Such horrific gaslighting is what you directly felt and what was directly inherited from this autocratic regime that ruled over the South in particular, then nationalized to other states like Indiana. Through terrorist tactics of lynching and house burning, small communities that had settle through out he few decades after the Civil War in across the state, in over 20 rural counties, were driven out of the four decades starting in the 1890s. That’s forty years of white terrorism against black Americans peacefully working in a couple dozen counties. By the time the president signed the 1934 FHA White Mortgage ACT passed by the white southern supremacist “solid South block” of senators, there were only five counties where black Americans lived in Indiana, and they were mostly in confined areas of Indianapolis and Gary, for example. Since black Americans in the state were blocked from getting any of those cheap mortgages for the next 34 years, until the president signed a new 1968 housing act, the state became “locked” into a whiteness, and any black family trying to enter would get a cross on their lawn. Do I believe you? Yes, of course. Sadly, that is a structural process embedded in 80 years of legalized behavior and acceptance of black murder and white terrorist tactics against black families. If your family had moved into a historical white area in the 70s, 80s or 1990s, those structurally approved mechanisms of “slow segregation” conditioned whites so strongly that some white man was bound to drop a burning cross on your lawn to terrorize your family.
The practice of gaslighting you experienced in being told you didn’t experience what you did is a light denial, or version of light white supremacy, that is made from mental conditioning of generational response by the forces of money from banks, practices from realtors not selling to black families, that created in Indiana a sense that a black man spotted in such neighbors structured white until 1980 was out of place. Glad to hear you’re alive and now writing clearly and stay true to your self.
