Some whites go on to hold that the existence of black towns legitimizes the racist policies of white sundown towns. But most black towns and townships never excluded whites.
46
Neither did black neighborhoods. As Myrdal put it in 1944, most mixed residential areas in America “are cases of whites living in ‘Negro areas’ and not of Negroes living in ‘white areas,’ ” where they would not have been allowed. Even Harlem has never been close to all-black. In 1990, Kinloch had seventeen whites in five white households. Today, although some African Americans do seek majority-black environments, most still prefer diverse neighborhoods with white and black (and other) residents. To a much greater degree, it is
white
Americans who seek “to be with their own kind.” To locate the problem in the supposedly free choices of the minority group is soclexic, even though it may be comforting to whites.
47
Elite suburbanites also avoid responsibility for the racial composition of their community by claiming that African Americans don’t have the wherewithal to move there. “It’s an economic thing.” “They can’t afford it here.” In America it’s considered perfectly all right to exclude on the basis of social class; indeed, an element of the American dream itself is to separate oneself and one’s family from the teeming masses. Grouping houses by social class is still a de rigueur principle of real estate. I hope that earlier chapters have laid to rest the claim that income differences explain sundown suburbs. They don’t.
It is a small step from blaming African Americans for not having the income to move in to a sundown suburb to blaming them for not having the personal characteristics—IQ, for example—to earn that income. Many residents of elite sundown suburbs take that step. Obviously, to believe that America is a sorting machine based on ability—and African Americans have less ability—eliminates any guilt about living in a community that keeps them out. This explains why
The Bell Curve,
the 1994 book that argued that differences in income by class and race result from differences in intelligence, was so popular in elite sundown suburbs. It located the problem in “them,” the outgroups, just as the eugenicists used to do. Precisely because it blames the victim, the resulting ideology is more dangerous than the overt racism of independent sundown towns. Residents of elite sundown suburbs are free to infer that African Americans are inferior, which explains their absence. Residents of such independent sundown towns as Anna or Sheridan can’t say that. They
know
their town has kept blacks out.
48
Claiming that ability results purely from individual achievement rather than one’s place in the social structure is also a pleasant way to interpret the high SAT scores earned by one’s children and their equally privileged friends in an elite community. Of course, affluent parents really know better. When making decisions about their own children’s futures, the rich know that ability is largely socially created, which is why they invest in
Sesame Street Magazine
for their toddler, computer camp for their eight-year-old, and the
Princeton Review
for their eleventh grader facing the SAT. They may get furious when a school principal tries to jettison tracking or their own child does not get into an advanced placement class. They go to great lengths—private schools, hiring “college coaches,” and so on—to give their children a leg up in college admission. Thus when it comes to their own children, they are structural sociologists who see positive individual outcomes as the result of expenditures and programs.
However, their awareness of suburban advantages, which they employ to justify why they moved there in the first place, disappears when the time comes to discuss the outcome of the college admission process. Now elite whites no longer brag about or even perceive the benefits of class and racial segregation. Instead, they now “explain” the positive results of these advantages, such as high SAT scores, as stemming from their child’s individual intelligence and ability. Suddenly they now assert that aptitude inheres in individuals and the SAT measures aptitude.
49
Again, to believe that America sorts people based on ability—and one’s child happens to be among the most able—is more satisfying than to admit that living in a sundown suburb amounts to a deliberate choice to stack the deck. Such Social Darwinism is not only soclexic but dangerous to democracy.
Misled by these rationalizations, rich white segregated children usually do not understand the processes in their own metropolitan areas that conferred advantages upon them, based on their race and social class. They made it, so why can’t everyone? In
Privileged Ones,
Robert Coles interviewed a male high school student in a sundown suburb of Boston who exemplified this soclexic thinking: “My father says it’ll always be like that; there are people who are prejudiced against anyone who has tried to work hard and make some money, and prejudiced in favor of the people who don’t care if they work or not, so long as they collect welfare.” In my 63 years in America I have yet to meet a single person “prejudiced in favor of the people who don’t care if they work or not,” and I suspect neither this boy nor his father have either. But such stereotypes are satisfying, for they imply that as soon as African Americans really apply themselves, our racial problems will be fixed. “We,” on the other hand, are not responsible, so there’s nothing we can do about it. Knowing no poor people or people of color firsthand, residents of elite sundown suburbs are particularly susceptible to stereotypes to explain the visible differences among neighborhoods.
50
Racial Stereotypes in Sundown Towns
During the past 25 years, while teaching race relations to thousands of white people and discussing the subject with thousands more, I have found that white Americans expound about the alleged character and characteristics of African Americans in inverse proportion to their contact and experience with them. Isolation and ignorance aren’t the only reasons why residents of sundown towns and suburbs are so ready to believe and pass on the worst stereotypes about African Americans, however. They also have a need for denial.
The idea that living in an all-white community leads residents to defend living in an all-white community exemplifies the well-established psychological principle of cognitive dissonance. No one likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person, argued Leon Festinger, who established this principle. People who live in sundown towns believe in the golden rule—or say they do—just like people who live in interracial towns. No one would want to be treated the way sundown towns treat African Americans. On the other hand, it is hard for someone living in an all-white town to define that choice of residence as “wrong” or that policy as “bad for our country.” Doing so might entail moving, or taking a risk in trying to change the town’s practices. It is much easier to rationalize one’s actions by changing one’s opinions and beliefs to make what one has done seem right.
What could make living in an all-white town right? The old idea that African Americans constitute the problem, of course. In 1914, Thomas Bailey, a professor in Mississippi, told what is wrong with that line of thinking: “The real problem is not the Negro, but the white man’s attitude toward the Negro.” Sundown towns only made white attitudes worse. Having driven out or kept out African Americans (or perhaps Chinese Americans or Jewish Americans), their residents then became
more
racist and more likely to believe the worst about the excluded group(s).
51
That’s why the talk in sundown towns brims with amazing stereotypes about African Americans, put forth confidently as reality by European Americans who have never had an honest conversation with an African American in their lives. The ideology intrinsic to sundown towns—that African Americans (or Jews, Chinese Americans, or another group) are the problem—prompts their residents to believe and pass on all kinds of negative generalizations as fact. They are the problem because
they
choose segregation—even though “they” don’t, as we have seen. Or they are the problem owing to their criminality—confirmed by the stereotype—misbehavior that “we” avoid by excluding or moving away from them.
Of course, such stereotypes are hardly limited to sundown towns. Summarizing a nationwide 1991 poll, Lynne Duke found that a majority of whites believed that “blacks and Hispanics are likely to prefer welfare to hard work and tend to be lazier than whites, more prone to violence, less intelligent, and less patriotic.” Even worse, in sundown towns and suburbs, statements such as these usually evoke no open disagreement at all. Because most listeners in sundown towns have never lived near African Americans, they have no experiential foundation from which to question the negative generalities that they hear voiced. So the stereotypes usually go unchallenged: blacks are less intelligent, lazier, and lack drive, and that’s why they haven’t built successful careers.
52
Actually, most African Americans, like most other Americans, are reasonably industrious people who are quietly trying to have a satisfying life and pass on a bit of a start to their children. But many residents of sundown towns and suburbs simply don’t believe that. Many also misunderstand basic economics and believe, for example, that African Americans don’t pay property taxes when they rent rather than own their homes, not understanding that landlords pay property taxes from the rents they collect. Nor do most whites realize that Social Security acts as a vast transfer program from blacks to whites, because African Americans’ life expectancy is so much shorter than that of whites.
Negative generalizations about African Americans are at least as common in sundown suburbs as in independent sundown towns, even though residents of sundown suburbs may have African American friends at work. In a corollary to the “file folder mentality” Chapter 10 described, such individuals are accepted as exceptions, leaving the negative generalizations about the mass of African Americans unscathed. Many residents of these suburbs, especially working- and middle-class suburbs, have fled from city neighborhoods that they believed were about to “turn black.” Those who flee such neighborhoods carry white-flight stories with them like a pestilence. Parents think they did the right thing by fleeing the city and its crime and problems, problems they see as inextricably bound up with race. When their children ask them why they moved, they respond with the negative stereotypes, thus passing them on to the next generation. Contact with a nice black co-worker makes no difference. A 1985 study of white voters in Michigan found that residents of blue-collar sundown suburbs of Detroit expressed “a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics.” Many also scapegoated African Americans:
Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives; not being black is what constitutes being middle-class; not living with blacks is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live.
53
A librarian in Oak Lawn, a sundown suburb southwest of Chicago, remarked that Oak Lawn residents welcome Hispanics, because “they don’t know what they will bring with them. Many know what blacks will bring with them.” Many suburbanites left neighborhoods in Chicago when African Americans moved in, she explained, and those areas are now black. They “don’t want to have to do that again”; therefore they don’t let African Americans in. I asked her, “What would blacks bring with them?” “Crime,” she replied immediately. That answer is a textbook example of prejudgment and overgeneralization—in a word, prejudice—from a woman who denied any racial animus herself. We were then joined by a male reference librarian; ironically, both complained about the “Colombian gangs” that now operated in Oak Lawn. Whether African American newcomers would have formed gangs we’ll never know, but the fact remains that neither librarian saw any contradiction in justifying excluding African Americans owing to crime while admitting Hispanics despite crime. Since Oak Lawn did not keep out Hispanics, cognitive dissonance did not move them to focus on Hispanic crime. It is
black
crime that really concerned them. At the top end of the status spectrum, residents of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, reacted identically, blocking African Americans while mounting no protest when members of the Mafia, booted out of Canada for criminal behavior, moved in.
54
Whites often engage in white flight despite evidence right before their eyes that their rationale for leaving makes no sense. Matteson, Illinois, an upper-middle-class suburb south of Chicago, went from 12% black in 1980 to nearly 60% black by 2000. “The blacks moving in are professionals,” according to Leonard Steinhorn, co-author of
By the Color of Our Skin.
As a result, the town’s median income rose by 73% in the 1980s. “Crime has not increased, schools have maintained the same standards, and home prices continue to rise—if anything, the community is wealthier with its new black residents.” Nevertheless, Matteson’s whites continue to leave, saying that they “simply want a nice place to raise their kids.” As Frederick Douglass put it, back in 1860, such behavior is characteristic of “prejudice, always blind to what it never wishes to see, and quick to perceive all it wishes.”
55
Imagining the “Black Menace”
Sometimes the stereotypes whites form about African Americans create real apprehension in sundown towns. Most residents of these towns see communities outside their city limits as much “blacker” than they are, which frightens them. “Cobden is half black,” a local history buff in Dongola, Illinois, a sundown town twelve miles south of Cobden, said in 2003. Actually, Cobden has 16 African Americans among 1,116 residents, or 1.4%. The high school secretary of a sundown town in northeastern Arkansas told me that Oxford, Mississippi, is majority-black, and she worried about it while there; actually, Oxford has 2,463 African Americans among 11,654 residents, about 20%. “We’re thinking of going to the Arkansas State Fair this year,” she also said, “and a friend told us to take a pistol. It’s in a black neighborhood.” I told her I’d been to the fairgrounds in Little Rock and never heard of folks having to shoot their way in or out. She didn’t laugh. She was considering her friend’s advice quite seriously.
56