Thread by @jholbo1

I surely didn't know about Tulsa, growing up, but the single thing I have learned in the last few years, that most shocked me and also fundamentally altered my view of the landscape, was the prevalence of 'sundown towns' across the US. 1/ sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.p…

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1399870810727256064

James Loewen, who wrote the book, remarks on that page: "When I began this research, I expected to find about 10 sundown towns in Illinois (my home state) and perhaps 50 across the country. Instead, I have found about 507 in Illinois and thousands across the United States." 2/

There are a lot of small to mid-sized towns and cities in the US with nearly all-white populations. Loewen expected to find they were a mix: some 'sundown towns' where African-Americans were excluded by law and threat of violence, but some all-white by chance. 3/

What he found was the latter is nearly the null-set. There basically aren't white-to-this-day towns, to which blacks didn't happen to migrate, as it so happened. (Obviously there may be exceptions, and you have to prove it. That's why Loewen's project exists.) 4/

Example: I remember learning in high school that Grants Pass, where grandma and grandpa lived and mom grew up, was an especially notorious sundown town in the 50's, when mom was a girl. True fact. 5/

But I only learned last year the liberal university town Eugene, where I grew up - in which I lived when I learned this stupefying fact that Grants Pass was a sundown town - was also a sundown town until ... the 40's? The 50's? Unclear. 6/

It's vampire fiction, if you are black - only it's all historical fact. Wherever you were surrounded by all white folks, the whites turn into hateful predators after the sun went down. (I haven't watched "Lovecraft Country" but ...) 7/

But, aside from the nightmare fuel quality of it, and the recency of it, and the collective amnesia about it, it feeds into one of the most salient dynamics in contemporary politics, the urban-rural 'density' divide. 8/ (@willwilkinson) niskanencenter.org/the-density-di…

I basically buy Will's thesis but there's more to it (as Will would agree, I'm sure - can't talk about everything at once.) Terrible but true, the 'pull' of the urban center is partly a function of the 'push' of bucolic-but-naw-too-many-vampires-for-me, for African-Americans.

It is perfectly reasonable, in the US context, to see the urban-rural divide, across much of the country, as semi-deliberately drawn along race lines within living memory. Yes, we're talking the 1950's, not the 1850's, never mind 1619. (Yes, of course it's more complicated.) 9/

This interlocks with the gross over-representation of rural America in our political system. Just think about that. R's like to polish it up, like so: small town America is just more politically virtuous in Tocqueville-something-something fashion. Deliberative democracy! 10/

So it's good for the country if the voice and interests of rural Americans is over-weighted, over against urban dwellers. That ensures not just that rural areas, whose culture and concerns really are distinct, have their voices heard. It keeps alive a healthy civic past! 11/

And D's make fun of this: you think rocks & dirt should have the vote. Wyoming! One man, one Senator! But it's even worse than the sheer arbitrariness of geograrchy as a government form. 12/

OK, I'm trying to cut down on the long threads. Let me end on this note: man, will the 1619 Project ever not be in the news? What's with that? Here's the thing: the notion of a 'founding' is a metaphor, whether it's 1619 or 1776. 13/

So this right-wing obsession with saying the 1619 project is 'false' is some kind of category error. It's a lens, a framework. It isn't true or false, simpliciter, it's relatively explanatory and insightful or it isn't. 14/

It's like saying rock as we know it started in 1967, when the Beatles released "Sgt. Peppers". I mean: we can debate the degree of influence of that one album, or the significance of the year. But we all get this claim is not a candidate for sharp, final falsification. 15/

'The US was founded in 1619' vs. 'the US was founded in 1776' are like that. Something definitely happened in both years, but what interests us is the degree to which thinking of everything after as 'coming from' this helps us see and understand everything after. 16/

The reason why it's 'right' to think of the nation as 'founded' in 1776, when dudes sign a Declaration, is not just that the war was won. It's that the content of that document echoes down the years. 17/

Q: Why is this thing this way? A: because America is an independent country that started with this Declaration thing here. If that answer were not still pertinent, it would not be 'true' that America was 'founded' in 1776, in the large sense we take it to have been. 18/

But it's equally 'true' that America was founded in 1619. Q: why is this urban-rural thing tearing us apart? A: slavery, dude, and the aftermath of slavery, until, like, today. Systemic racism. That's the thing that, when you see it, is gonna make you go 'a-HA, I get why!' 19/

And, as the Sundown Town case shows, it is not the case that we have already learned all the lessons - yes, racism = bad! - but these brutal Wokesters are just sadistically determined to pound the rubble by hammering on and on, never seeing the good. 20/

It is not the case that American consciousness of past wrongs is commensurate with the scale of it - even the recent scale. Now: we can ask how important is it, really, to dig up every ugly thing from the past, to sniff at it again? Isn't it healthier to move on? 21/

Well, as to historians: they are supposed to sniff old dead things. It's their job! And a dirty job it often is. For regular old Americans, who prefer to think fondly and proudly on the past? First, they shouldn't yell at the historians, for digging up old bones. 22/

2nd, the past isn't past. R's, clinging to their rural-urban skew privileges, are clinging something that's kinda-sorta a recent product of 'sundown town' social engineering. You don't have to beat yourself up about it, daily. If you like your small town, you can keep it. 23/

But you do have to understand that, if you choose to ignore how and why things are as they are, you are going to get an earful from people who choose NOT to ignore it, because they think all that means that the current system is due for some reform. 24/