I was raised in a former sundown town…

Sundown towns are all or overwhelmingly white areas of a residence that practice latent racial segregation by excluding people of color from moving to the area — especially the Black community. Roughly 10,000 have existed in American history. While researching these towns, author James Loewen only expected to find around a handful of these towns in his home state of Illinois but found more than 440 and thousands across the country.

Although landmark legislative endeavors, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, federally mandated desegregation and ostensibly enabled equal protection for all citizens, these residential areas continued to maintain a white population through discriminatory legislation or intimidation — oftentimes both. I was raised in such a town — a suburban neighborhood in upstate New York named Delmar. 

Minority narratives and perspectives are not monolithic, and my personal experiences should not be used to speak on behalf of entire demographics. However, it is undeniable that institutional racism permeates our interpersonal interactions, whether it be through microaggressions, disparities in privilege or more. 

Caesar, the last slave to be freed in New York State, was held on a farm 6 miles from my house. But the abolition of slavery didn’t prevent my town from practicing redlining, the commissioned racial segregation of neighborhoods through urban planning, in the 1930s. Even in 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial segregation in schools, several cities took decades and court-mandated desegregation to take any action. 

Not until the 1950s did Black families attempt to settle down in Delmar, facing significant opposition along the way. According to the Times Union, the first family to do so were the Cunninghams, who were unable to find a suitable place despite James Cunningham’s high-ranking position in the state Department of Health.  

“Every place they looked they were rejected on the basis of race,” said Miki Conn, Cunningham’s daughter, in an interview with The Daily Gazette. “Unless it was a ghetto neighborhood, they were turned away. There were fair-housing laws that had been passed around then, but it takes time for new laws to be implemented. I don’t know if there were specific laws against selling or renting to Blacks in Delmar back then, but they did have these protected real estate covenants. It was informal, but Delmar was all white.”

Although integration began after the Cunninghams’ arrival and Delmar is no longer officially considered a sundown town, the effects still clearly linger. The town is 92.6% white, and during my time at the high school, there had only been one Black teacher in the school’s 94-year-long history. This lack of representation among authority figures was a significant problem. Those residing in a bubble of whiteness couldn’t properly recognize racism, allowing racist actions to transpire. 

While there was an earnest effort to rectify these issues, it was an incredibly difficult cycle to break. If an environment doesn’t seem welcoming to a person of color, why would a person of color subject themselves to it? Ignorance tends to reign supreme and slip past the eyes of those who had the power to stop it. Elementary schools would stage all-white versions of Mulan, and white soccer players would style their hair into cornrows to hype up the school for a game. A handful of students of color, myself included, were sometimes singled out by the administration to consult and organize their reparation efforts. It felt as though I was living in a world where my homework was to study for my Spanish quiz and to solve centuries of institutional racism.

Although many high-profile cases of both institutional and interpersonal racial discrimination are concentrated in former confederate states, places like these exist all across America. Scapegoating southern America as “the racist region” negates the fact that George Floyd, Eric Garner and eight Black attendees of a supermarket in Buffalo were all murdered in the North. In 2020, Anti-Asian Hate Crimes rose by 361% in New York City alone. 

Ignoring the fact that institutional racism is a prevailing issue all across America promotes dangerous rhetoric that ignores an institutional problem and allows this kind of subtle racism to continue. Such environments allow perpetrators to slip through the cracks and allow those tragic events to occur. Society has greatly changed since the 1930s, but the roots of racism go much deeper than anyone could have ever imagined. Ultimately, just because the cycle wasn’t caused by us doesn’t mean that it isn’t our responsibility to break it.