Former President Donald Trump is facing backlash for holding rallies in places described as “sundown towns.”
For the uninitiated:
“A sundown town is one that forbade Blacks, by ordinance or otherwise, to live in it. Many of these places, including Cullman, posted signs to the effect of ‘Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark,’ sometimes with far less sanitized language.”
As a non American, thank you. The headline made zero sense without that context.
If it is American and does not make sense, it is probably racism.
Depressingly true, but largely because our popular culture is so pervasive that anything weird that you’d talk about openly is already pretty commonly known.
Like, the Netherlands don’t have a particularly pervasive culture, so anything you learn about them that’s not “everywhere” won’t make sense at first. It dilutes the whole “wait, what the fuck is ‘black pete’?” thing.
All that to say, not all of our nonsense is racist, just the unfamiliar nonsense we don’t talk about anymore.
what the fuck is ‘black pete’?
Bizarre Dutch Santa Claus helper. Like an elf, except canonically a black person with curly hair, silly mannerisms, bright clothing, big red lips and played by a white person wearing blackface.
It’s almost over the top how racist it is, and there’s controversy around if they should keep doing it.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/4/the-netherlands-black-pete
Turns out if you have a history selling slaves, you’ll pick up some stuff.
Point being less about pivoting this to the Dutch, and more that not hearing much about a culture also means you don’t hear as much about their awful stuff, and when you hear a lot about a culture you tend to mostly hear about the parts that people want to share in public.
No one’s gonna make a movie that just casually drops the wide variety of ethnic slurs for the Italians or Irish that have existed.
OMG.
I can understand an elf covered in soot.
But full on black-face caricature?
Almost like institutional racism is a thing.
As an American, I had no clue what a “sundown town” was, but I do know how far American media will go to obfuscate Führer Drumpf’s outright racism and bigotry.
Dude it’s a SUPER old term. Like, Civil War old. They’re using the term because it’s highly associated with slavery-flavored racism.
Edit: I’m not saying it’s an archaic or disused term. I’m saying the term was coined well over a century ago.
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Uh yeah that’s more or less what the article is about? I wasn’t trying to say “it’s not used anymore” I only meant that the term was coined a long time ago.
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No worries, friend 🍻
As an American, I had no clue what a “sundown town” was
Same… I figured it was one of those retirement communities where people go to die. TIL.
You are by no means the only one who thought that before reading the comments…
Obfuscate? Just because you don’t know what something means doesn’t mean it’s a malicious attempt to hide anything. Sundown towns are widely known as racist ordinances.
I was reading Erik Larsen’s The Demon of Unrest and one of the things he pointed out was that, in areas of the South, blacks had to be off the streets by a given time. If they weren’t, they were subject to arrest overnight (during which they might be beaten or even killed), and then “returned” to their owners the next day (where they’d likely face additional punishment).
I knew of the definition of “sundown towns” as you described them, but it seems like they’re post-Civil War attempt at some kind of pseudo-slavery, combined with expanded sharecropping, “separate but equal” facilities, red-lining, voting literacy laws, etc.
Many of these towns still have those laws, they never removed them and refuse to to this day.
Waiting for SCOTUS to make it legal again. (And Trump’s presence is effectively an endorsement of that.)
A lot of these small towns around me don’t even have their own police force or only have a few people on staff and have to use the sheriff for backup. They’re going to have a bad time if people decide they’re not going to put up with it.
Yeah, but it’s probably one of those sherrif departments that’s managed to get a couple APCs and tanks with tax payer funds.
County by me has 13k people in it across 500 sq miles. Not sure how they’re going to catch anybody in an APC (which they didn’t have) after they zoop out of the area on one of the many country roads.
“Let the states decide!”
“No OnE HaS DonE MoRe fOr BLAK pEoPlE thAN mEeEeEEEe”
Just to clarify what “great again” implies
Faces backlash from who? From anyone that he cares about?
he has to do something to make sure he doesn’t lose the 4th grade dropout vote along with everyone else
Ha! You literally just described my aunt. Worst person i know, dropped out after fourth grade, one kid dead from drunk driving, another guilty of insurance fraud, the third one molested a child and the fourth was forced to give birth to a rape baby at 14.
She’ll vote Republican till the day she dies, and she’ll think she’s right the whole time…
The best part about Harris replacing Biden is that she has the time and energy to actually campaign, which forces Donald Fuck to get up off his toilet and open his mouth. And in public, he keeps showing everyone who he really is!
Is he getting more orange?
I figured it was because its the only places he won’t get boo’d at. He needs some good footage to lie about his campaign success.
there is about 10,000 historically sundown towns, i think referring to their current race distribution would be a stronger argument
Howell at least has a current reputation for being a nasty center for white supremacy and the KKK. I don’t know about the other cities off hand, but I know it’s reputation without needing to look it up.
