Sundown towns, Ferguson, and the militarization of police
I've been reading Sundown Towns, coincidentally, after seeing it was another book written by the author of Lies My Teachers Told Me.
I was originally interested because I knew there were sundown towns here in Michigan, but I was unaware how many there were - the likelihood is that almost all all-white towns in certain parts of the country including the midwest were sundown towns - and how much violence and intimidation were involved in their creation and continuation. I was naive.
If you haven't heard of this, basically all across the US except in the traditional south, in one town or county after another, there was some event that led to white people expelling all black people from their town or county. These all-white towns didn't just happen. There weren't many at all in existence before about 1890. They were created violently and on purpose mainly between 1890 and the 1940s, and have been enforced with violence and threats from the point of creation through now.
So the point is that whole black populations of many towns were forced together in a few areas that we now sometimes call ghettos after similarly created places in Poland. We created those - they didn't just happen and weren't a choice made by African Americans. And Ferguson is one of the places African American have been forced to go to after being unable to go elsewhere. (Since originally writing this I've learned that Ferguson used to be an all-white suburb that has had a strong racial shift and I wonder what racial issues that brings up.)
The sundown towns are still sundown towns. As I was reading paying special attention to towns I recognized here in Michigan, and as the whole thing in Ferguson was going on, I started to notice how many towns in Missouri had horrifying stories of violence and continuing exclusion in the book. There are a lot of sundown towns in Missouri. And sundown towns have a scary racial culture where people of color in general and African Americans in particular are spoken of in a demonizing and dehumanizing way. What happens to people who grow up there?
Then I made another connection. What towns did the members of the majority white police force grow up in? Where do they live now? How many of them are from sundown towns? Is that contributing to their thought processes and behavior in Ferguson? I would like to know the name of the town where Darren Wilson grew up, and where he lives now. (And since originally writing this, I've read that he grew up in Ferguson, which was formerly an all-white suburb. Again, I wonder how the racial shift in Ferguson plays into this.)
And then I thought about the town where I live now. I can see after reading this book that it was originally what the book would call a sundown suburb, although it is more racially mixed and doesn't meet the racial definition of the book. Still, it has a fairly strong white majority. And I thought of our police station and realized that there isn't space for anything like what is in Ferguson here. Our police force doesn't look like that. I wonder how many white and majority white areas have police forces that look like that, and how many majority African American areas have police forces that look like that.
It feels like it's all related. We as a society created these sundown towns and at the same time created ghettos, and then have a bunch of people we as a society have raised in the racial dysfunction of sundown towns, and then we've created military forces staffed by people from these sundown towns and put them in these ghettos we created. What do we think is going to happen? Of course there's going to be violence. And the sad thing is that if the police officers had shot down the protestors, there are a good number of white people who would have cheered. I can name some. I've read comments on news reports about Ferguson written by people who seem to hope it will happen.
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This way they can all gather, even from neighboring towns, with their toys and just wait for the fun to start.
Fuckers.
