhetoric that high school students from these towns exhibit when they get to their big city—Fort Wayne, South Bend, Elkhart, or Indianapolis:
Students ask questions like, “Will we get mugged?” “That black (or as frequently, ‘colored’) guy has on a red t-shirt, is he in a gang?” Or, taking swimmers into a McDonald’s, “I saw a black guy, is this neighborhood safe?” “Is that guy a rapper?” And just generalized stupid behavior, fake ghetto accents, caricatur-ized walks and behavior. I am still surprised that I need to tell these kids that the term “colored” is considered offensive. And several years ago, I had to tell kids specifically that “nigger” was never acceptable. After twenty years of teaching and coaching, I discovered that if I didn’t remind them of that before we went to a “big” city, that they would use those kinds of terms and use them loudly. Or they would ask an African-American what gang they were in. Or just point and laugh out the bus window.
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Of course, students like these already know
nigger
is offensive. They just imagine such rules don’t apply to them because they come from a sundown town. Some of their antics are mainly performed for the benefit of their fellow white students. As they make fun or ask insensitive questions of a member of the black outgroup, the students confirm their membership in their white ingroup. Karns explains how the demographic makeup of his students’ hometown contributes to their rude and racist behavior:
I think that growing up in an all white community is detrimental for the white kids. I believe that that kind of upbringing allows people to think of minorities as an “other.” It allows you to suspend your normal respect for people. Some of these kids don’t see a person walking down the street, they see what amounts to a character. They would never consider being so disrespectful to someone, they just haven’t thought about what they are doing as disrespectful because they are seeing a unique “other” and not just the guy down the street.
Here Karns supplies a perfect example and analysis of the “file folder phenomenon.” His students react to the African Americans they meet not as people, but as examples of a type. His students are not necessarily bad people, even though they behave badly. In a sense their words and acts are shallow. But their surface racism allows white supremacy to fester and makes it harder for a humane response to come forth the next time race is on the table. As Karns concludes: “Growing up in an all white town has a profound impact on those who grow up there.... I believe that the lack of diversity is damaging to all.”
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“We’re
Not Prejudiced”
These Indiana young people would doubtless deny that they meant anything mean by their comments and antics. Denial is a peculiar characteristic of the talk in sundown towns. When criticized for their racist jokes or use of
nigger,
residents typically deny they are racist. In the early 1990s, football players in Hemet, California, a rapidly growing sundown exurb of Los Angeles, routinely called African Americans on opposing teams “niggers.” Scott Bailey, the Hemet quarterback, admitted some of his teammates had aimed the slur at opponents, but “they did not intend it as a racial slur.” In Bailey’s words, “I don’t think anybody who does say it means anything by it.” A black football player from Ramona, one of Hemet’s opponents, observed, “I just think, you know, there aren’t that many black people out there [in the Hemet area], so they think saying that stuff is OK.”
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Many residents of sundown towns not only deny that their humor is racist, they also deny that their communities’ anti-black acts are racist, even as they agree that those acts make it impossible for African Americans to live there safely. A former resident of an Illinois sundown town characterized her former neighbors: “They don’t have anything against colored people, they just don’t want them to spend the night.” Surely there is a certain tension between the two halves of that sentence. “I’m not a racist, but . . . ,” a resident of Villa Grove, Illinois, said, prefacing a long story of how in 1990, when he was a senior in Villa Grove High School, he “and 45 or 50 of my buddies” gathered in their pickup trucks at the city limits to head off a carload of African Americans and Latinos from Decatur. They had come intending to date Villa Grove girls, one of whom made the mistake of bragging about it at school. “We beat the shit out of them,” he concluded triumphantly, and the episode surely ensured Villa Grove’s sundown reputation for another decade or two.
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How do residents of sundown towns accomplish the rhetorical feat of admitting they beat up blacks and keep them out while denying they are racist? Only the tiniest proportion of whites are willing to admit to being racist. Typically whites define racism to be almost an empty category, so “we” are not guilty of it. Self-proclaimed white supremacist David Duke saying “I hate niggers” is a case of racism. Almost nothing else passes muster.
This rhetoric of denial is timeless. Here is an example from the
Gentry Journal-Advance,
an Arkansas newspaper, in 1906:
With a population of 1,000 Gentry has not a solitary Negro inhabitant. We are not prejudiced against the colored man, but we feel that we can get along better without his presence, and are therefore glad to have him remain in some other town or locality. There are plenty of white men here to do the work, ordinarily, and a Negro population under the present conditions, would not only be superfluous, but an annoyance and a nuisance. We are certainly thankful that the dusky denizens have always given our town the go by.
The editor characterizes African Americans as a group as “an annoyance and a nuisance,” avoids words such as
people
or
citizens
in favor of “dusky denizens,” and clearly favors an indefinite continuation of Gentry’s sundown policies. Yet “we are not prejudiced.”
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A corollary of denial is the curious fact that residents of sundown towns believe they have no problem with racism or race relations. In sharp contrast, people in interracial towns know they do. In Decatur, for example, 33.4% of adults surveyed in about 1985 ranked “racial difficulties” as “the most pressing social problem in Decatur”—well
before
Decatur made national headlines in 1999, when its school system expelled seven African Americans for fighting in the stands during a football game. Few residents of Pana, a sundown town thiry miles south, would rank race relations as their “most pressing social problem.” Neither would residents of most sundown suburbs. Nationally, as reported in the 2001 book
Race and Place,
whites living in overwhelmingly white communities perceive the least discrimination against blacks, while whites in majority-black neighborhoods perceived the most. Ironically, then, recognition of “racial difficulties” is a sign of racial progress, and race relations are in fact much more problematic in Pana or sundown suburbs than in Decatur, the latter’s moment of notoriety in 1999 notwithstanding. It is true that white children in Pana have no problem getting along with African Americans, since they never encounter them. Nevertheless, as they go through life, these children may encounter some race relations problems that Decatur’s white children do not.
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The Paradox of Exclusivity
Denial is especially common in suburbia. Residents of elite suburbs are much less likely than residents of independent towns (or working-class suburbs) to admit that their communities keep out African Americans, or did until recently. Their particular need for deniability arises from what we might call the “paradox of exclusivity.” We have seen how in metropolitan areas, neighborhoods are ranked more prestigious to the degree that they exclude African Americans, people in the working and lower middle classes, and, in the past, Jews. Such exclusivity connotes social status, even “good breeding.” For this reason, white suburbs have usually done little to combat segregation. Instead, they have fostered it. At the same time, exclusivity also suggests prejudice, racism—
“bad
breeding”—even to the elite themselves. As early as 1976, 88% of white Americans agreed with the statement “Black people have a right to live wherever they can afford to,” and educated people agreed even more strongly, so residents of sundown suburbs know that they must not admit they live in a place that keeps or kept blacks out.
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The ethical paradox is this: on one hand, to live in an exclusive area is good, connoting positive things about oneself and one’s family. On the other hand, to exclude is bad, implying negative things about oneself and one’s family. How do affluent white residents of sundown suburbs deal with this paradox of exclusivity? They don’t want to deny that their suburb is exclusive, because exclusivity proves to themselves and others that they are successful and know how and where to live. But they do want to deny that they are all white on purpose. So they develop a motivated blindness to the workings of social structure: soclexia. The talk in sundown suburbs prompts residents to be bad sociologists and bad historians. Suburban rhetoric has so mystified the exclusion that created sundown suburbs that many suburbanites now sincerely view residential segregation as nothing but the “natural” outgrowth of countless decisions by individual families.
William H. Whyte Jr. wrote
The Organization Man
in 1956, a study of executives based on fieldwork in Park Forest, a sundown suburb of Chicago. He noted that several years before he did his research, Park Forest suffered “an acrid controversy over the possible admission of Negroes.”
For a small group, admission of Negroes would be fulfillment of personal social ideals; for another, many of whom had just left Chicago wards which had been “taken over,” it was the return of a threat left behind.
Most residents, he noted, whom he called “the moderates,” were in the middle, and these were “perhaps most sorely vexed.” This majority was
against admission too, but though no Negroes ever did move in, the damage was done. The issue had been brought up, and the sheer fact that one had to talk about it made it impossible to maintain unblemished the ideal egalitarianism so cherished.
In short, most residents of the suburb wanted it to stay sundown
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but desired deniability.
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In his famous 1944 book about race relations,
An American Dilemma,
Gunnar Myrdal saw this: “Trying to defend their behavior to others,
people will twist and mutilate their beliefs of how social reality actually is”
(his italics). Residents deny their town’s history of discrimination and its ongoing sundown apparatus because they want to credit themselves with success, not blame themselves for prejudice and discrimination. “Yes, we live in an elegant, affluent, white [but this last goes unstated] area, with lovely amenities and low crime,” people might say. “All of that says good things about us. But anyone could live here if they wanted to and had the means. It’s not our fault; it’s to our credit. America is a meritocracy.” That others do not live here merely says bad things about them, at least implicitly. As Robert Terry put it in
For Whites Only,
commenting on residential segregation in the Detroit area in the 1970s: “Who has ever heard a Northerner admit he did something because he was a racist? Our propensity for moral justification does not permit it. Rather, our racism is couched in quasi-moral terms which command social respectability and accrue social acceptance to us.” Just as many white southerners used to believe the legal separation of the races in southern society was natural, many white northerners still seem to believe the geographic separation of the races in northern metropolitan areas is natural.
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When the racial composition of their community is so overwhelmingly nonblack that accident cannot plausibly be invoked, residents often blame African Americans for not moving in, saying that blacks “prefer their own.” In 2002, I asked a realtor in Kenilworth why no African American family lived in that elite Chicago suburb, to his knowledge. “Birds of a feather flock together,” he replied. “People are happier with their own kind.” I had noticed his Armenian-sounding last name, so I asked him, “Do you live with other Armenians?” “No,” he replied, “but the first generation did. The second generation moved out, lived with other people.” I didn’t bother to point out that most African Americans are now at least tenth-generation Americans and fourth-generation Chicagoans, much longer than most Armenians.
A resident of an overwhelmingly white neighborhood near a golf club in south Tulsa told me of a black doctor who moved there. He had to move back to north Tulsa, she said, because “his [black] patients rose up in protest.” Chapter 8 told how Patrick Clark, curator of the Andrew County (Missouri) Museum, denied that his own county or nearby counties had any history of excluding African Americans. Clark went on to write, “Incidentally, the only community in the state we are familiar with being associated with one racial make-up is/was near St. Louis, Missouri; an all Black community, Kinloch, Missouri”—a small town some 300 miles away. Other whites have echoed Clark’s thinking, invoking Boley; Harlem; Mound Bayou, Mississippi; or the South Side ghetto of Chicago.