The discussion of Trump and sundown towns should include how segregated we still are.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
There have been several stories posted here in the last few days, addressing the whole issue of where Donald Trump has been campaigning, and whether or not his campaign stops have been in “sundown towns”:
Trump is visiting a succession of 'Sundown Towns'
Trump's "Sundown Town" habit, may not be what it appears
The issue has erupted on social media as a response to a TiKTok reel, from speakthetruth101, which former Daily Kos community member Propane Jane responded to, on Twitter:
She reminds us of Ronald Reagan, the racist.
As Propane Jane points out, there were many responses from people who were not familiar with the “sundown town” term, which held true in many of the comments made here on Daily Kos. So here’s a brief explainer and a link to the data:
Dedicated to James W. Loewen (1942-2021), author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, this Historical Database of Sundown Towns is an eyeopener for many folks.
Welcome to the world’s only registry of sundown towns. Just click on a state to see an alphabetical list of all the sundown towns we know about, think may been sundown towns, and have managed to get up onto the site.
A sundown town is not just a place where something racist happened. It is an entire community (or even county) that for decades was “all white” on purpose. “All white” is in quotes because some towns allowed one black family to remain when they drove out the rest. Also, institutionalized persons (in prisons, hospitals, colleges, etc.), live-in servants (in white households), and black or interracial children (in white households) do not violate the taboo.
“On purpose” does not require a formal ordinance. If, for example, a black family tried to move in, encountered considerable hostility, and left, that would qualify the town as “sundown.” Note that some sundown towns kept out Chinese Americans, Jews, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, even Mormons.
Not all towns are thoroughly confirmed. Look over the information provided and come to your own conclusion. Some towns are not and never were sundown towns but are listed for other reasons. And of course, a town may have been sundown once, but now is not. Ferguson, MO, was a sundown town between 1940 and 1960. By 2014, when racial conflict famously erupted there, it was 67% black, so it was certainly no longer a sundown town. However, like some other “recovering” sundown towns, it still displayed “second generation sundown town problems”, in this case an overwhelmingly white police force that still engaged in “DWB policing.”
My point today, is that it is quite easy for a racist politician to travel across the U.S. and make appearances in “white America only” since this country is still highly racially segregated. They don’t need to plan to visit sundown towns. It’s pretty easy for them to tour white, or almost all-white enclaves. We don’t have to discuss segregation as “history” because the reality today is we still live in a residentially segregated society. The picture posted up top is from 1942. Sadly, it could also be from 2022, or from 2024. Give this article a read:
The Great Real Estate Reset: Separate and unequal: Persistent residential segregation is sustaining racial and economic injustice, by Tracy Hadden Loh, Christopher Coes, and Becca Buthe, was published by Brookings (not a hotbed of radicalism) in 2020:
In 1950, the 50 largest U.S. metro areas contained almost half of the country’s population. These areas in aggregate were 90% white in that year (matching the nation as a whole), but the suburbs were even whiter, at 94%. As the civil rights movement opened up the prospect of integration, white flight to the suburbs only intensified, significantly increasing the spatial scale of racial segregation. Jurisdictional boundaries reinforced this segregation: Even as Black and immigrant populations began to move into suburban areas, they encountered the same exclusionary and segregationist zoning policies that created segregated cities and the first white suburbs years prior. The upshot of all this is that today, the vast majority of white people live in suburbs—and white people and people of color largely do not live in the same suburbs.
[...]
The real estate finance industry has consistently exploited and exacerbated segregation since World War II, beginning with excluding Black neighborhoods from eligibility for homeownership or rehabilitation loans—a practice known as redlining. And throughout the civil rights era, the industry exploited, reinforced, and worsened segregation through other racist lending practices.
Most recently, there is widespread evidence that the real estate finance industry targeted Black and Latino or Hispanic neighborhoods with subprime loan products, committing “reverse redlining” in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, foreclosure rates between 2005 and 2009 were an estimated 3.5 times higher in Black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods, and 2.7 times higher in Latino or Hispanic neighborhoods. The cumulative outcome of decades of predatory lending practices—in combination with other economic trends—is a dramatic erosion of homeownership, concentrated in “middle neighborhoods” and legacy cities (Figure 4).
Suburbanization, particularly in slow-growth regions, has had a destabilizing effect on housing values in predominantly Black neighborhoods. But undervaluation is not only a function of low demand. Rather, systemic bias in lending and appraisals are among the reasons that Black neighborhoods are significantly devalued relative to predominantly white neighborhoods. Analysis by Andre M. Perry, Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger revealed that after controlling for differences in housing quality and various neighborhood characteristics, homes in majority-Black neighborhoods were valued 23% lower than homes in neighborhoods with few or no Black residents.
The article also points out something that many white people don’t realize; how continued segregation affects them:
Beyond the direct effects on individuals and families, race- and income-based segregation has long-term, negative impacts that affect
all residents of a community. A 2017
report from the Urban Institute and Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council found that higher levels of racial segregation are associated not only with lower income levels for Black people, but also lower educational attainment for both white and Black people, as well as lower levels of public safety for all residents of an area. Similarly, Perry and his colleagues
document a $156 billion cumulative loss from the devaluation of homes in Black neighborhoods—money that would otherwise be circulating in local economies. As law professor Sheryll Cashin
observed, this
“segregation tax” is also costly to white people, who pay extreme price premiums to live in exclusive neighborhoods. McKinsey & Company
estimates that continued racial and economic segregation will cost the U.S. 4% to 6% of its GDP by 2028 due to its dampening effect on consumption and investment.
Just how segregated are we? Take a look at “The Roots of Structural Racism Project”
“Twenty-First Century Racial Residential Segregation in the United States”
Check out where you live and work on the map and see how segregated it is (or how diverse)
This video explains how to use the map:
I’m curious to know, what did you find out about your neighborhood, or workplace?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Fawn Weaver, founder of Black-owned spirits brand Uncle Nearest, has a message for Jack Daniel’s parent company, Brown-Forman, which announced last week that it is reversing course on its commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion: Take a page from the liquor baron who died in 1911.
“Jack Daniel, the man, offers a model for the type of DEI we need today,” she said.
In the 1800s, a young Daniel was introduced to a formerly enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green who had perfected the art of filtering whiskey through charcoal. Green taught Daniel how to distill whiskey, and together they built one of the world’s iconic brands.
The parent company of Jack Daniel’s overlooked Green until Weaver – a bestselling author and businesswoman – set out to reclaim his forgotten legacy. By scouring historical archives and interviewing descendants, she pieced together scattered fragments of a distant past to reveal previously unknown details about an improbable partnership in the post-Civil War South.
In the process, she crafted a new chapter in her own legacy, establishing Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey and, in June, publishing a bestseller chronicling the rise of Nearest.
So when Brown-Forman said it would end workforce and supplier diversity goals and stop linking executive compensation to progress on DEI, the interview requests poured in. Weaver responded Thursday in an op-ed for Time magazine.
“Jack Daniel didn’t need mandates or quotas to treat people equitably,” she wrote. “His workforce at the distillery was diverse long before it was required by law.”
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Racist and anti-immigrant signs that also targeted Vice President Kamala Harris popped up Thursday in multiple bus stops along Colfax Avenue in Denver and Aurora, and transit agencies in at least one other state reported similar incidents.
“I wish I could say I were surprised, but in a year when a Black woman could become POTUS, those with hate in their heart are going to coordinate these kinds of atrocious, expensive campaigns to stir division,” Denver City Councilwoman Shontel Lewis said in a statement on X.
The first Denver sign was reported around 5 a.m. Thursday by a bus driver on the pole of a bus stop near the intersection of Colfax Avenue and Oneida Street, according to a news release from Regional Transportation District. The two other signs in Denver were found at Colfax’s intersections with Garfield Street, near St. Joseph’s Medical Center, and with Yosemite Street.
Around 8:20 a.m. Thursday, one man in Denver’s Congress Park neighborhood spotted two white women putting up the sign at the bus stop at Colfax and Garfield.
“It was one of those things where you know something is out of place, but you don’t know what’s going on,” Congress Park resident Greg Bell said.
Bell said he passed the two women — who were carrying a white stepladder and trash bags he believes were holding the signs — as he made his way into a nearby grocery store. Minutes later, he saw the pair setting up the stepladder in front of the bus stop and one woman climbing onto it while holding a white, metal sign.
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“A binding code of ethics is pretty standard for judges, and so I guess the question is 'Is the Supreme Court any different?'" Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she is open to proposals to implement an "enforceable code" of ethics for justices and lamented the court's presidential immunity decision in an interview that aired Sunday.
"A binding code of ethics is pretty standard for judges, and so I guess the question is 'Is the Supreme Court any different?'" Jackson asked in an interview on "CBS News Sunday Morning" about her new memoir, adding, "I guess I have not seen a persuasive reason as to why the [Supreme] Court is different than the other courts."
The issue of ethics on the Supreme Court has entered the public sphere in recent years as stories have emerged about justices' not disclosing certain lavish gifts on their ethics disclosure forms.
For example, Justice Clarence Thomas accepted lavish gifts and trips from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. None of them were officially disclosed before ProPublica's reporting about on the trips and Crow last year.
Asked directly about the trips, Jackson said she was "not going to comment on other justices' interpretations of the rules or what they're doing."
President Joe Biden proposed a slate of reforms this summer, including a call for Congress to make the Supreme Court subject to an enforceable code, including the same disclosure rules for gifts, financial dealings and political activities other federal judges face.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
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Demographics and the weakness of traditional media explain the rise of video news. The Economist: YouTube in Africa offers a new kind of news
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Salam madior fall has been a pioneer more than once. In 1999, while studying in America, he and a friend founded Seneweb, one of the first websites devoted to news from Senegal, his home. By 2002 Seneweb was the most visited news site in Francophone Africa. In the late 2000s, media firms there still focused on satellite television. Mr Fall thought that setting up “a fully-fledged tv channel would be going backwards”. So in 2012 he started putting news videos on YouTube. Today, Seneweb’s headquarters in Dakar has more than 100 employees, plans to expand across West Africa, and has correspondents as far afield as Europe and America.
Growing numbers of people get their news via videos on social networks such as TikTok, Instagram and—above all—YouTube. That is particularly true in the global south—and especially in Africa (see chart), according to research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, a research centre and think-tank at Oxford University. More people in Kenya get their news from YouTube than those in any other country surveyed by the institute. “The trends in media consumption which people say are coming to the West are already well under way in the global south,” notes Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute.
YouTube’s appeal makes sense in a youthful continent with relatively low literacy rates. The rapid spread of smartphones and cheap mobile-internet access across Africa in recent years has also helped. Between 2014 and 2021 the share of Africans getting their news from social media or the internet at least a few times a week almost doubled, according to Afrobarometer, a pollster. When the Oromia Media Network, an influential news outlet run by diaspora Ethiopians, was launched a decade ago, “satellite broadcasting was number one”, recalls its founder, Jawar Mohammed. Once people would gather around one television to watch together. Now everyone can watch the news alone on their phones, notes Mor Talla Gaye, a prominent journalist formerly of tfm, a Senegalese tv network with 2.7m YouTube subscribers. That is liberating for viewers who can seek out a variety of perspectives.
In countries where most people would struggle to afford a paid subscription, and where rich advertisers are scarce, YouTube offers media startups a path to financial viability. Setting up a tv channel is expensive and takes an age; establishing one on YouTube is cheap and almost instant. Once they get a certain number of viewers, the platform gives content-producers a cut of future advertising revenues. Yayesaw Shimelis started Ethio Forum, a YouTube channel, in 2019; he says he was making money within weeks. Today it is among the most widely watched Ethiopian news channels on the platform, generating tens of thousands of dollars a month. Crucially, because many of its viewers are Ethiopians living in the West, it attracts advertising from big American firms, says Yayesaw.
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