[blockquote type=”left”]”After 1917, most sundown suburbs resorted to restrictive covenants…[they] first targeted Chinese Americans in the West, originating in California in the 1890s, and then spread to the East, where Jews and blacks were targeted for exclusion.” (257)[/blockquote]
[blockquote type=”center”]”Across the United States, exclusionary covenants were the rule rather than the exception.” (258)[/blockquote]
Where have you seen examples of exclusionary behavior? Have you ever been excluded? Have you ever done the excluding?
[blockquote type=”left”]”In St. Louis…realtors zoned the entire metropolitan area into ‘white’ and ‘black’ neighborhoods and forbade any realtors ‘under pain of expulsion to sell property in the white zone to a Negro’…Even as late as 1957, a teaching manual for Realtors…counseled against introducing ‘undesirable influences’ into a block. Included among these undesirable influences were bootleggers, gangsters, or ‘a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.’” (259)[/blockquote]
Who decides what is undesirable? Couldn’t racial exclusion be undesirable? What does it do to our collective humanity when we turn each other into dangers to be avoided? Were you protected from anything or anyone while you were growing up?
In the spring of 1960, a civil court suit unexpectedly shed light on how the real estate market operated in Grosse Pointe. The trial revealed that there was a screening system in effect in the Grosse Pointes that required real estate brokers to submit the name of a potential property purchase to the Grosse Pointe Property Owners Association. The Association then engaged a private detective to fill out an investigative questionnaire… “The filled out questionnaire was then turned over by the Association to a committee of brokers which totaled up the scored points and sent it back to the Association. They made the final evaluation as to whether or not the prospective buyer had made a passing grade.” Out of a maximum of 100 points, a passing grade was based on a sliding scale for different nationalities; “Poles would pass with 55 points, Southern Europeans with 75, Jews with 85.” Negroes and “Orientals” were not even eligible; their disqualification was automatic.” The point system considered such details as whether the prospective buyer was “American” or “Americanized,” if his occupation was typical of his own race, or if either the Mr. or Mrs. was “swarthy” in appearance or spoke with an accent. The private detective was also asked to find out about the prospective buyer’s reputation and how the outside and inside of his previous home was maintained.”…The trial even revealed that a new form had been introduced, the “blue form,” because too many Jews were passing the existing point system. (more information in Privilege, Power, and Place.)
Zoning. Permits. Licenses. Covenants. Ordinances. What do we really know about our local governments? Who is your mayor or city manager? Who is holding them accountable? Who is on your city council? Who is the city planner? What kinds of codes are on the books and who are the code enforcers? What are the penalties? Who is your local government set up to help and protect?
Is it better to be known as someone who found their civic voice by shutting someone’s line of work down, or by finding a way to help them succeed?
Does your neighborhood have an association and do they have meetings? How do they view the other neighbors? Who is the association supporting and who are they wishing would move?
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This series is available in a handy 40 page pdf that includes journaling space for the personal questions.
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An Integrated Life
a series studying the book Sundown Towns by James Loewen
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Part 1 – A Series
Part 2 – Our Racist Foundations
Part 3 – What Are We Taught Is Normal?
Part 4 – All Whites Are Responsible
Part 5 – What Are You Known For Supporting
Part 6 – What Makes You Stay Silent?
Part 7 – Gravitating Towards the Comfortable
Part 8 – Social Exclusion
Part 9 – Restrictive Covenants and Governments
Part 10 – Do You Live in a Sundown Town? Before You Say No…
Part 11 – Still Forming Sundown Towns Today
Part 12 – Sundown Suburbs = NIMBY
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It would be nice to give the author/researcher of the piece on Grosse Pointe (Stephen R. Higley Ph.D) or at least identify my website http://www.Higley1000.com that you lifted the quote from.
I did identify the website with the link at the beginning of the paragraph. I wasn’t clear on how much of that paragraph came from his book, but you’re right, I should have mentioned it. Fixed it.
Caris, I am absolutely delighted to see you doing this. Your passionate voice is preciously unique, deeply lucid and most timely.
And a thought to add. My own recent experience living with formerly incarcerated men in Oakland, CA, and there moving at the heart of a Bay conversation deeply concerned with how to move beyond what john a. powell identifies as the “problematic and isolated white self” constituting a “backbone of resistance” to a changed world, suggests to me that the advent of the racialized self is, ultimately, inseparable from the formation of the modern separate self. Put another way, tackling racial injustice once and for all demands of us nothing less than addressing the roots of an incoherence which is fundamentally, comprehensively _existential_ in nature. I perceive clear evidence of this in the mysterious but very tangible paroxysm – I’m sure you’ve also witnessed it – triggered in others by efforts to speak into the phenomenon of ‘white denial’ or ‘white fragility.’ Such intense reactivity arises, I strongly sense, because we are touching into nothing other than a Terror Threshold, one marking the cusp of a revolutionary transfiguration in the ontological status of the human being and, by extension, the entirety of the American and indeed global psyche. The race issue, about a very great deal more than race.
But if the challenge of racism is totalizing, systemic, transpersonal, transcultural, epistemological and ontological, we may be thankful that our solution is, too. In this vein, I love the words of the Irish gardener, John Moriarty. “The Second Coming is but a deeper understanding of the first coming” he says. “Jesus is our hero of integration.” With race suddenly moving center stage upon our shores, alongside the climate crisis and countless other historical narratives both effecting and requiring the precipitous crash of the old, so we open, like a flower toward the burning fire of Reality Alight With Truth. The sunburst of the messianic, the definitive birth of a new creation, it is upon us, and ‘the liberation of the captives’ stands at its blessed heart. Blessings upon your endeavors, dear peacemaker.
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