Fear of Cities, Anti-Urbanism, Anti-Blackness

Dartmouth professor and writer Jeff Sharlet posted a thread on BlueSky today that resonated with my experience.

It's about fear of cities, which underpins the current moment and motivates much of MAGA (and not just MAGA) thinking.

Sharlet grew up across the river from Schenectady, New York. He doesn't say in which white-flight suburb, but it went without saying among its white residents that the largely Black city across the river was a dangerous, scary place. And as a child you just believe what everyone around you believes.

In school other kids liked talking about Schenectady, a small city, as something like Escape from New York. And then, of course, there were movies like CHUD, and Adventures in Babysitting. Even my beloved Blade Runner was a “beware cities, white people” parable.

Personally, I grew up in a rural area in central upstate New York where there were almost zero Black people, and any city was thought to be a frightening place. I didn't think about the upstate cities like Schenectady or Syracuse much, but I have clear memories of assuming Harlem was utterly terrifying.

Which is why a book like Antonia Barber's juvenile novel The Affair of the Rockery Baby was such a tonic for me... Its white, English characters discover that Harlem is a normal place and make friends with other kids there. (I need to write about that book some day. It doesn't appear anyone else has!)

Like Sharlet, kids in my town were basically inculcated to think that any white person who went to a Black neighborhood would be instantly attacked — when the opposite is what was true, given the history of lynching, white race riots, and sundown towns.

His point in describing his own history (and mine) is this:

Anti-urbanism is a way of speaking anti-Blackness without naming it as one’s own. It’s a sociological euphemism for racism. I didn’t know that as a white kid among white kids who liked to vow they’d never live in NYC, they always wanted to be in a small town....

What’s happening now with the Trump regime…is the conversion of the latent racism of anti-urbanism into explicit and hysterical racism. Previous GOP — and plenty of Democrats — were content to leave it unstated. Trumpism wants to foreground and escalate it.

The most common version of this subtle (not so subtle) white racism is the desire for so-called good schools, which always means ones with very few Black students. Ask yourself how often you hear that from liberals.

Naively, I never thought these attitudes would lead to where we are, with the Trump regime using it to send the armed forces into an American city, and getting ready to send them into others. But here we are. It was ready-made for manipulation by a racist sociopath.

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Here's another earlier post on the topic nice white people who are not so nice.