Nicer in Newtown: The Stories White Folks Tell about Place
by Deirdre Mayer Dougherty, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies, Knox College
If you grew up in Newtown in the early 1990s, you probably saw green “Nicer in Newtown” bumper stickers. Later, my friends and I used to joke, using alliteration and trying it out on different towns around: “Dangerous in Danbury,” "Dirtier in Derby," “Worse in Waterbury,” “Rich in Ridgefield.” It wasn’t until nearly two decades later that I realized the underlying assumptions that had compelled our wit.
What made us describe Danbury and Derby and Waterbury and Ridgefield in particular ways as young people? Why did we think about those places as dangerous or dirty, or rich, or worse? It comes down to the stories we tell about different spaces. These stories circulate and become true in our minds and they have a lot to do with what we understand about race and the assumptions we make about certain groups of people based on those understandings. White folks often unconsciously measure danger and safety along a continuum of whiteness to blackness where the whiter a place is, the more safe white folks assume it is and, in the inverse, the more people of color who live in an area the more dangerous it seems. White people don’t talk about it in those terms--we use coded language, or we can’t even articulate what feels “off” about a place or what makes it feel unsafe to us.
Why is this? As the “Why Is Newtown So White?” project has documented in other articles, zoning policy at the local level and federal initiatives such as the GI Bill, as well as the historical and contemporary impact of discrimination by banks and realtors among other factors, help determine where people live. These facts are well documented by several generations of urban historians; Kenneth Jackson, Arnold Hirsch, Tom Sugrue, Richard Rothstein, and most recently Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor have shown that where we live is no accident. Before the GI Bill tackled housing shortages for white soldiers returning from WWII, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal set about trying to solve a national housing shortage through the 1934 Housing Act, which created the Federal Housing Administration. The first of several housing acts, the 1934 Act helped white families move to the suburbs in record numbers, their homes subsidized by federal funds that revolutionized how homes were purchased. For the first time, ordinary white people became able to buy houses with their loans amortized over a period of 30 years. They could make low down payments and the federal government would back their loans.
Black families, however, were shut out of these early programs. Furthermore, banks used a variety of techniques to avoid lending to Black families, based on risk assessment and on evaluations of a neighborhood’s safety. Safety and risk were grounded in things like how racially homogeneous a neighborhood was (read:Black) or how many homes in a neighborhood were owner-occupied. Redlining, as it became known, was a way in which banks justified not granting loans to Black families. This, coupled with restrictive covenants which forbid the sale of certain properties to Black families, excluded many Black Americans from homeownership until the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer case that struck them down.
Even still, exclusion from homeownership continued through both formal and informal means. For Black families, homeownership through contract leasing was available, though risky, and public housing was the only form of government subsidy available. Public housing, much like the suburbs, was segregated. Looking at it on the surface, it might seem as though white people were natural homeowners who lived in sparkling suburban neighborhoods and occupied the newest housing stock and Black people were irresponsible; they lived in slum-like conditions, high rise public housing complexes that were systematically neglected.
But, as historians and other social theorists such as Clarissa Hayward have written, the stories that white folks have come to tell about suburbs on the one hand and inner cities or urban cores on the other, leave out the part about the federal government, bank, and realtor involvement in segregating America. What remains, are negative assumptions about apartment-dwelling people, about city streets that are in a state of disrepair, about schools that are “failing.” Often, when white people look at cities, we don’t see the past remnants of policy--we only associate the problems of urban space with the racial characteristics of the people who live there. The same is true for suburban living. When white people look at cul-de-sacs, at high achieving schools, at well-maintained infrastructure, and at single family homes, we think we know the type of people who live there and that they’ve earned their place in a good space, a clean space, because they have worked hard.
James Baldwin meditated on this relationship between neighborhood spaces and assumptions about race in his debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965: “If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem that, of course, that it’s an act of God that this is true! That you belong where white people have put you.” In the U.S., anti Black racism is so baked into the political economy of housing, that where we live just seems natural.
The stories we tell about the places we live have real consequences for the way we see the world around us. And, these stories about places are a key way in which white supremacy operates as a system that structures our understanding of the world. As sociologist George Lipsitz has argued, places become racialized. In plain language: we associate certain towns, neighborhoods, or locations, with groups of people who belong to a certain race. And with those associations, come assumptions about the place and the people there. Those assumptions are built through layers of told and untold history, through our personal experiences, and through stereotypes and biases that we might not even be fully aware of.
So when my friends and I joked about it being “Dangerous in Danbury” and “Nicer in Newtown,” we were unconsciously upholding whiteness and white supremacy. That's because racism, anti Blackness, and white supremacy happen in and through our perception of and ability to occupy public spaces. This is what Ibram Kendi calls space racism: "a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to resource inequity between racialized spaces or the elimination of certain racialized spaces, which are substantiated by racist ideas about racialized spaces" (166). Examples of this space racism are part of the sort of discriminatory housing policies that I mentioned above, the unequal access to capital for Black families in search of homeownership, and the way that public housing, policing, schooling, healthcare, access to clean water and nutritious food and other public services depend in large part on where you live. And, where you live and how you live--whether it's in Danbury or Newtown, in a million dollar home or in a studio apartment--is no random thing. It is determined, in large part, on the market logic of what Cedric Robinson calls racial capitalism.
When I say "white supremacy" some might think I'm exaggerating; white supremacy to them might reference burning crosses and the Ku Klux Klan, or the way that the Arkansas National Guard had to lead Black students into Central High School in Little Rock to desegregate the school in 1958. More recently, the phrase white supremacy might make people think of the 2016 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia where white extremists drove their car into and murdered activist Heather Heyer, or the 2015 murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a gunman shot and killed nine African American members of the congregation. Or, even more recently, the murders of six women of Asian descent in Atlanta. Those are, all of them, examples of the racial terrorism that upholds the long arm of white supremacy.
Another way of thinking about white supremacy, especially for people who live in a predominantly white town like Newtown, is that white supremacy is a system, a whole mess of connected ways of thinking, talking, acting, and interacting that intrude into all facets of American life--from housing to schooling to health care to policing. White supremacy is simply the unspoken and rarely interrogated principle that whiteness is superior, that it is the norm against which all other things should be measured. White supremacy is as often silence as it is violent confrontation.
But white supremacy is a system of ideas that has actual concrete effects. There are innumerable material advantages to being white because the current world we live in is structured for our use as white folks; we never have to wonder whether we are being treated a particular way because of the color of our skin, whether we're being stopped by police because we look suspicious, whether we're being undertreated or not treated for pain in the ER because of assumptions medical professionals make about the pain tolerance of Black bodies. The murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Daunte Wright, and Adam Toledo among countless others, are symptoms of white supremacy. Their deaths index the structurally racist practices in American policing and the way that white supremacy operates through the implicit biases white individuals hold toward people of color. White supremacy is Officer Darren Wilson holding a gun in his hand describing 18-year-old Michael Brown as if he were a monster: “He [Michael Brown] looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”
One piece of white supremacy concerns the fact that mostly, white folks don't have to think much about being white while being Black or Indigenous or a person of color means paying what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls a “black tax.” Growing up in Newtown to a multigenerational farming family, I never thought a whole lot about my whiteness. I understood racism as a categorically bad thing, but because you could count the number of non-white students at Newtown High School on two hands in the late 1990s and early 2000s, race seemed to exist outside and over there or in the past; It was abstract. It wasn't until I moved to Washington, D.C. at 23 and began teaching 7th grade and Adult Basic Education in a predominantly Black school district and living in a majority Black neighborhood, that I began to critically deconstruct my whiteness.
For the first time in my life, I was the only white person in the room or in the grocery store or on my street. The school I taught at was underfunded and under resourced, in a state of “Turn Around.” We were constantly visited by consultants who warned us about test scores and failure. But what I experienced were brilliant students who worked hard and teachers who stayed at the school routinely until 6pm or 8pm each day. What I experienced was not failure, but deliberate sabotage. I had to buy my own paper to make copies, my room registered at 45 degrees in November because the heater was broken, and I had to borrow a class set of books from the public library so that we’d be able to read in class. My time there changed my way of thinking about the world around me, about my whiteness, and about the intractable inequalities that racism and its political economy creates and perpetuates.
Prior to my years teaching, I had always thought that talking about and recognizing race was racist, but as I worked as a teacher and later, when I went to graduate school to study race and education, I learned through living in a diverse community and through intentional reading about race and American history, that race has been a fundamental way in which we've structured life in the United States, a biological set of phenotypical differences to which we have ascribed reality. Not talking about race, being colorblind, while appealing and even innocent-seeming, will never move us toward a more just society.
Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who argued the Brown decision and who later became the first Black Supreme Court Justice linked this paradoxical desire for colorblindness back to the contradictions within the U.S. Constitution: "These were beautiful words but at the same time a Negro slave was but three-fifths of a man in the same Constitution. Negroes who, finding themselves purportedly the property of white men, attempted to secure the blessings of liberty by voting with their feet and running away, were to be captured and returned to slavery pursuant to that same document." Marshall, defending affirmative action, or the affirmative role of the federal government in remediating past injustices, reminded listeners: "There our groups in every community, which are daily paying the cost of the history of American injustice." Social theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant also tackled the concept of color-blindness by arguing that the U.S. had in fact embraced, in the almost 200 years between its founding and the formal abolition of segregation, a race-conscious set of priorities: "State actions in the past and present have treated people in very different ways according to their race, and thus the government cannot retreat from its policy responsibilities in this area. It cannot suddenly declare itself "color-blind" (57). In short, we can’t just switch it all off and suddenly pretend that race doesn’t matter when it has always, already, mattered in this country.
At first, the more I read, the more immobilized I felt. What could I do? Acknowledging the unearned benefits of my whiteness, I rehearsed the ways I had previously thought about minoritized populations and rethought the comments, the jokes, the assumptions--"Dirtier in Danbury" "Nicer in Newtown." I knew in part that becoming aware of my whiteness was a luxury that people of color in the United States don't get to have. And, often, reckoning with systems of oppression makes for a lot of guilt to hold. But, guilt is just a feeling, albeit an unpleasant one. Black Indigenous People Of Color (BIPOC) experience actual violence, deprivation of liberty, death, and exploitation by American capitalism. White people who want to be in the fight for racial and economic justice, need to understand the difference between feelings of guilt, of unease, which can feel insurmountable, and the very real effects racism and white supremacy have on communities of color. As African American writer Alice Walker mused, in an essay about the differences between the types of fiction that Black and white writers produce: “Black people have never felt themselves guilty of global cosmic sins.” The feelings of guilt that you feel once you come to realize the "global cosmic sins" perpetrated by people who look like you, make it hard to figure out where to go next, what to do. One of my teaching colleagues and friends, a Black woman, said to me: "Get out of your guilt, D. It's about thinking: what is my stuff? and what do I need to build up or tear down to make it right?'"
As a historian of education who writes about desegregation, racial capitalism, and anti-blackness, and as a white person still working through her "stuff," I think we start hyper-locally with unearthing histories that have been occluded, untold, and by seeing how those histories create the stories we tell about the place we live--like Newtown. As "Why is Newtown So White?" urges us to consider the why behind residential segregation in Connecticut, the individual research questions of the group follow up by asking how questions--how is it that this place has come to be? How is it that we have come to understand this town in particular ways? How did slavery look in Connecticut? How did the erasure of indigenous pasts come to be? How did policy and prejudice come together to create a segregated community that maintained its racial innocence? What impact has this had on schooling? Zoning? Homeownership? What have been the individual experiences of people of color who have called the town home?
Another part of this community-based effort is recognizing the injuries that white supremacy effects on people of color and on white folks, through the ways it dehumanizes us all. That this racist infrastructure took centuries to build in the United States means that we are fighting a long fight. And so, part of doing this work is seeing anti-racism as a stance and fighting white supremacy as a daily practice. And like anything that we practice, we do better the more we try. For white people, it means critically thinking through our assumptions about our own town and its surroundings. It means examining policies and thinking through who has benefited and who has lost out or who stands to lose out in the policy process. It means organizing for social, economic, and racial justice and in doing so, recognizing the intersectional nature of oppression--that economic exploitation, racism, and sexism, are bound up in a big knot that we must methodically spend our lives untangling. It means reading widely and deeply, listening to BIPOC voices, making the margin the center, in the words of bell hooks. It means taking up less space, speaking less and listening more. And, it means interrogating our minds and reorienting our hearts toward change. It doesn’t necessarily mean always being nice, but it does mean that we are truly endeavoring to make it Nicer in Newtown.
What made us describe Danbury and Derby and Waterbury and Ridgefield in particular ways as young people? Why did we think about those places as dangerous or dirty, or rich, or worse? It comes down to the stories we tell about different spaces. These stories circulate and become true in our minds and they have a lot to do with what we understand about race and the assumptions we make about certain groups of people based on those understandings. White folks often unconsciously measure danger and safety along a continuum of whiteness to blackness where the whiter a place is, the more safe white folks assume it is and, in the inverse, the more people of color who live in an area the more dangerous it seems. White people don’t talk about it in those terms--we use coded language, or we can’t even articulate what feels “off” about a place or what makes it feel unsafe to us.
Why is this? As the “Why Is Newtown So White?” project has documented in other articles, zoning policy at the local level and federal initiatives such as the GI Bill, as well as the historical and contemporary impact of discrimination by banks and realtors among other factors, help determine where people live. These facts are well documented by several generations of urban historians; Kenneth Jackson, Arnold Hirsch, Tom Sugrue, Richard Rothstein, and most recently Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor have shown that where we live is no accident. Before the GI Bill tackled housing shortages for white soldiers returning from WWII, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal set about trying to solve a national housing shortage through the 1934 Housing Act, which created the Federal Housing Administration. The first of several housing acts, the 1934 Act helped white families move to the suburbs in record numbers, their homes subsidized by federal funds that revolutionized how homes were purchased. For the first time, ordinary white people became able to buy houses with their loans amortized over a period of 30 years. They could make low down payments and the federal government would back their loans.
Black families, however, were shut out of these early programs. Furthermore, banks used a variety of techniques to avoid lending to Black families, based on risk assessment and on evaluations of a neighborhood’s safety. Safety and risk were grounded in things like how racially homogeneous a neighborhood was (read:Black) or how many homes in a neighborhood were owner-occupied. Redlining, as it became known, was a way in which banks justified not granting loans to Black families. This, coupled with restrictive covenants which forbid the sale of certain properties to Black families, excluded many Black Americans from homeownership until the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer case that struck them down.
Even still, exclusion from homeownership continued through both formal and informal means. For Black families, homeownership through contract leasing was available, though risky, and public housing was the only form of government subsidy available. Public housing, much like the suburbs, was segregated. Looking at it on the surface, it might seem as though white people were natural homeowners who lived in sparkling suburban neighborhoods and occupied the newest housing stock and Black people were irresponsible; they lived in slum-like conditions, high rise public housing complexes that were systematically neglected.
But, as historians and other social theorists such as Clarissa Hayward have written, the stories that white folks have come to tell about suburbs on the one hand and inner cities or urban cores on the other, leave out the part about the federal government, bank, and realtor involvement in segregating America. What remains, are negative assumptions about apartment-dwelling people, about city streets that are in a state of disrepair, about schools that are “failing.” Often, when white people look at cities, we don’t see the past remnants of policy--we only associate the problems of urban space with the racial characteristics of the people who live there. The same is true for suburban living. When white people look at cul-de-sacs, at high achieving schools, at well-maintained infrastructure, and at single family homes, we think we know the type of people who live there and that they’ve earned their place in a good space, a clean space, because they have worked hard.
James Baldwin meditated on this relationship between neighborhood spaces and assumptions about race in his debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965: “If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem that, of course, that it’s an act of God that this is true! That you belong where white people have put you.” In the U.S., anti Black racism is so baked into the political economy of housing, that where we live just seems natural.
The stories we tell about the places we live have real consequences for the way we see the world around us. And, these stories about places are a key way in which white supremacy operates as a system that structures our understanding of the world. As sociologist George Lipsitz has argued, places become racialized. In plain language: we associate certain towns, neighborhoods, or locations, with groups of people who belong to a certain race. And with those associations, come assumptions about the place and the people there. Those assumptions are built through layers of told and untold history, through our personal experiences, and through stereotypes and biases that we might not even be fully aware of.
So when my friends and I joked about it being “Dangerous in Danbury” and “Nicer in Newtown,” we were unconsciously upholding whiteness and white supremacy. That's because racism, anti Blackness, and white supremacy happen in and through our perception of and ability to occupy public spaces. This is what Ibram Kendi calls space racism: "a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to resource inequity between racialized spaces or the elimination of certain racialized spaces, which are substantiated by racist ideas about racialized spaces" (166). Examples of this space racism are part of the sort of discriminatory housing policies that I mentioned above, the unequal access to capital for Black families in search of homeownership, and the way that public housing, policing, schooling, healthcare, access to clean water and nutritious food and other public services depend in large part on where you live. And, where you live and how you live--whether it's in Danbury or Newtown, in a million dollar home or in a studio apartment--is no random thing. It is determined, in large part, on the market logic of what Cedric Robinson calls racial capitalism.
When I say "white supremacy" some might think I'm exaggerating; white supremacy to them might reference burning crosses and the Ku Klux Klan, or the way that the Arkansas National Guard had to lead Black students into Central High School in Little Rock to desegregate the school in 1958. More recently, the phrase white supremacy might make people think of the 2016 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia where white extremists drove their car into and murdered activist Heather Heyer, or the 2015 murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a gunman shot and killed nine African American members of the congregation. Or, even more recently, the murders of six women of Asian descent in Atlanta. Those are, all of them, examples of the racial terrorism that upholds the long arm of white supremacy.
Another way of thinking about white supremacy, especially for people who live in a predominantly white town like Newtown, is that white supremacy is a system, a whole mess of connected ways of thinking, talking, acting, and interacting that intrude into all facets of American life--from housing to schooling to health care to policing. White supremacy is simply the unspoken and rarely interrogated principle that whiteness is superior, that it is the norm against which all other things should be measured. White supremacy is as often silence as it is violent confrontation.
But white supremacy is a system of ideas that has actual concrete effects. There are innumerable material advantages to being white because the current world we live in is structured for our use as white folks; we never have to wonder whether we are being treated a particular way because of the color of our skin, whether we're being stopped by police because we look suspicious, whether we're being undertreated or not treated for pain in the ER because of assumptions medical professionals make about the pain tolerance of Black bodies. The murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Daunte Wright, and Adam Toledo among countless others, are symptoms of white supremacy. Their deaths index the structurally racist practices in American policing and the way that white supremacy operates through the implicit biases white individuals hold toward people of color. White supremacy is Officer Darren Wilson holding a gun in his hand describing 18-year-old Michael Brown as if he were a monster: “He [Michael Brown] looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”
One piece of white supremacy concerns the fact that mostly, white folks don't have to think much about being white while being Black or Indigenous or a person of color means paying what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls a “black tax.” Growing up in Newtown to a multigenerational farming family, I never thought a whole lot about my whiteness. I understood racism as a categorically bad thing, but because you could count the number of non-white students at Newtown High School on two hands in the late 1990s and early 2000s, race seemed to exist outside and over there or in the past; It was abstract. It wasn't until I moved to Washington, D.C. at 23 and began teaching 7th grade and Adult Basic Education in a predominantly Black school district and living in a majority Black neighborhood, that I began to critically deconstruct my whiteness.
For the first time in my life, I was the only white person in the room or in the grocery store or on my street. The school I taught at was underfunded and under resourced, in a state of “Turn Around.” We were constantly visited by consultants who warned us about test scores and failure. But what I experienced were brilliant students who worked hard and teachers who stayed at the school routinely until 6pm or 8pm each day. What I experienced was not failure, but deliberate sabotage. I had to buy my own paper to make copies, my room registered at 45 degrees in November because the heater was broken, and I had to borrow a class set of books from the public library so that we’d be able to read in class. My time there changed my way of thinking about the world around me, about my whiteness, and about the intractable inequalities that racism and its political economy creates and perpetuates.
Prior to my years teaching, I had always thought that talking about and recognizing race was racist, but as I worked as a teacher and later, when I went to graduate school to study race and education, I learned through living in a diverse community and through intentional reading about race and American history, that race has been a fundamental way in which we've structured life in the United States, a biological set of phenotypical differences to which we have ascribed reality. Not talking about race, being colorblind, while appealing and even innocent-seeming, will never move us toward a more just society.
Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who argued the Brown decision and who later became the first Black Supreme Court Justice linked this paradoxical desire for colorblindness back to the contradictions within the U.S. Constitution: "These were beautiful words but at the same time a Negro slave was but three-fifths of a man in the same Constitution. Negroes who, finding themselves purportedly the property of white men, attempted to secure the blessings of liberty by voting with their feet and running away, were to be captured and returned to slavery pursuant to that same document." Marshall, defending affirmative action, or the affirmative role of the federal government in remediating past injustices, reminded listeners: "There our groups in every community, which are daily paying the cost of the history of American injustice." Social theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant also tackled the concept of color-blindness by arguing that the U.S. had in fact embraced, in the almost 200 years between its founding and the formal abolition of segregation, a race-conscious set of priorities: "State actions in the past and present have treated people in very different ways according to their race, and thus the government cannot retreat from its policy responsibilities in this area. It cannot suddenly declare itself "color-blind" (57). In short, we can’t just switch it all off and suddenly pretend that race doesn’t matter when it has always, already, mattered in this country.
At first, the more I read, the more immobilized I felt. What could I do? Acknowledging the unearned benefits of my whiteness, I rehearsed the ways I had previously thought about minoritized populations and rethought the comments, the jokes, the assumptions--"Dirtier in Danbury" "Nicer in Newtown." I knew in part that becoming aware of my whiteness was a luxury that people of color in the United States don't get to have. And, often, reckoning with systems of oppression makes for a lot of guilt to hold. But, guilt is just a feeling, albeit an unpleasant one. Black Indigenous People Of Color (BIPOC) experience actual violence, deprivation of liberty, death, and exploitation by American capitalism. White people who want to be in the fight for racial and economic justice, need to understand the difference between feelings of guilt, of unease, which can feel insurmountable, and the very real effects racism and white supremacy have on communities of color. As African American writer Alice Walker mused, in an essay about the differences between the types of fiction that Black and white writers produce: “Black people have never felt themselves guilty of global cosmic sins.” The feelings of guilt that you feel once you come to realize the "global cosmic sins" perpetrated by people who look like you, make it hard to figure out where to go next, what to do. One of my teaching colleagues and friends, a Black woman, said to me: "Get out of your guilt, D. It's about thinking: what is my stuff? and what do I need to build up or tear down to make it right?'"
As a historian of education who writes about desegregation, racial capitalism, and anti-blackness, and as a white person still working through her "stuff," I think we start hyper-locally with unearthing histories that have been occluded, untold, and by seeing how those histories create the stories we tell about the place we live--like Newtown. As "Why is Newtown So White?" urges us to consider the why behind residential segregation in Connecticut, the individual research questions of the group follow up by asking how questions--how is it that this place has come to be? How is it that we have come to understand this town in particular ways? How did slavery look in Connecticut? How did the erasure of indigenous pasts come to be? How did policy and prejudice come together to create a segregated community that maintained its racial innocence? What impact has this had on schooling? Zoning? Homeownership? What have been the individual experiences of people of color who have called the town home?
Another part of this community-based effort is recognizing the injuries that white supremacy effects on people of color and on white folks, through the ways it dehumanizes us all. That this racist infrastructure took centuries to build in the United States means that we are fighting a long fight. And so, part of doing this work is seeing anti-racism as a stance and fighting white supremacy as a daily practice. And like anything that we practice, we do better the more we try. For white people, it means critically thinking through our assumptions about our own town and its surroundings. It means examining policies and thinking through who has benefited and who has lost out or who stands to lose out in the policy process. It means organizing for social, economic, and racial justice and in doing so, recognizing the intersectional nature of oppression--that economic exploitation, racism, and sexism, are bound up in a big knot that we must methodically spend our lives untangling. It means reading widely and deeply, listening to BIPOC voices, making the margin the center, in the words of bell hooks. It means taking up less space, speaking less and listening more. And, it means interrogating our minds and reorienting our hearts toward change. It doesn’t necessarily mean always being nice, but it does mean that we are truly endeavoring to make it Nicer in Newtown.
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Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 2016. “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools.” Educational Researcher 35 (7): 3–12. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x035007003.
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Neely, Brooke, and Michelle Samura. 2011. “Social Geographies of Race: Connecting Race and Space.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34 (11): 1933–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.559262.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2014. Racial Formation in the United States. Routledge.
Powell, Michael. 2020. “‘White Supremacy’ Once Meant David Duke and the Klan. Now It Refers to Much More.” The New York Times, October 17, 2020, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html.
The Riverbends Channel. 2012. James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFeoS41xe7w.
Robinson, Cedric J. 2021. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Revised and Updated Third edition. The University of North Carolina Press.
Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. First edition. New York ; Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of WWNorton & Company.
Rothstein, Richard. n.d. “The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles.” Economic Policy Institute (blog). Accessed April 2, 2021. https://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson/.
Sugrue, Thomas J. 2014. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit - Updated Edition. Revised edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2021. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Univ of North Carolina Press
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. 1997. “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” And Other Conversations about Race. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books.
Walker, Alice. 2003. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Reprint edition. Orlando: Mariner Books.