Sociohistorical Contexts of Racial Violence: Sundown Towns and the Durability of Racialized Public Space
UW Social Sciences Building 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin
The Institute for Research on Poverty hosts seminars on the UW-Madison campus most Thursdays during the academic year. These presentations are free and open to the public. Room 8417.
media release: Michael Esposito, associate professor, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota
Scholarly work on racial violence has illustrated the diverse effects of historical practices like slavery, lynching, and redlining upon contemporary racial inequalities. We extend this work by considering the durable legacy of sundown towns – an understudied package of legal and conventional practices restricting the mobility of Black communities. We argue that the racialized organization of public space that was produced via sundown practices is expressed today in racialized engagement with public resources and test this using cell phone location data.
