I was thinking about sundown towns lately. They are rare in the Deep South. The reason being that poor blacks in the past lived near the wealthy people they worked for. That is still the case today.
Instead of sundown towns, the Deep South has sundown neighborhoods. A poor all black neighborhood will be next to a wealthy all white neighborhood.
I remember one clear example of this in Columbia, South Carolina. I would take Gervais St. downtown from where I lived in Forest Acres. In one stretch of the road, there was a clear divide. On one side, were poor neighborhoods and some of the so-called Projects, the government housing. A white person like me would unlikely ever purposely drive into that area. But on the other side of the road was an expensive neighborhood of beautiful large houses. No black person (or even poor white person) would venture into that neighborhood, unless they had business to do there, especially not at night.
The divide was stark. There were no walls to separate the two sides of the road. Any poor black person theoretically could cross the street and go into that wealthy white neighborhood, and vice versa, but I doubt it happened very often. That stretch of road and the neighborhoods on either side probably were heavily policed. That road was a well-maintained border, as if it were a wall.
I drove down that street on a regular basis. I stopped thinking about how strange it was. It just became part of the background. If you lived there your whole life, you’d probably never give it any thought at all. It is similar to how it never occurs to many white people in the North how the town they live in ended up all white or that it ever had a black population.
What interests me is what is not thought about and so not seen.
Marmalade 
Today there aren’t really “hard” enforcements in that sense, but it’s more ‘indirect’ on minorities.
The War on Drugs is really if you think about it, a war on people of color. It’s replaced Jim Crow as the sort of way to keep people poor.
There are other social barriers of course. It’s something that Blacks experience that is difficult for Whites to relate to because they’ve never seen anything quite like it in society.
Have you come across Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow. It is one of the best books I’ve read on the issue of racism. If you haven’t read it yet, you should do so.
There are many ways to enforce segregation. Some are overt, but most aren’t. Even during slavery, most of the social order was kept in place through social customs and practices that weren’t directly violent and oppressive, although there was always a threat in the background.
These days, some of the practices include not just racially biased policing but also such things as redlining.
I’m wondering if there will be an entrenched sort of movement against Generation Y that will keep our generation poor, out of work, in a manner not unlike what minorities face.
Right now, finding work is pretty hard, even in the supposedly attractive majors, as I am learning the hard way. What I am concerned about is that things could somehow snowball in a manner not unlike for people of color.
Perhaps if the far right gets its way, there will be.
Racism in America has always been the model for classism.
For example, poor whites have for a long been treated as a gray area. Back in the day, many poor whites weren’t even considered white. Early British and Anglo-Americans often compared the Irish to Africans and Native Americans. They were somehow ‘other’. Poor whites in the rural South are still treated as ‘other’.
The racial order is about social control, as is the class order. Demographics are destabilizing that order. With bi-racial children and race-switching hispanics, with once middle class whites falling into the working class or even outright poverty, with all of this the boundaries have become fuzzy. Being white with a good education no longer means what it once did. No one is safe and secure for almost anyone is now expendable in a world where there are more people than jobs and the remaining jobs are getting worse.
The comparison that might be the most helpful is that of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The young generations now have high rates of immigrants and children of immigrants. That was also true a hundred years ago. The KKK hated the ethnic “hyphenated” Americans as much as they hated blacks. They hated these ethnic immigrants because they challenged the white social order that kept everyone in their place.
The Lost Generation were treated like crap by their elders. They were feared and despised. Most of them were born into poverty and desperation. They started out life as dirty little children running around the streets without parents, for their parents were in the factories. They joined gangs and mobs. They made moonshine and did what it took to make ends meet. They became WWI veterans and so the first generation of Americans to see the world, coming home with shell shock, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They were a generation of great artists and thinkers challenging all that came before.
The young generations now are in a similar situation. Old people fear what the future is bringing, and the young are symbolic of all they fear. The young are increasingly becoming poor and desperate, and it likely will only get worse.
This post was based on personal observation and speculation. I didn’t have any clear data about the entire South to prove my suspicions, but I just now came across such data.
It’s not just about segregation by town, by neighborhood, or by church. Segregation takes many forms, some harder to see than others. In my example from this post, these people might live across the street from one another, and yet that street acts as a barrier of segregation. Are they in the same neighborhood or not?
What is interesting about the following data is that some kind of social force created segregation in the South where it hadn’t previously existed. If it wasn’t sundown towns causing this, what was it?
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/02/a-painstaking-new-study-reveals-the-persistence-of-us-racial-segregation/386171/