About a century ago, millions of Americans feared that members of a religious group was amassing an arsenal of weapons for a secret, preplanned takeover of the United States.
The feared religious group wasn’t Muslims. It was, as Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce wrote in a great piece in 2015, Catholics:
Hatred had become big business in southwestern Missouri, and its name was the Menace, a weekly anti-Catholic newspaper whose headlines screamed to readers around the nation about predatory priests, women enslaved in convents and a dangerous Roman Catholic plot to take over America.…
America’s deep and widespread skepticism of Catholics is a faint memory in today’s post-Sept. 11 world. But as some conservative politicians call for limits on Muslim immigration and raise questions about whether Muslims are more loyal to Islamic law than American law, the story of Aurora’s long-ago newspaper is a reminder of a long history of American religious intolerance.
Today, there are calls for federal surveillance of mosques in the name of preventing terrorist attacks; a century ago, it was state laws that allowed the warrantless search of convents and churches in search of supposedly trapped women and purported secret Catholic weapons caches.
This may seem absurd today, but there was a real fear among Protestant Americans back then that Catholics were planning to take over the country. As Pearce reported, the fears led to serious violence: Lynch mobs killed Catholic Italians, arsonists burned down Catholic churches, and there were anti-Catholic riots. It was a similar sentiment to the kind of Islamophobia today that’s led many Americans to call for shutting down mosques, forcing Muslims to register in a national database, and even banning Islam.
The point of the comparison is not to say that the US faces the same problems today as it did a century ago, or that the discrimination toward Catholics back then and Muslims today is exactly the same. But when looking back at the history of the US, it’s easy to see a pattern of consistent xenophobia and fears of outsiders.
Me trying to explain to Northern and coastal liberals that bigotry is not a regional phenomenon:
notes on this post are a fucking mess
“ I hate the South! Everyone is a bigot! I’m going to move to New York where EVERYONE is progressive like me!”
Having come from Upstate NY myself…No. No they’re not. People in rural NYS are just as bigoted as rural Southerners. The really annoying part is they’re four times as rude about it.
People in NYC can be just as racist as rural Southerners too
NYC white liberals fought against desegregation. The Harlem 9 emerged because of it. Bedstuy’s taxation without Sanitation happened right here in Brooklyn. I’ve seen more racist housing practices here in NYC than I ever did in Atlanta. Systematic racism isn’t regional. It’s white.
The difference between segregation in the South and the North is that in the South it was the law and in the North it wasn’t but they just did it anyway.
There was also the basic fact that the Southern laws presumed different races would be sharing physical space.
A northern sundown town doesn’t need race-based laws about bathroom accommodations in public places, because it’s presumed no one who isn’t white will be there long enough to need one. They don’t need school segregation because there was never a student for a parallel education system to educate. They may not see a need for laws against interracial marriage, because how would they meet in the first place.
A southern town where the business owners are white and the lowest-tier employees are black does need those things to preserve extreme racial division. They need rules about who sits where on the bus. They need rules about what happens if people fall in love across racial lines. And that meant there were visible legal changes that could be forced during the civil rights movement.
Meanwhile, there are still sundown towns in practice and there are still school systems that have never been integrated… And people will raise hell any time anyone tries to do anything because ‘we aren’t racist like those southerners’ and ‘how dare you change our traditions’ and ’[insert stereotype about black kids universally being in gangs and white kids being angels unless corrupted by outsiders here]’.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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