[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…
Category
History
An Integrated Life – Living In Fear
We all know the Bible says over and over to not be afraid. “We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most…
An Integrated Life – HOAs – What Are You Supporting with Your Way of Life?
[blockquote type=”left”]”In addition to sundown exurbs, another innovation threatens to maintain sundown suburbs, morphed into a new form: suburbs hypersegregated by social class.” (390)[/blockquote] Loewen goes on to talk about homeowners associations and gated communities. [blockquote type=”left”]”Gated communities epitomize defended neighborhoods, providing no amenities, not even streets, that are open to the public. Their walls…
An Integrated Life – City Schools, Suburb Schools
[blockquote type=”center”]”In yet another way, elite sundown suburbs fail to pay their way: their zoning, lot requirements, and other restrictions force their maids, supermarket clerks, police officers, and even teachers to live elsewhere…Thus the property taxes paid by affluent whites in elite sundown suburbs do not help pay for the city services their employees use….
An Integrated Life – Sundown Suburbs = NIMBY
The church’s task in each country is to make of each country’s individual history a history of salvation. -Romero, The Violence of Love [blockquote type=”left”]”Since affluent sundown suburbs are not politically connected to nearby inner-city neighborhoods, the system of white supremacy that makes them so much nicer is not obvious.” (375)[/blockquote] Listen to This…
An Integrated Life – Still Forming Sundown Towns Today
[blockquote type=”left”]”Circularities get built in. Some working-class or multiclass sundown suburbs have passed ordinances requiring teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other city workers to live within their corporate limits. Thus they can be assured that all their employees will be white…In turn, African Americans are ineligible to be hired for future openings, since they would…
An Integrated Life – Do You Live in a Sundown Town? Before you say no….
For 70+ years segregation in our cities was sought and designed. How are we working to undo that design? [blockquote type=”center”]”During the Depression the federal government…set up at least seven towns…that explicitly kept out African Americans. At the same time, and for three more decades, the Federal Housing Administration – a government agency –…
An Integrated Life – Restrictive Covenants and Governments
[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…
An Integrated Life – Social Exclusion
[blockquote type=”center”]”By the end of World War II, the housing pressure in African American neighborhoods in inner cities was enormous, greater even than the pent-up postwar demand among white families. A 1943 memo of the Illinois Interracial Commission pointed out that 80% of the black population of Chicago was packed into less than 5 square…
An Integrated Life – Gravitating Towards the Comfortable
[blockquote type=”center”]”Asking ‘Why?’ with quiet astonishment when acquaintances announce that they are thinking of moving to a town or suburb known to be overwhelmingly white invites people to explain their decision – suddenly no longer obvious – to live in such places and may make them think. So do questions such as ‘But don’t you…