Sundown-town exclusion hoarded resources for whites, raising their advantage

Evidence

The legacy of sundown towns is still with us. Remember Glendale, California? Today fewer than 2 percent of the city’s residents are black. Likewise, other sundown towns continue to look as they did in the past. Maine’s black population is 2 percent, North Dakota has less than 4 percent, and Nebraska has just under 5 percent. Research shows that counties adjacent to counties that were once sundown towns tend to have a higher-than-average disparity between black and white poverty rates, resulting in higher black poverty rates and lower white poverty rates. Black poverty is understandably higher because being surrounded by a cluster of sundown towns limited black mobility and led to fewer economic opportunities for black people in the area. As the sociologist Heather McConnell has stated, “This large-scale segregation within and across counties could directly benefit whites through the protection or hoarding of resources.” The financial winners were the privileged white Americans (and later their descendants) who lived in these towns and benefited from the decreased competition for jobs and homes. The financial losers were the black Americans who were not allowed to live there. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 447

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘hoarding of resources’ mechanism is the same resource-hoarding logic the reader tracks in income-asset segregation work; links to compensation-vs-charity framing in Brown’s accounting thesis.