The Tomlins, a black family, and the Midwoods, a white family, live on the same street but are separated by a hedge and the political boundary line that identifies Hempstead, where the Tomlins live, and Garden City, where the Midwoods live. Tomlin complains to a Times reporter that plows rarely show up after a snowstorm. But on the Garden City side, the pavement is smooth; when a large tree limb falls, village workers arrive within hours to haul it away.
Of course, the Tomlins could not gain access to these benefits just by moving a city marker. A move to Garden City would require them to pay a steep premium in the form of much higher housing costs, assuming they could afford it, and they would have to be willing to live in an overwhelmingly white city. Usually the race and class lines that divide us are not so clearly drawn. But most Americans experience forms and degrees of separation.
Racial segregation is still pervasive, and class segregation seems to be an accepted norm. Such separation is so endemic to American life that we rarely question it—at least not when we benefit from it. In fact, one might argue that our balkanized social structure is a salutary, critical feature of our system of benefits and incentives.
Like it or not, this is the established path to better schools, less crime, better services, and stable property values. We seem to understand, if not accept, that the opportunities and amenities available in a neighborhood, as well as the responsiveness of local government to its needs, are often closely calibrated to its racial and economic makeup.
We may not agree with this system. We may even decry its unfairness. But when it comes to our personal choices about where to live, our primary motive is to maximize benefits and comfort for ourselves and our families.
As I explain in this book, we are all making choices about where to live in a market system that values racial and economic homogeneity, at least of the white kind, over racial and economic integration. This balkanization comes with very steep, long-term costs, particularly for black and Latino children.
Black and brown public school children are now more segregated than at any time in the past thirty years. Typically they are relegated to high-poverty, racially identifiable schools that offer a separate and unequal education. Many poor African Americans live in isolated ghetto neighborhoods that offer violence, weak schools, few jobs, and limited avenues for escape.
Of all of our tacit understandings about separation, the supreme, cardinal principle seems to be that poor black people are to be avoided and that society is better off shunting them into their own neighborhoods, far away in particular from sizeable white populations. Although we are loathe to admit it, the United States, much more than any other developed Western nation, is premised on the idea of there being winners and losers. Our separatism plays into this. Our acceptance of pervasive racial and increasingly stark class separation creates communities of abundance and communities of need.
The 7 percent of the population of large metropolitan areas that live in affluent, job-rich, predominately white suburban enclaves are the biggest winners. They are typically the families of corporate executives and entrepreneurs who are at the top of the income and wealth scale. Everyone else gets a very different deal; the black poor get the worst deal, often being relegated to hypersegregated neighborhoods that are incubators of extreme social distress.
Our tortured racial heritage—one that initially was premised on blacks being unworthy of the privileges of full citizenship— masks our winner-take-all system. Middle-income whites cannot appreciate that their daily anxiety about just trying to stay ahead in America has a lot to do with how we have chosen to order ourselves. There are multicultural, socioeconomically integrated islands that buck the dominant trend of race and class separation.
Neighborhoods such as Adams-Morgan in Washington, D. But such inclusive neighborhoods are the exception, not the rule, in American real estate markets. Those home buyers who set out to live in an integrated neighborhood are often surprised by the lack of offerings. And frequently in integrated communities, like West Mount Airy in Philadelphia, the schools are becoming more segregated and impoverished.
Even among the universe of families that choose to live in integrated neighborhoods, parents with options, especially white and black professionals, often bypass the public schools. My aim with this book has been to offer a thorough factual account on where we are in upholding the integrationist, egalitarian ideals we claim to believe in.
I come to this as a scholar but also as a black woman who values black institutions and communities even as I advocate for race and class integration. These are highly emotional issues. They also tend to be single rather than married and not to have children. Significantly, childless black households are similarly more open to increasingly black communities than their counterparts with children.
Finally, white renters are considerably more willing to move into and remain in racially mixed areas than homeowners are. Thus, communities with relatively larger proportions of rental housing are more likely to remain integrated. Again, this finding runs counter to the pure-prejudice view of neighborhood choice, since renters can leave much more quickly than homeowners. The data support the second prediction as well.
Indeed, there is virtually no evidence of white flight or accelerated departure rates in the face of racial mixing. White households are no more likely to leave a community that is 80 percent black than one that is 2 percent black. And the moving decisions of black households appear insensitive to racial composition as well. Thus, to the extent that integrated neighborhoods do tip, or become increasingly black, entry decisions, rather than exit decisions, appear to be the cause.
The point is, residents living in a community are far less likely to consider race as a signal of neighborhood quality than outsiders considering moving in. As for the third prediction, the evidence confirms that mixed neighborhoods that seem sheltered from further black growth are more stable. The longer a community has been integrated, the more likely it is to remain so.
And analysis of individual decisionmaking confirms this. Controlling for present racial composition, white households are both less likely to leave a mixed community and more likely to enter one if its black population has been fairly steady in the past and thus seems likely to remain steady in the future. Moreover, integrated neighborhoods located farther from black inner-city communities are more likely to remain stable.
Of course, the added distance may discourage blacks from entering these communities as quickly, but it seems likely that white expectations play a role too.
For white households may view communities closer to the core black area as both more apt to gain black population and more vulnerable to the social dislocation that whites associate with such gain.
Furthermore, mixed neighborhoods in which the housing market is thriving and in which neighborhood amenities seem particularly secure are more likely to remain stable. For example, the data appear to show that communities with large stabilizing institutions, such as universities or military bases, that promise to provide a continual source of people, both white and black, who desire to live in the area provide just such strength and security.
To the extent the racial neighborhood stereotyping hypothesis is sound, the obvious question arises: what light does it shed on the moral and economic justification for government intervention to maintain mixed neighborhoods or to promote integration generally, and what kinds of policies would most effectively promote integration consistent with this justification?
This is not the place to address such a grand question. The act subsidized housing for whites only, even stipulating that Black families could not purchase the houses even on resale. The program effectively resulted in the government funding white flight from cities. One of the most notorious of the white-only communities created by the Housing Act was Levittown, New York, built in and followed by other Levittowns in different locations.
Segregation of children in public schools was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in with Brown v. Board of Education. The case was originally filed in Topeka, Kansas after seven-year-old Linda Brown was rejected from the all-white schools there. A follow-up opinion handed decision-making to local courts, which allowed some districts to defy school desegregation. Eisenhower deployed federal troops to ensure nine Black students entered high school after Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had called in the National Guard to block them.
When Rosa Parks was arrested in after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, the civil rights movement began in earnest. Through the efforts of organizers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the worst incidents of anti-integration happened in The state had passed the Elimination of Racial Balance law in , but it had been held up in court by Irish Catholic opposition.
Police protected the Black students as several days of violence broke out between police and Southie residents. White crowds greeted the buses with insults, and further violence erupted between Southie residents and retaliating Roxbury crowds. State troopers were called in until the violence subsided after a few weeks.
Segregation persists in the 21st Century. Studies show that while the public overwhelmingly supports integrated schools, only a third of Americans want federal government intervention to enforce it. The phenomenon reflects residential segregation in cities and communities across the country, which is not created by overtly racial laws, but by local ordinances that target minorities disproportionately. Scholars have found that African Americans in moderately segregated metropolitan areas have much better employment levels, earnings, and mortality rates than do African Americans in metropolitan areas with very high segregation levels.
Sander and Jonathan M. Zazloff, along with Yana A. Kucheva of the City College of New York, looked at outcomes for African Americans in metropolitan areas where the black—white dissimilarity index was below 0. The outcomes were consistently better for African Americans living in moderately segregated areas than highly segregated areas, both in absolute terms and when compared with non-Hispanic whites living in the same regions.
The unemployment rate for black men ages 25—34, for example, was Unemployment was 3. See Figure 3. Likewise, for all blacks, age-adjusted mortality relative to non-Hispanic whites was better in moderately segregated regions 1. Part of the reason for better outcomes, the authors of the study suggest, is that blacks are more likely to live in concentrated poverty in metropolitan areas with high levels of racial segregation than those with moderate levels of racial segregation.
The researchers found, for example, that 17 percent of low-income blacks living in moderately segregated metro areas reside in concentrated poverty, compared with 33 percent of low-income blacks living in highly segregated areas. Both currently and historically, segregation is best understood as a tool used to promote and preserve white supremacy, deployed to make it easier to isolate, divest from, surveil, and police black and brown people concentrated in certain communities.
The ingenuity of this racist tool is that its evil use creates its own justification—that is, once employed, it creates perspectives and data that seem to support its further use. As communities of color suffer under the deprivations that come with segregation—economic disinvestment, political disenfranchisement, educational inequity, and unfair, ineffective policing practices—those who build and install resilient and enduring racist systems that sustain segregation explain their decisions in terms of protecting and promoting safety, strong schools, and stable housing markets.
These indeed are desirable neighborhood attributes—but they are the very same attributes that the conditions of segregation disrupted for blacks.
In fact, regarding neighborhood characteristics, African Americans express the same values and desires as most Americans, even though they have much more difficulty in realizing them. Yet only 16 percent rated their local public schools as excellent , and 43 percent of residents reported feeling that their local government services were not a good value for the taxes that they pay. Extensive evidence suggests that black residents in many segregated communities do not believe that their needs and desires are met in their current environments.
For African Americans, an integrated community is one where between 20 to 50 percent of residents are African American. White definitions of integration indicate that they accept diversity only when they can continue to dominate, defining integration as a scenario where only 10 percent of neighborhood residents are black. Certainly, integration is not a panacea for past and present injustices.
In fact, pro-integration advocates should respect the ways that integration might lead to new hardships for black folks—increased discomfort and fear of police encounters, elevated levels of surveillance and suspicion from neighbors, disproportionate discipline of black children in predominantly white schools, and so on.
And so one challenge of contemporary housing integration efforts becomes how to dismantle the racist system of policies that created and continue to sustain residential segregation without simultaneously destroying valuable cultural and economic institutions that black and brown communities have created in response to it.
Integration best functions and is best incentivized when public policies and private citizens tackle the myriad of inequities and indignities that complicate, and sometimes limit, the lives of African Americans. Despite this caveat, it remains true that 1 both historically and currently, black people have risked their comfort, livelihoods, and sometimes lives to gain access to integrated spaces; and, most importantly, that 2 segregation itself is a white supremacist practice that has proven both durable and highly effective at limiting black wealth and opportunity.
Racial housing segregation, residential poverty concentration, and diminished housing access did not emerge accidentally. Sign up for updates. Sign Up Follow us. Members of government and private entities began to deliberately segregate residential areas by race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, largely by prohibiting blacks from purchasing homes in majority-white neighborhoods.
After the Civil War, those newly liberated black people dispersed throughout the United States, but an abrupt end to Reconstruction ushered in an era of heightened white paramilitary violence, exploitative sharecropping arrangements, and Jim Crow laws.
As anti-black discrimination formalized and intensified, many communities systematically expelled African Americans, excluded them from public goods and services, and adopted policies that forbade blacks from residing in towns, or even remaining within town borders after dark. Pioneered by Baltimore in , racial zoning quickly emerged as an effective way to further subjugate and segregate black folks.
Louis, and others. The U. Supreme Court in struck down explicit racial zoning with its decision in Buchanan v. Warley , arguing that such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners. Localities quickly found a way to circumvent the ruling and preserve the racial caste system in housing. Some localities created and enforced laws in flagrant violation of Buchanan. Richmond, Virginia, for example, passed a law prohibiting anyone from moving onto a block where they could not marry the majority of people on that block.
Because the state had then-enforceable anti-miscegenation laws on the books, the ordinance effectively prevented neighborhood integration without explicitly mentioning race. Other localities were slightly more subtle.
These policies rapidly proliferated. In , just eight cities had zoning ordinances; by , that number had risen to 1, Supreme Court affirmed the practice of exclusionary zoning in Euclid v. Ambler , finding that zoning ordinances were reasonable extensions of police power and potentially beneficial to public welfare.
In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership. One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers.
Initially upheld in Corrigan v. Buckley , the U. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution. In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants.
Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between and , whites received 98 percent of them.
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