I’m starting a new series for a month or so based on the book Sundown Towns, and how we can use it to inspect the whiteness of our lives. It will feature several short posts, and hopefully it will give you a good feel for the book, especially for the people who don’t have time to read a 450 page book, or maybe your library doesn’t have it, but you still would love to know what it talks about. The questions that I wrote to go along with are I think a little uncomfortable, but I’m not asking you to think about anything that I haven’t thought through as well!  Numbers in parenthesis refer to page numbers in the book. While I hope this is helpful for all people, the questions are written for white (christian) people, and are intended to help undo the legacy of white supremacy present in our country .

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After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, many black Americans spread out all across the country. Not to the inner-cities, but to small towns and farms all across the country, including the Midwest. But then as Reconstruction ended, and the Great Migration was getting underway, white people collectively looked around and realized they weren’t alone.

And they wanted to be.

So they made it happen.

Sundown Towns by James Loewen describes how.

[blockquote type=”centert”]”The assumption of progress has blinded us to the possibility that sometimes things grew worse. As a result, most Americans have no idea that race relations deteriorated in the 1890s and in the first third of the twentieth century. Sundown towns cannot be understood outside of the historical period that spawned them. This era, from 1890 to the 1930s, when African Americans were forced back into noncitizenship, is called the Nadir of race relations in the United States.” (25)[/blockquote]

Can things grow worse? How can we tell? What are the signs? What are the signs of things getting better? How do we know better if we don’t know worse? What else might we have no idea about?

What is your history? Are there any family rumors? What are the stories told to you?  If you have them, what do you tell your kids about where you came from, where your parents came from?

There is a family rumor that my great-grandpa was in the KKK. And when I looked at a map and realized my grandma was born in Lynn, In, and graduated high school from Winchester, 9 miles away in the late 20s, and then discovered that the local KKK headquarters was in Richmond, only 25 miles away, and that there had been rallies where thousands of local people came…….it would only be an act of tremendous denial to say that my ancestors were not in those crowds. Not to mention my very vivid memory of being 7 years old and having my grandma asking me about my friends and classmates, because she was very worried that I was going to school ‘with those little black kids’.

We may have been handed a legacy of white supremacy, but we do not have to hold onto it.

What legacy have you been handed?

What parts of it do you want to pass it on?

What parts do you want to let go of?

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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
Part 16 – An Historical Comparison
Part 17 – Hidden Fault Lines
Part 18 – Reputations Are Important
Part 19 – Until We Solve the Problem of Sundown Neighborhoods…
Part 20 – The TL;DR Version

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