Tip for Journalists and Historians: When You Don’t See Blacks in a Community Ask Why — James Loewen, 2016.

My wife likes to say that we failed Fox Chapel. We moved to the Pittsburgh suburb in 2019 and we always knew it was a temporary stop. Our move back to Pittsburgh after leaving exactly 20 years earlier allowed us just one day to find housing. Fox Chapel was a familiar suburb, in many ways like Silver Spring, Maryland, and Decatur, Georgia. Just a few miles away from our 1990s home, its housing stock includes more modest brick Cape Cods, Colonial Revivals, and ranch houses with spacious yards and lots of trees. Not all of the homes there are manorial estates with brick and stone mansions.

And, like Decatur and Silver Spring, Fox Chapel was a sundown suburb, a place with a history defined by exclusion.

Fox Chapel was the whitest place I think I’ve ever lived. Unlike Silver Spring and Decatur, there wasn’t any collective effort to hide behind false white progressive liberal cloaks. We knew that our tax dollars wouldn’t be going to any municipally-sponsored racial reconciliation projects. We didn’t expect any Decatur Dinners or Community Conversations (Decatur flavor) or Community Conversations (Montgomery County flavor). Efforts like those do little to repair communities. They are, as I wrote for Next City in 2017, taxpayer-funded cosmetic efforts.