Enduring geographies: Historical sundown towns and contemporary Black-White arrest disparities in the U.S.

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 9: Race and Privilege

Abstract

The literature on historical racial regimes (HRRs), or racial governance systems like slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow, disproportionately overlooks HRRs based on racial exclusion and underspecifies how HRR legacies transmit to contemporary racial inequalities. We address these gaps using the case of sundown towns, jurisdictions that maintained all-White populations between 1890 and 1968 by forcibly displacing Black residents, often into adjacent counties. Using multiple sources of county-level data, we show that the legacy of historical sundown towns on contemporary Black-White arrest disparities follow a consistent spatial gradient. Counties with sundown histories exhibit the largest Black-White disparities, counties adjacent to sundown counties show intermediate disparities, and distant counties show the smallest. We further find evidence of lower violent arrest rates among White residents of former sundown counties, suggesting enduring forms of White protection from state violence. These findings suggest that the legacies of racially exclusionary HRRs on state punishment practices are comparable to those of HRRs rooted in racial exploitation with two key exceptions. Sundown legacies uniquely spill across county lines, and enduring racial segregation structures appear to primarily drive their contemporary effects.

Authors

• Taylor Domingos, Northwestern University

• Sino Esthappan, Northwestern University