[blockquote type=”center”]”White Americans encounter sundown towns every day but rarely think about them or even realize that they’re in one.” (193) [/blockquote]

What do we view as normal? What are some things about your life you consider normal? Is it possible we live inside a legacy that is deeply un-normal?

[blockquote type=”left”]”Perhaps it is more accurate to say that white Americans know and don’t know about sundown towns. This curious combination of knowing and not knowing seems eerily reminiscent of Europe, 1938-45: surely Germans [and others] knew that Jewish and Romany people were being done away with – their houses and apartments were becoming vacant and available before their very eyes, after all. Yet many professed shock when told about it afterward. I do not claim that America’s rash of sundown towns is a Holocaust…Yet there is a parallel question: why have so few white Americans ever heard of sundown towns, even when they live in one?” (193) [/blockquote]

Loewen quotes a woman from Buffalo, Illinois who says there were no African Americans in her graduating class in 1963, and no one thought anything of it, even though they were taught to respect all people.

[blockquote type=”right”]”What would we make of a long-term resident of, say, Heidelberg, Germany, who wrote in 2002, ‘There weren’t any Jews in my graduating class, but I never thought of it as anything but coincidence?’ Buffalo drove out its African Americans on August 17, 1908. The absence of African Americans from Buffalo today is no more a ‘coincidence’ than the near-absence of Jewish Germans from Heidelberg.” (194) [/blockquote]

What was the racial make-up of your graduating class? What was the racial make-up of the faculty? Who was present, and why?

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This series is available in a handy 40 page pdf that includes journaling space for the personal questions.

Buy now

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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
Part 13 – City Schools, Suburb Schools
Part 14 – What Are You Supporting With Your Way of Life?
Part 15 – Living In Fear

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