Western states are white today partly because sundown towns expelled black residents

Evidence

I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been) to see that sundown towns proliferated in western states that today have very small percentages of black Americans, like California (5 percent), Montana (0.6 percent), Oregon (3 percent), and Utah (2.1 percent). Honestly, California especially surprised me because I thought the black population there today was much larger. For the other states, I assumed black people never wanted to go there in the first place. (Oregon, in fact, was admitted to the Union with laws in place that specifically excluded black people from settling there.) But if you look at their demographics, you see that the states became whiter over time because black people left in droves. Sundown towns are a part of what made them leave. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 340

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the historical-exclusion causal chain relevant for defending harms as systemic, echoing themes from The Whiteness of Wealth on structural causes of the racial wealth gap.