Read Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism Online

Authors: James W. Loewen

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (67 page)

Such behavior wasn’t limited to an eight-year-old white boy in Baltimore in 1911. As we have seen, residents of sundown towns persist in expressing racial slights and taunts. Young black adults have supplied many examples of being called “nigger” and worse in these towns in the last ten years, such as this experience by a high school athlete in Pekin, in central Illinois, in 1999:
In track, I was the Conference Champion in the 3200 meters and in cross-country I was Conference and Sectional Champion. One occurrence that I would never forget about running cross-country is when I had a meet in Pekin, Illinois. While running along the course, someone riding alone in a car shouted out the word “Nigger.” This was my first time experiencing racism. Throughout my years of living [in Peoria], I had never been in the act of racism. Till this day I can remember this occurrence very visually. This event made me aware that racism does still exist in the ’90s.
 
And till this day the memory sears.
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Internalizing Low Expectations
 
Since the 1970s, the research literature in social science and education has stressed that the expectations teachers and others have of children—and ultimately the expectations children have of themselves—make a key difference to their performance in school (and later life), and expectations vary by race (and class and sometimes gender). If teachers think of African American children as less intelligent, they will expect less from them. Soon they get less from them. After a while African American children may start expecting less from themselves. The generalizations that are intrinsic to sundown towns and suburbs—that African Americans must be kept out because they are problematic people who are likely to be intellectually inferior, if not criminal—pervade our general culture. Sociologists Dale Harvey and Gerald Slatin demonstrated how teachers have internalized these expectations. They showed photographs of children to teachers and found them all too willing to predict different levels of school performance based solely on snapshots. “White children were more often expected to succeed and black children more often expected to fail,” they summarized.
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Unfortunately, these lower expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies for some members of the oppressed group. African Americans in segregated environments can find it hard to break out of this cycle of lower expectations and inferior self-worth. De facto segregation is no kinder to the excluded minority than the old de jure segregation that the Supreme Court threw out as unconstitutional in 1954; besides, as this book has shown, sundown towns are all-white by policy and official actions, not just de facto. All-black schools often do not and sometimes cannot convince black children they are fully equipped, genetically and intellectually, to challenge the white world. Since the raison d’être for segregated schooling was (and is) to keep an allegedly inferior group from “contaminating” and slowing the progress of white students, it can be hard for teachers in black schools to convince their charges that they are fully equal and ready to take on all comers. “Segregation promotes the devaluation of black life even among blacks, and can lead to self-hatred,” wrote psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint in 2002. In this respect teachers in segregated black schools face the same uphill battle faced by teachers in segregated white schools in sundown suburbs who are trying to convince their charges that blacks are fully equal.
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All the while, the act of living in sundown neighborhoods and attending all-white schools communicates to everyone in the society that whites are superior. So does the higher prestige accorded to whiter suburbs. The ideology underlying sundown communities relies on stereotypes about African Americans, stereotypes that unfortunately reach African Americans. Claude Steele and his associates at Stanford show that these stereotypes can then “dramatically depress” the performance of African American students on the SAT and similar tests, a phenomenon Steele calls “stereotype threat.” In subtle experiments, Steele has created stereotype threats for white students that depress their performance, and the same for women as a group, and so forth. Thus books such as
The Bell Curve,
which claims African Americans have lower intelligence genetically, in turn help to maintain precisely the lower test scores that they claim to “explain,” by maintaining the stereotype that African Americans are inferior.
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All this is why Malcolm X famously said, “A segregated school system produces children who, when they graduate, graduate with crippled minds.” Black parents try to convince their children that they are valuable human beings, but it’s not easy when society devalues them. It’s also hard to answer such logical questions as “Why are we in the ghetto?” “Why do whites move away?” As an eight-year-old black child said to Jacob Holdt, commenting on this white antagonism: “We must have done
something
wrong!” And lo, the old “blacks as problem” ideology, expressed so clearly in the origin myths of sundown towns, surfaces miles away in the minds and mouths of the victims.
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Excluding African Americans from Cultural Capital
 
Residential segregation makes it easier to give African Americans inferior educations, health care, and other public services. Study after study has shown how expenditures per pupil are higher in suburban schools than in inner cities, even though everyone knows that suburban pupils have many advantages—from their own computers to a higher proportion of two-parent households—that make them easier to teach. Kati Haycock of the Education Trust notes the incongruity: “We take the kids who are most dependent on their teachers for academic learning and assign them teachers with the weakest academic base.” Residential segregation not only makes this systematic disadvantaging possible, it makes it desirable, even prestigious, in the eyes of white suburbanites.
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Confining most African Americans to the opposite of sundown suburbs—majority-black, inner-city neighborhoods—also restricts their access to what Patterson calls cultural capital: “those learned patterns of mutual trust, insider knowledge about how things really work, encounter rituals, and social sensibilities that constitute the language of power and success.” Sundown suburbs shut blacks out from coming into contact with these patterns of the dominant culture,
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at least before college. This cultural segregation shows up even in something as basic as patterns of speech: many African Americans sound identifiably “black” on the telephone. Their accent and voice timbre are “different.” The difference is not racial; Chinese Americans I knew in Mississippi in the 1960s either spoke “Southern white English” (more than half), “Southern black English” (a few), or Chinese-accented English (many persons older than 40). Historian Barbara J. Fields points out that there is no such thing as “black English” in England, where West Indian immigrants’ children learn the English of their class and region. But in America, as a consequence of the Great Retreat, “black English” intensified.
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In turn, not coming into contact with patterns of the dominant culture is one reason why African Americans (and to a degree Hispanics and Native Americans) average much lower scores than European Americans on college entrance exams such as the SAT. The SAT and related tests suffer from racial and class (and some gender) bias. This unfairness is in addition to such problems as the far greater access white students have to coaching classes and personal tutors. It derives from the statistical methods the Educational Testing Service, the administrator of the SAT, uses to select items to be included on the tests.
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Until this bias is eliminated, African Americans need exposure to the vocabulary and thoughtways of white suburbanites to do well on standardized tests. Sundown suburbs prevent that by keeping black children away from high-scoring white children, as well as from the amenities that help them score high.
Research in Chicago by James Rosenbaum and others confirms Patterson’s general point. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), burned by the white resistance to African Americans who tried to live in Airport Homes after World War II, changed its policies to comply with sundown suburbs and neighborhoods. It built public housing for blacks in black neighborhoods and public housing for whites in white neighborhoods. As a result, CHA was sued for racial segregation in what became known as the Gautreaux litigation. In 1969, federal judge Richard Austin ordered CHA to locate public housing for blacks in predominantly white neighborhoods scattered throughout the city. Eventually, the relief was ordered to extend to the white suburbs as well .
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The result, getting under way in 1976, located more than 5,000 families in more than 100 predominantly white communities in Cook County and five suburban counties.
Rosenbaum took advantage of the marvelous natural experiment provided by this order. He compared families that happened to get selected for housing in white neighborhoods with families that applied but were not selected. He found that being exposed to new surroundings had transforming effects on the families placed in white neighborhoods: 95% of their children graduated from high school and 54% went on to college. (Both of these rates were higher than for European Americans nationally.) Black parents in suburbia were also much more likely than parents in inner cities to find work in the suburbs. Rosenbaum concluded that residential segregation was itself the problem, promoting hopelessness and keeping poor black families from connecting with the larger society.
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Even apparently unrelated social problems such as crime and school dropout rates turn out to be related to residential segregation, according to research by Wayne State University professor George Galster. He analyzed the segregation level and various quality of life indicators across U.S. cities, based on the 1990 census. Looking at Detroit, America’s most segregated metropolitan area, he concluded that if its segregation level were cut in half, “the median income of black families would rise 24%; the black homicide rate would fall 30%; the black high school dropout rate would fall 75%; and the black poverty rate would fall 17%.” The Galster and Gautreaux research shows that blaming the pathological conditions of ghetto neighborhoods on their inhabitants gets causation at least partly backward.
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Excluding African Americans from Social Connections
 
Gautreaux also worked for an additional reason: social connections. Following a 1973 article by Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” sociologists have come to see that Americans connect with the larger society in important ways through casual and seemingly unimportant relations. A whole new career might result from a tip from a friend’s older sister’s boyfriend. “Again and again,” wrote sociologist Deirdre Royster in 2003, “the white men I spoke with described opportunities that had landed in their laps, not as the result of outstanding achievements or personal characteristics, but rather as the result of the assistance of older white neighbors, brothers, family friends.” The trouble is, these networks are segregated, so important information never reaches black America .
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Sundown suburbanites know only whites, by definition, except perhaps a few work contacts. Thus sundown suburbs contribute to economic inequality by race. In the Milwaukee metropolitan area, for instance, often listed as America’s second most segregated, African Americans “earn just 49 cents for every dollar that whites earn, far below the national average of 64 cents to the dollar,” according to reporter Stephanie Simon. Overwhelmingly white suburbs, with which Milwaukee abounds, play a large role in maintaining this inequality. Similarly, urban studies professor Carolyn Adams found that occupational segregation is worse in the Philadelphia suburbs than in the city itself and blames residential segregation, because networks in inner-city neighborhoods stay within the “ ’hood.” Even affluent African Americans who live in majority-black suburbs face this limitation.
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Darien, Connecticut, nicely illustrates the concentration of opportunity in the casual networks of elite sundown suburbs. Teenagers there have so many summer job offers, as well as other prospects, that they have no interest in working at Darien’s McDonald’s. Nearby suburbs are almost as elite. So the restaurant hires a private bus from East Harlem, an hour away, filled with teenagers and adults who feel fortunate to work at McDonald’s. There they have no meaningful interaction with Darien residents at the take-out window, so they make no connections that might lead to upward mobility.
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Because suburbs have become increasingly important economically and culturally, excluding African Americans from suburbs increasingly keeps them out of the centers of American corporate, civic, and cultural life. Many manufacturing jobs have long been located in sundown suburbs such as Dearborn, Michigan, and Brea, California. As whites left the city, they took still more of America’s jobs to the suburbs with them. Geographer Charles Christian studied this process in the Chicago metropolitan area, where many jobs moved to the suburbs. Generally, the jobs went to the suburbs with the smallest black populations; in the two suburbs that gained the most jobs, Franklin Park and Des Plaines, “there appears to be no black population.” This trend accelerated in the last two decades, during which not only factories but also corporate headquarters have been moving to the suburbs.
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