Before I put up the full post on the Supreme Court decision on voluntary desegregation programs, I want to briefly discussion the dimensions of of residential segregation. Segregation is a really hot topic in sociology these days. This is probably true for a few reasons, including the fact that it is fairly easy to measure with statistics and it’s one of those areas where we still have significant progress to make.
For the most part, sociologists are interested in residential segregation, which simple means refers to the racial/ethnic mix of blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan areas. We tend to be less concerned with segregation as a legal concept, and it seems that a minority of sociologists studying segregation focus on school segregation or segregation in other social institutions such as churches and families.. I suspect that we don’t focus as much of school segregation because it is so highly correlated with residential segregation. I think too often people start by looking at school segregation, but they ignore the fact that more integrated neighborhoods would lead to more integrate schools. I suspect that people don’t focus on residential segregation because it is much harder to challenge, and it’s much more firmly entrenched (at least it is in recent history).
So what are the dimensions of residential segregation. The Census Bureau website identifies 5 major dimensions of segregation: eveness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering. ((Iceland, John, Daniel Weinberg and Erika Steinmetz. 2000. US Census Bureau, Series CENSUR-3, Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in the United States: 1980-2000. US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.)) Each one of these measures a slightly different element of segregation, and some cities may do well on some measures and poorly on others. One major weakness is that the census doesn’t give segregation data for whites in it’s general report on housing segregation, so the data is lacking in that area.
Eveness
Evenness refers to the distribution of a particular population group.
The most widely used measure of evenness and the most-widely used measure of residential segregation, in general, is dissimilarity. Conceptually, dissimilarity, which ranges from 0 (complete integration) to 1 (complete segregation), measures the percentage of a group’s population that would have to change residence for each neighborhood to have the same percent of that group as the metropolitan area overall.
For example, if a group has a dissimilarity score of .75, then 75% of the people in that group would have to move for the group to be evenly distributed throughout the given area. The table below highlights the eveness for major racial and ethnic minority groups in the US, keep in mind the closer the number is to one the more segregated the group is.
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Exposure
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Concentration measures “the relative amount of physical space occupied” by a group. Generally, concentration figures are based on a group’s relative density in a particular area, usually a city or a metro areas. If a group is more segregated it is more dense. In the tables below, I have recorded the Census figures for the delta index, which measures concentration and has figures between 0-1, with those closer to one indicating more segregation. This index measures the proportion/percent of people who would have to move to have a group be distributed across a given area without having greater density in any place. This may sound similar to eveness, but it is different because it is measuring spacing, not percents.
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Centralization measures how closely a group is to the center of an urban area. This is measure is useful because many cities currently have a pattern, which some call the “chocolate city vanilla suburbs” phenomenon. In these metro areas, the cities are predominantly people of color and the suburbs are predominantly white. Of course, some day the US could also have the reverse pattern as they do in places like Paris, where ethnic and racial minority groups are concentrated in suburban ghettos.
Absolute centralization examines only the distribution of the minority group around the metropolitan area center and varies between -1 and 1. Positive values indicate a tendency for group members to reside close to the center, while negative values indicate a tendency to live in outlying areas as compared with the reference group. A score of 0 means that a group has a uniform distribution throughout the metropolitan area.
As you read the table below keep mind the numbers closer to zero mean less segregation, and those closer to 1 or -1 mean more segregation.
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The final dimension is clustering, which “measures the degree to which minority group members live disproportionately in
contiguous areas.” For this, the Census Bureau uses the spacial proximity measure, which
basically measures the extent to which neighborhoods inhabited by minority members adjoin one another, or cluster, in space. Spatial proximity equals 1 if there is no differential clustering between minority and majority group members. It is greater than 1 when members of each group live nearer to one another than to members of the other group, and it is less than 1 in the rare case that minority people lived nearer, on average to nonminority people than to members of their own group.
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Looking carefully over the graphs, we can see a few trends of note. First, across measures of segregation there have been some declines in segregation for Blacks and American Indians from the 1980 to 2000. The declines are modest, but nevertheless, they are declines. For Asians and Latinos, the trends are more mixed. In a few areas there has been lower segregation, and in other areas there are no changes or increased segregation depending on which measure is used. Some of the increases of lack of changes for Latinos and Asians is likely attributable to the large increases in their populations. ((Their rates of intermarriage have also decreased from 1990-2000.)) Overall, African Americans are by far the most segregated racial minority group. ((I would really like to see data for whites here because I would suspect comparable figures.)) American Indians and Alaska Natives are the least segregated racial minority group and Latinos, and Asians fall somewhere in between.
I think this is very important background information that needs to be addressed before we can adequately discuss school segregation, so keep these figures in mind as we go on to discuss school segregation.
Did you find anything that added class to the equation? I would love to know how segregation compares in poor neighborhoods, middle-class ones, and rich ones. A breakdown of urban versus rural segregation would also be interesting.
The data indicates that middle class Blacks and Latinos are slightly less segregated than their lower income counterparts, but the difference is not very big.
So erasing the income gap will not likely erase the racial segregation problem.
I have seen almost nothing on rural segregation. My own experience in the midwest would lead me to believe that rural whites in the north face a very low level of exposure to other groups.
Ya know..I think having exposure to others and a big mix of race in schools is a great thing, but Im not too keen on having to get up at 5 am to get my kid ready just so she can be bussed somewhere. I picked the district I want her in for a reason. If the school suddenly decided to move her so other kids can be exposed to a more racially diverse environment, Id be right pissed.
Rachel, is there something odd with your data link? In Firefox, it blinks for me but does nothing. The rest of the links on the page seem fine.
I’m sure you’re right about the rural North. When I was young, my family would go from Florida to northern Minnesota to visit the grandparents. The kids up there had only seen blacks on TV.
Will I fixed the link in comment 2. I made a typo.
pheeno, you’re jumping the gun sister. I promise we can talk about that in the school integration thread.
You know what gets me, is everyone ignores class while blaming it all on race.
I lived in a big city, it wasnt your skin color that determined where you lived, it was what you could afford to the dollar-!!
The thing that gets me about left leaning websites, is you would think there is no such thing as poor white people.
I’m rather suprised by these results. If I were guessing, I would have guessed that American Indians and Alaskan natives would have been the most segregated group, not the least. Is there any thought that some of the measures, particularly exposure, might be falsely low for this group because of their small numbers? Also, do you have any information on what kind of confidence intervals these numbers have (ie are the apparent gains made by blacks over the past 2 decades real or the result of random variation?)
I think too often people start by looking at school segregation, but they ignore the fact that more integrated neighborhoods would lead to more integrate schools. I suspect that people don’t focus on residential segregation because it is much harder to challenge, and it’s much more firmly entrenched (at least it is in recent history).
I think it goes beyond that. Isn’t it likely that, at least to some degree, school integration practices actually increase residential segregation? The “vanilla suburbs” aren’t just about a big lawn and the corner soda shop. It’s also about “escaping” from the urban de-segregation/ bussing program (for white parents who can’t afford a good private school).
While you identify that “white segregation” is missing, you don’t speculate on the trend. My guess is that “white segregation” is likely increasing, or at least decreasing more slowly than the black trend.
While I don’t like the disparaging tone of “social engineering,” that is exactly how it is viewed by those white parents who opt out by moving to the suburbs.
Isn’t it likely that, at least to some degree, school integration practices actually increase residential segregation?
I would say definitely yes, based on my observations. Also, the set of laws and Supreme Court decisions that constrain schools ability to keep disruptive behavior out of the classroom increases the gains to class-based segregation, which tends to feed racial segregation.
One question for you, Rachel–why are these programs called “voluntary?” “You can’t go to this school because you’re the wrong race” doesn’t seem very voluntary to me.
Sam, it’s voluntary for the school or the district. IE, a court isn’t making them do it a la the 1960s.
This statistical focus leaves unsaid one of the reasons that so many people resist integration: diversity destroys social capital and makes life worse.
There are long-term gains realized from diversity, but those gains are realized at the societal level; the people who would actually pay the cost in terms of worse communities, etc. naturally try to avoid those costs.
OK, that makes sense–although it’s a bizarre usage of voluntary. (By the same logic, Birmingham was “voluntarily segregated.”)
I think it goes beyond that. Isn’t it likely that, at least to some degree, school integration practices actually increase residential segregation? The “vanilla suburbs” aren’t just about a big lawn and the corner soda shop. It’s also about “escaping” from the urban de-segregation/ bussing program (for white parents who can’t afford a good private school). … While I don’t like the disparaging tone of “social engineering,” that is exactly how it is viewed by those white parents who opt out by moving to the suburbs.
Sometimes on these threads I get the idea that people think that all suburbanites are people who lived in their central city to begin with and then moved out. Is there any kind of analysis of this? Judging from my own experience in the Chicago area, my guess would be that around here lots of people who live in the suburbs are from families that haven’t lived in the city for generations, or are people who moved to the area from somewhere else entirely.
Urban sprawl in the Chicago area (eating up some of the world’s finest farmland, BTW) is being driven by housing prices and employment patterns. The farther you go from the city, the cheaper that single-family homes on a lot bigger than a postage stamp is. People don’t want to live in 3-flats in the city and send their kids to an academically suspect school. They want some space for their kids to run around in and send them to a good school in their neighborhood with all the amenities. The cost for this is about 1/2 that in the outlying suburbs than it is in the city, and about 50% cheaper than it is in the near-by suburbs.
They also don’t want them to have to worry about gang wars on their way to and from school. Not that gangs are absent from the ‘burbs, but the serious activity is mostly the close-in oldest suburbs. Parents in the suburbs worry about child molesters but not about gangs. Getting away from “social engineering” really isn’t a factor, at least in Chicago.
Then there’s the fact that a lot of the major employers have moved out of the city. Manufacturing is no longer a major employer and thus being next to the rivers, canals, railroads and cheap unskilled labor is no longer a big advantage for them, and being next to a highly educated workforce is. They move out of the city to the suburbs where they can get lots more land, where taxes are a lot lower, and where the influence of the tax base and employment they bring makes local government a little more amenable towards … cooperating … with what they want.
Here in the Chicago area, the few people I know who lived in the city and then moved to the ‘burbs did so first to get their kids into good schools that were close to their homes. It’s no accident that when you look at new home listings around here, the realtor data sheet on the house has the school district given top billing equal only to the price. School in Chicago are definitely improving, but their performance on the standardized ranking tests are still well below State average. The second reason is to have a nice house with space for the kids to play both indoors and outdoors that they could afford.
Bussing to achieve racial balance isn’t that big of a deal in Chicago. I don’t think kids in Chicago are being bussed to achieve racial balance. And this concern isn’t limited to the whites of Chicago. I was reading a story yesterday about a latino group that is planning a demonstration because they are tired of their kids being bussed out of their neighborhood to high schools outside their area; not because of a desire to achieve integration, but because their neighborhood in fact has no high school. They want the city to build a high school in their neighborhood. Of course, it’s cheaper for the city to bus kids to existing schools than to build a new one (especially because the parents want a school with an Olympic size swimming pool, a state-of-the-art football stadium, etc.), so this is unlikely to happen. Stuff like this makes people say, “Why not move to the suburbs where this stuff already exists and I can live nearby?” People want their kids to go to school within a few miles of their homes.
I’m waiting with bated breath for the post on school segregation… my head starts to hurt when I think of how complicated it would be address the problem residential integration.
That’s happening here for elementary school mostly as the children in one primarily Black and Latino are being bussed out to 13 schools. But the predominantly White schools, many of which operate on a larger pot of property taxes don’t want their schools to be less “White”. It was hard enough to get them to stop screaming about naming the newest high school after MLK, jr. That high school is 2/3 White at least but White parents still complained that their kids would be stigmitized when they applied to universities that they went to a “Black” school.
Ironically, in part to to complaints from the “White” schools, a new elementary school will be built in the neighborhood that has one that’s horribly overcrowded which necessitated the farming out students to other schools. But given that the district decided to put some administration buildings out there, that’s led to up to 25 houses being targets for eminent domain so still a lot of upset people. But poorer people can’t afford lawyers who though they can’t stop eminent domain could get them much better prices on their homes than the district will pay.
There’s a very interesting (imho, of course) discussion about schools at An exchange of letters on school integration and affirmative action.
And since you’re looking at residential segregation, you might want to take a look at the most segregated institutions in the United States, the places we worship. Heck, based on the more vocal atheists I’ve known, the people who gather to not-worship tend to be rather monochromatic too.
Radfem, where is “here” for you?
In the example I’m referring to all the schools are Chicago schools, so the pot of tax money is the same for all. And the complaints are wholly coming from the Hispanic parents whose kids are being shipped out of their neighborhood; there was no reference in the story to any complaints from the schools (or the parents thereof) where the Hispanic kids currently were.
Schools in Illinois are a bit oddly organized. While the City of Chicago is it’s own school district, schools in the rest of the state (absent perhaps East St. Louis) are organized into districts whose boundaries bear no relation to the municipal boundaries of the various towns. Thus a given school may draw kids from 4 or 5 different towns; a given town may have kids going to 3 or more different schools depending on where in the town they live, as the school district’s boundary may cut right down through the middle of town and the town may be divided up among 3 or 4 different elementary school districts and two different high school districts. The only regularity is that a given elementary school district always sends all it’s kids to a given high school. My kids’ high school drew kids from 8 different elementary school districts. There are a few examples of “unit” districts, where one district administers both elementary schools and a high school. Actually, Chicago is thus a “unit” district.
This all makes for a complicated tax bill and also means that your town is divided up into multiple voting precincts so that only the affected people end up voting on a given school referendum.
I have often heard of the segregation patterns in the City of Chicago likened to a bag of various colored marbles; while overall the city is integrated, a great many of the neighborhoods are made up of segregated enclaves.
Ron F, you really need to get south of I-80 more often; most downstate cities with a population of over 15,000 have school district boundaries that correspond quite neatly with municipal boundaries. In more rural areas, the consolidated districts are more common, but those consolidations don’t come without a fight (which has nothing to do with race, since those small towns tend to be almost all-white—it’s all about the economics). The loss of good-paying jobs and the corresponding loss of population means it’s not feasible to have small-town school districts anymore. And the folks who live in those towns aren’t happy about it—consolidation is an in-your-face reminder that their town is dying.
But I digress. The book, “The Hidden Cost of Being African-American” has quite a bit to say about both residential and school segregation; that parents both white and of color would love to jockey for positioning their children at the “good schools”, but that the legacy of racism means that it tends to be only white parents that have the price of admission (read: money to buy a house in a tonier neighborhood) to do that. And not necessarily from their own incomes, either—from inheritance or gifts of money from the grandparents (or, just not having student loans to pay off, because their parents paid for their education). Redlining comes in the form of zoning these days, with suburbs that specify larger houses, larger garages, and no multi-family units—that insures a majority white population with the majority white school district to go with it. The surrounding suburbs where I live put up a fierce fight against the construction of apartments or townhouses whenever developers propose them, because cheaper housing brings in the riffraff (y’know, like me). Their investment isn’t just in the real estate, but in the exclusivity that real estate delivers.
Redlining comes in the form of zoning these days, with suburbs that specify larger houses, larger garages, and no multi-family units—that insures a majority white population with the majority white school district to go with it. The surrounding suburbs where I live put up a fierce fight against the construction of apartments or townhouses whenever developers propose them, because cheaper housing brings in the riffraff (y’know, like me). Their investment isn’t just in the real estate, but in the exclusivity that real estate delivers.
Right. But at that point, it’s about class much more than it’s about race, IMO. They’re trying to keep you and me out, not my company President (who is black, but as a Fortune 500 officer, not at all poor.)
But SamChevre, race is classed in the United States. Sure, there’s well-off people of color in the U.S., but statistically speaking, whites are much better off financially, and it has little to do with bootstraps. Inherited money, significant financial gifts from relatives (especially parents), no student loans (or much smaller student loans), lower interest rates on mortgages (and cars, credit cards, home equity loans), increasing real estate values of suburbs (while older urban neighborhoods diminish in value) all have the net effect of increasing white wealth. Not to mention statistically higher pay.
Here in Illinois, property taxes are the mainstay of school funding—which means not only are the “rich getting richer” in terms of net wealth (their investments and pay increase while downscale folks get pink slips and watch their neighborhoods or towns crumble)—the “rich are getting richer” in terms of the opportunities they can leverage for their children through exclusive access to better schools. White folks who aren’t necessarily “rich”, but who can access that starting gate have a big leg up over similarly-situated people of color who have only their paychecks.
And yes, that is “raced”. “Affirmative action for white people” came in the form of FHA and VA housing loans that didn’t consider older, urban neighborhoods as part of the program. It came in the form of the GI Bill that helped lots of white men improve their opportunities by going to college—and those white men were (and are) hired, promoted and paid at rates significantly higher than white women or people of color. The suburbs that sprung up around cities after WWII didn’t have bus service (at the same time the old interurbans were shutting down), which created a physical barrier for folks without the means for a car. Blockbusting projects popular in the fifties, sixties and seventies were more likely to cut a swathe through close-knit working class neighborhoods than “slums”, furthering the disintegration of urban communities (and lowering property values for those that remained).
So, all this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Public fiscal policy promoted and paid for (through tax dollars) programs that had a net positive impact on whites. Flash forward to now, and whites can claim that they aren’t really trying to get away from blacks and Latin@s when they move to the ‘burbs, that they just want to get their kids into a quality school. Funny how when those folks lived in the city, they voted against school referendums, but once they got out to the suburbs it was a matter of biting the bullet, ‘cuz yeah, it’s more money, but “it’s for a good cause; we need to keep our quality schools.”
La Lubu,
Does anyone disagree taht race and class are correlated?
But class isn’t a “protected class,” and (so far) doesn’t show any signs of being one. Wanting to live with, or surrounded by, members of your own class is fully permissible. That makes segregation a lot more complex.
Sailorman, it’s true that anyone who gets the money can get a home in a neighborhood for a different class. But Americans today have less class mobility than in many countries, including the UK.
And since I’m commenting, La Lubu, who do you think blacks and Latinos who move to the ‘burbs are seeking to avoid? I don’t think they’re seeking to avoid anyone; I think they’re looking for quieter neighborhoods and better schools.
I’m not saying racism is dead, but anyone with a sense of history knows racism and sexism are shrinking while the wealth gap grows.
Will, I’m afraid I didn’t get the memo on racism and sexism shrinking; I think that certain battles won as a result of the civil rights and women’s rights movements helped women and people of color gain footholds, but there’s a huge rollback now in the U.S. that has only picked up steam as the wealth gap grows. I expect future Supreme Court decisions to further erode or erase legislative or judicial decisions designed to correct racist and sexist practices. Racism and sexism shrinking? Not in my country they’re not—not by a long shot.
Why should anyone need to move to the suburbs in order to access a good quality public school? There certainly isn’t anything inherent in a city as to why this should be so.
Sailorman, I’ve met plenty of (white) people who think race and class aren’t correllated. As for the complexity of segregation, I think erosion of “the commons” is directly related to gains made during the civil rights movement. Privatization of formerly public services and amenities is a tactic used to shut people of color out of the game—that it affects some whites too is incidental. Collateral damage, you might say. That so many non-wealthy white folks buy into these schemes that work against their own interests just shows how effective racist propaganda (via centrally-owned mainstream media—-hey, where’s that vaunted competition there?!) is.
Will said, “Wanting to live with, or surrounded by, members of your own class is fully permissible.”
And as far as I know the same is true for race. There are no laws whatsoever prohibiting people’s choice of neighborhoods based on race. There are only laws that forbid racial steering by agents, but if people want to do their own racial steering they can.
Second point, the race based wealth gap is huge, and is an area of increased focus thanks to the works of Melvin Oliver and Thompas Shapiro (Black Wealth White Wealth) and Dalton Conley (Being Black Living in the Red). You can look this up, but many poor white families actually have more wealth than middle class black families. Some of that can be directly traced to segregation policies that go back to the FHA loans given to white families in the post WWII era. Whites in my grandparents generation were able to get loans and build homes in the suburbs. Blacks were not because of racial discrimination. These WWII generation whites passed the wealth on to their baby boomer children, who are now pasing the wealth on to their children. Black families have not be able to do this because of this history of discrimination. So even if all the prejudice in the world was taken away tomorrow; the vestiges of past discrimination would still be with us. This is why we need policies that don’t pretend like stopping discrimination is the only way to build racial equality. Stopping the racial wealth gap will require measures that make up for past (and present) discrimination.
Furthermore, we don’t need to try to separate out race and class; they are clearly linked. We also don’t need to play the class is more important than race game; or the race is more important than class game. They are both forms of social inequality that are related to each other, but also have their own distinct qualities. Although it’s pretty clear that racism caused class differences between blacks and whites, not the reverse.
Robert your link is not working. Are you talking about the recent study by Robert Putnam? I’m not sure sure that he meant social capital so much as social isolation.
The link works for me. Yes, it’s Robert Putnam. Social capital as well as social isolation are terms that he uses in the paper.
La Lubu, I’m a communist; I want great schools for everyone. I look at what’s been done under Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales, and I think class is the greater factor than race. I think the things they do harm everyone who’s not rich, and especially those who live below the poverty the line, a group that’s effectively 50% white, 25% black, and 25% Latino. (There are Asians and American Indians in poverty, of course, but in absolute numbers, they’re only a few percent of the total.) Where you see people being trators to their race, I see people being true to their class.
Rachel, you’re quoting Sailorman. I agree with you that income and wealth play very different roles, but I must note that not all poor white families have any wealth. 25% of the population has less than $5000 in wealth, and that 25% is of all hues.
I should stress that I think it’s important to analyze racism. I’m only saying that when analyzing racism, you have to be very careful not to credit to racism what’s explained by the class warfare of the rich.
And now I’ll be quiet until your next post, because I do appreciate your thoughts on racism.
I posted some data about wealth, income and race in 2003; here and here.
Will wrote:
But it’s a pretty safe bet that those hues include a disproportionate number of Blacks, Indians, and Latin@s.
Ampersand, why anyone wants proportionate poverty is beyond me. Eliminate it all!
Here are more fun facts for you: 50% of the people of the US own 2.8% of the wealth. 1% owns 32.7%. Both of those groups are racially disproportionate, but so what? All of us in that group have been shafted by the system.
Ampersand, that said, your links are interesting. Again, I’m not denying the historical effects of racism or saying racism has disappeared today. I’m simply saying that if you focus on race and ignore class, you’ll miss half of the people who are shafted by capitalism. Generational poverty is not unique to people of color. That truth is most glaring in places like Appalachia, but it exists throughout the US.
Will said, “Again, I’m not denying the historical effects of racism or saying racism has disappeared today. I’m simply saying that if you focus on race and ignore class, you’ll miss half of the people who are shafted by capitalism.”
Will, that’s all fine and dandy, but if you ignore racism then you are going to ignore one of the primary reasons many people are poor–they face the cumulative effects of racial discrimination. Nobody is saying that class doesn’t matter or that capitalism isn’t a system based on wealth disparities. But what I find so frustrating is that your class matters narrative is so frequently used to shut down or redirect discussions of racial discrimination. That’s one of the great failings of Marxist ideology; it’s failure to adequately account for multiple forms of social inequality.
Will said, “The truth of the matter is people get shafted by capitalism in different ways based on race Generational poverty is not unique to people of color. That truth is most glaring in places like Appalachia, but it exists throughout the US.”
I was born in Appalachia, and I do not dispute the poverty in such places. However, I can assure you that as one of those people who has “made it out” and is solidly middle class I have generally left much of the discrimination behind me. If I was black and had made it out of poverty, I will still have my skin color and that would be a barrier to gaining wealth and other opportunities. My whiteness, in large part shelters me from the assumption that I grew up poor. It shelters me from loan discrimination, and people are not general uncomfortable or enamoured by my presence in when I am in a middle class setting. They actually have to talk to me for a while before they know about my background, and that is why race still matters for many middle class people of color.
That was me, not Will. And I agree with you ;)
“if you ignore racism then you are going to ignore one of the primary reasons many people are poor”
I agree entirely. But why ignore the other primary reasons? Ultimately, there are poor people because capitalism is based on the rich needing poor workers to serve them. Some white families never rose from coming here via debtor’s prison. Some black families never rose from being released from slavery. It’s not their fault. It’s the system.
Aren’t the sixteen million whites living in poverty just as deserving of economic justice as the nine million blacks and the nine million Latinos?
Have you read Freakonomics? It has a very interesting discussion of whether a “black” name hurts you in job applications.
And apologies for the digression. All I’m asking is that you include class, not that you ignore race.
Will said, “But why ignore the other primary reasons? Ultimately, there are poor people because capitalism is based on the rich needing poor workers to serve them.”
First of all, the post was not about poverty it was about racial residential segregation, but you’re trying to refocus it. I don’t honestly know of data that examines class based segregation, but that is another topic. A related topic but still another topic.
Will said, “Aren’t the sixteen million whites living in poverty just as deserving of economic justice as the nine million blacks and the nine million Latinos?”
What is your point? Noobody said anything about economic justice. The focus was on racial justice.
Will said, “Have you read Freakonomics? It has a very interesting discussion of whether a “black” name hurts you in job applications.”
The answer is yes; it does hurt you.
Will for the record, my primary area of study is race, but if you have been reading this site for a while you will see that we do discuss economic and poverty issues. What I find fascinating is that when we do that you don’t see people rushing in with the whole let’s talk about race not class phenomenon.
I know we should not have a we can only talk about one or the other mentality; we can talk about both race and class simultaneous. We can talk about class and gender simultaneously. We can talk about race, class, and gender simultaneously, but we don’t need to try to supress discussion of the others.
Obviously class has a lot to do with where someone can buy a house. Obviously one’s race has a lot (but not everything) to do with one’s class. The tricky part is keeping that in view while still engaging with the fact that the US is racially segregated within classes as well. There are Black middle class neighborhoods and Black suburbs. There are poor Black neighborhoods and poor white neighborhoods. There are neighborhoods in transition from one race to another. What there *isn’t* a lot of is stable, integrated neighborhoods. I, for one, would like that to change.
I think it’s important to center racial segregation in conversation every once in a while — mainly because if everyone were middle class, there’d still be a significant amount of racial segregation and a significant amount of harm because of it.
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Here are more fun facts for you: 50% of the people of the US own 2.8% of the wealth. 1% owns 32.7%. Both of those groups are racially disproportionate, but so what? All of us in that group have been shafted by the system.
This is incorrect. Putting aside the question of whether people with low incomes have been shafted by the system (some have, though not the system you’re thinking of, but many have not), I guarantee you that the former category—the 50% that owns 2.8% of the wealth—contains plenty of people who have high incomes but no wealth because they’ve chosen to live at or beyond their means, rather than living below it in order to accumulate wealth.
Rachel, it’s hard to find statistics on class in this country because class is the last taboo in the land where everyone’s middle-class. I’m not trying to focus the discussion on class; I’m only trying add it as a factor. But I’ll happily stop. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with looking exclusively at one factor so long as your readers know that’s what you’re doing, and that’s clear here.
But I must say it’s odd to say that you’re concerned with racial justice, not economic justice. Doesn’t racial justice mean you want economic justice for at least one race?
Freakonomics found that a name that sounds black on an application does not hurt the applicant’s chances of getting a job. Their stats may be wrong, and they have a capitalist bias, but the book is well worth reading, especially for the section about crime and abortion.
“What I find fascinating is that when we do that you don’t see people rushing in with the whole let’s talk about race not class phenomenon.”
That’s because it’s okay to talk about race in the US, but if you’re concerned about class, you get accused of being a commie who advocates class warfare. Rich people get resentful. We’re all middle class, right?
“We can talk about race, class, and gender simultaneously, but we don’t need to try to supress discussion of the others.”
Total agreement!
Murphy, you say, “if everyone were middle class, there’d still be a significant amount of racial segregation.” Do you have any statistics for segregation by class in America? I haven’t found any. It seems to me that that in urban communities, the most integrated neighborhoods tend to be lower-middle class, but that’s only an impression.
Will- I’ll refer you up to Rachel’s comment #2 for some data on how class affects racial segregation.
Will wrote:
Will, Rachel didn’t say that, nor anything that can be fairly interpreted that way. If you’re going to continue posting comments here, I’m going to have to ask you to try and give a reasonable benefit of the doubt to the bloggers here; it’s only by bending over backwards to make the least fair interpretation of her words imaginable that you can say the above.
No, that’s not proven by their study. As the Freakonomics authors themselves point out, one possible reason for their results is that “Black names are used as signals of race by discriminatory employers at the resume stage, but are unimportant once an interview reveals the candidate’s race.”
They don’t challenge the fact, found by many audit studies, that if you send out identical job applications with the name “Molly” on one and “Shanice” on the other, Molly will get more interview offers.
I think that for the measurement of this one particular factor — whether or not a name that is statistically used more by blacks will do worse in the job market than a name that is statistically used more by whites — the audit design is superior to the regression analysis that Freakonomics used.
It’s also worth pointing out other audit studies have found that when blacks and whites are trained to interview identically and given fictional, equally-qualified resumes, whites are on average more likely to be offered jobs, and the jobs they are offered have better future prospects.
Murphy, thanks for the reminder! I’d downloaded that and not looked at it yet. A partial answer is here: “higher socioeconomic status (SES)
African Americans generally live in more integrated neighborhoods than lower SES African Americans.”
Ampersand:
Has a study like this ever been done for jobs which require bachelor’s or advanced degrees? I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true for low-wage jobs, where statistical discrimination might well be a viable strategy, but I would expect the effect to be much weaker in jobs where qualified candidates are few enough and the stakes are high enough that it makes sense to do a more thorough evaluation of each candidate. In some fields (law, for example) the effect is actually reversed due to diversity initiatives.
Ampersand, apologies for not quoting there. I was referring to this: “Noobody said anything about economic justice. The focus was on racial justice.”
I think Rachel was just typing quickly there. I do that often enough. I completely agree that we need to cut each other slack, especially when talking about issues like race and class.
“It’s also worth pointing out other audit studies have found that when blacks and whites are trained to interview identically and given fictional, equally-qualified resumes, whites are on average more likely to be offered jobs, and the jobs they are offered have better future prospects.”
Apologies for doing the broken record thing, but do those studies factor in class? “Trained to interview identically” may mean the applicant isn’t hiding class markers like accent, hair style, or dental health.
Yes, she did, referring to the focus of her post. To interpret someone saying “the focus of my post is on racial justice” as if they had said “I am concerned with racial justice, not economic justice” is unfair at best, dishonest at worst.
It’s possible for someone to have concerns about X, Y and Z, but to write a post or make an academic career focusing on Z in particular. To assume that a focus on Z means that they are not concerned with X or Y is illogical and, in this context, insulting.
Finally, as I recall, the audit studies matched the auditors for general appearance, grooming, and accent, among other factors.
Brandon, iirc the study in question was of entry-level positions with prospects for advancement at white-collar employers. I wouldn’t say such jobs absolutely require college degrees — I’ve met a handful of people in jobs like that who didn’t finish college — but it’s certainly the norm.
I’ve never seen an audit study done of job entry in fields that require advanced degrees.
As for your “in some fields” example, the study the article talks about has been (to put it mildly) controversial and contested. (As the article acknowledges.)
Will says: “A partial answer is here: “higher socioeconomic status (SES)
African Americans generally live in more integrated neighborhoods than lower SES African Americans.”
I’m not sure I can take you too seriously if you chop off the rest of the sentence – “though differences are modest” – without even an ellipsis. I read the sentence as a pretty clear indication that class status does not insulate people of color from residential segregation, though it does have an effect. Extrapolating, I get to this: magically increasing everyone’s class would not make residential segregation disappear. There’s another factor at play: race.
But, maybe we could start to talk about racial segregation? You know, the subject of the post? I’d be interested in thinking more about what can be done to address the problem, since it’s become a pretty vital concern after the recent court decision. Residential segregation was a key issue before school desegregation blipped onto the radar screen, and, in a lot of ways, desegregating the schools was a band aid solution to greater iniquities. Too often, though, I get to the point where I throw up my hands and say, people will live where they want, the best place they can afford, around people who are like them, and they’ll take so many factors into account that’s it impossible to get a word in edgewise from a policy perspective.
Also, I think it’s interesting how often the burden of integration is placed on the shoulders of people of color — the study above doesn’t even mention segregation levels among white people — giving the impression that it’s just not an issue for white people. I’ve read one account, The Failure of Integration by Sheryll Cashin, that mentions the monetary costs associated with majority white communities, namely that white people pay through the teeth to live in places with no people of color. I find that particularly sad.
“To interpret someone saying “the focus of my post is on racial justice” as if they had said “I am concerned with racial justice, not economic justice” is unfair at best, dishonest at worst.”
Hey, never discredit simple sloppiness!
She said, “Noobody said anything about economic justice. The focus was on racial justice.” What I was trying to say is that I don’t see how you can focus on racial justice without focusing on economic justice. Isn’t racial justice a subset of economic jusice? I can see how you can separate race and class in some contexts, primarily tribal ones—why do churches tend to be segregated, why is there very little interracial rape (if the statistics are accurate), why are certain forms of entertainment race-based (Chris Rock on CW, perhaps) and others class-based (Chris Rock on HBO, definitely), etc.
I’m really not one of those assholes who says that racism doesn’t exist anymore. I’m one of those assholes who says that if you look only at race, your results may be distorted. For example, I’ve done a bit of reading on the death penalty and drug penalties. Both appear to be racist when you ignore class. But when you add in class, the death penalty is astonishingly fair (though still morally reprehensible), while our drug penalties continue to be astonishingly racist, at least, based on the data I’ve seen so far.
Apologies for being part of the topic drift. I think Rachel did fine work here, and I’m looking forward to her next post.
Murphy, I left that off because I didn’t see a definition of “modest,” and, more importantly, we were talking about where you find the most integration, not about how much integration you find there. You seem to recogize that when you say, “though it does have an effect.” The suggestion that I was trying to hide something from a source that Rachel offered us all is silly. I’m only a lying commie scumbag when I make up my own statistics or cite sources that you can’t find.
If class affects integration, I would think that talking about class is relevant to this discussion. If it doesn’t, it’s not, of course.
When you say, “white people pay through the teeth to live in places with no people of color,” don’t all people “pay through the teeth” to live in expensive neighborhoods? Or do you mean there are all-white neighborhoods where the cost of living is higher than other expensive neighborhoods because those neighborhoods have managed to preserve the standards of 1955?
Since I don’t have the book on me I can’t be sure, but the author’s point was that there are high income, majority Black communities (Prince George’s County, MD, for example) with lower housing prices than similarly high income segregated white communities. There’s a value attached to the relative whiteness of a neighborhood that is not only explainable by the class of the neighborhood. In Baltimore, for example, several solidly middle class Black neighborhoods have seen housing prices grow at a substantially smaller clip than white middle class and even working class neighborhoods. There’s a reason white people worry about housing prices falling when a certain number of Black people move into a neighborhood, and it’s not because they’re convinced that their new Black neighbor didn’t have enough money to buy his/her house.
So, yeah. Class affects residential segregation. It’s a factor. Race also affects residential segregation. You can talk about one without denying the other. I’m just confused as to why you were so adamant about not talking about race, which happened to be the point of the post.
But hey. I should have just waited to join the post on school segregation. I always get super frustrated trying to suss out the intricacies of residential segregation because it’s a hugely complicated issue with a bunch of competing factors at play.
Murphy, full agreement about the competing factors.
Do you remember what time period the writer was researching? I’ve read about middle-class black neighborhoods where the whites moved in because those were the best buys. But I can’t swear the memory’s accurate; I haven’t seen anything about this in ages.
Ampersand:
The only study I’m aware of using the methodology you described is the one Rachel linked to in this post, in which the participants applied for jobs which required no postsecondary education. This isn’t to say that there aren’t others, but this is the one I initially assumed you were referring to. If you’re thinking of a different study, I’d be interested in seeing it.
It’s a given that any study that purports to show that the black-white achievement gap in any area may be due to anything other than discrimination is going to be hotly contested and controversial, regardless of its merits.
Putting aside the question of whether Sander is right about the reason for the high attrition rates of black law firm associates, I don’t see anything in the article that indicates any credible objections to the point I cited it to make: That a black candidate has a considerable edge over a white candidate with an identical resume when applying for a job as an associate at a major law firm.
Yes, there’s some hand-wavy stuff about how it’s impossible to measure qualifications objectively, but we’re given no reason to believe that black candidates’ superiority in these unmeasurable qualities is not only not reflected in their grades, but so great as to be sufficient to make up for their much lower average GPA.
Yes, it’s conceivable that, for some unknown reason, grades might dramatically underpredict the true qualifications of black candidates relative to white candidates. But barring at the very least a plausible mechanism (and ideally some empirical support) for this, the parsimonious explanation is that, facing simultaneously both pressure to hire black associates and a dearth of qualified (by conventional criteria) black candidates, law firms choose to relax hiring standards for black candidates relative to white candidates.
This should go without saying, but I should probably say it anyway: That there is a dearth of qualified black candidates for law firm positions doesn’t mean that blacks are inherently less qualified than whites to be lawyers (or doctors, or engineers, or whatever). Black infants, children, adolescents, and even fetuses are subjected to environments that are on average less conducive to helping them reach their full potential than are those environments in which whites are raised. I do think that blacks are at a disadvantage, but I think that the bulk of that disadvantage comes from the environments in which they spend their formative years, not from discrimination they face as adults.
LaLubu, I’ll go south of I-80 as soon as my visa application is cleared ;-) When I used to work in Deerfield and talk to people about living in the SW suburbs, people would give me a blank look. I used to joke that folks up there thought you needed a visa to go south of the Eisenhower.
Seriously, thanks for the info. I guess when you have lower overall population densities you’d be more likely to see school districts follow municipal boundaries. I used to live in Massachusetts and out there everything – sewer, water, library, mosquito abatement, schools, fire departments, parks, etc., etc. were municipal services provided by the town you lived in, or very rarely by a combination of towns. You didn’t have this hodgepodge you have around Chicago.
I had heard that a lot of this was an invention of the Illinois legislature as a reaction to the 1970 Constitution. That document was structured to limit the taxing powers of municipalities, and I was told that the plethora of separate school districts, library districts, park districts, fire protection districts, mosquito abatement districts, community college districts, etc., etc. was an invention of the legislature to get around that. But I don’t know that for a fact.
Brandon Berg:
I do think that blacks are at a disadvantage, but I think that the bulk of that disadvantage comes from the environments in which they spend their formative years, not from discrimination they face as adults.
An example; MIT accepts all black students that qualify for it. Yet the percentage of black students is lower than the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population. In this case we’re not even dealing with black adults, and they’re getting special treatment to boot. Yet their numbers stay low. It’s because of what’s led up to that point, not discrimination at that point.
LaLubu
The surrounding suburbs where I live put up a fierce fight against the construction of apartments or townhouses whenever developers propose them, because cheaper housing brings in the riffraff (y’know, like me).
Well, let’s see. I’d fight if someone tried to put high-density housing in my area. I woudn’t give a shit about the color of whoever moved in. But it would mean more traffic and congestion on the roads as well as more wear and tear on them. It would mean that the parks I pay taxes for would be more crowded and would cost more to maintain. There’d be more noise. There’d be more demand for the various municipal services and less tax money per person to pay for them. No thanks. If I want to live in a crowded area I’ll move to Chicago. Not that it doesn’t have attractions, mind you. But it’s not what I want. Where I live now is, and I like it the way it is.
Why should anyone need to move to the suburbs in order to access a good quality public school? There certainly isn’t anything inherent in a city as to why this should be so.
Because in most suburbs the average income per person and the average taxes paid per person is higher than in the city. So there’s more $ per kid to spend. There’s also generally less crime in and around the schools. Of course, I figure that the City of Chicago should put a cop in every classroom; it would improve security so the kids can concentrate on their studies, and would give the cops a live demonstration that not every kid is like the ones they end up having to deal with in the majority of their job; the vast majority of them want to learn and be decent kids. In the normal course of events it’s not the job of a city cop to deal with that kind of kid, it’s their job to deal with the assholes. I think giving them exposure to the non-assholes might benefit both the kids and the cops.
Note that I said most suburbs, not all. There are certainly suburbs (that my kids played interscholastic sports against) whose schools’ quality is equal to that of Chicago schools (that’s not a compliment, folks). Those suburbs face a catch-22. They’re mostly poor (and mostly latino or black), so their schools suck since the school funding formula in Illinois emphasizes local property taxes and the people there can’t afford to pay high taxes. So well-to-do people move to suburbs that have better schools. Now things in that suburb are even worse. We’ve actually had suburbs go bankrupt (or come damn close) because there wasn’t enough property tax and sales tax money coming in to pay for minimum municpal services. Imagine if your town was so poor that it couldn’t pay it’s own cops and the Sheriff and State Police had to take over. It’s happened here.
Now, say school funding was picked up more by the State of Illinois. Even if you worked that out so that it was tax-neutral over all (the State’s total property tax levies dropped down as much as it’s income tax levy went up), people who were middle-class and up figure that more of their taxes would go towards other people’s kids and less to their own. They don’t want to see that!
I’m actually in favor of this kind of thing, though. I think the #1 way to break the cycle of poverty and crime is not to give people money to live on and have them be dependent on the State; we need to improve education and thus their ability to independently earn their own. First, there’s the moral issue. Second, I figure that overall productivity would rise to the point that in the long run it would actually be cheaper.
That’s unsurprising. White people tend to have more of what “everyone” wants–money, nice houses, better social services, and better schools. People want to move UP, not down, in their life. Sending kids to a better school, or moving people to a safer neighborhood, will usually mean moving minorities to white neighborhoods. That’s a simple result of the current distribution.
It’s true that there are other ways to achieve technical equity. Instead of sending 500 kids from the shitty Boston schools to newton, you could send 250 kids to newton, and require that 250 kids leave the outstanding newton schools to go to Boston. But that’s politically unfeasible.
LaLubu, I’d oppose denser construction near me as well–not because I have anything against the residents of said construction, but because I don’t want to live in a dense area. I don’t want to live in a RICH dense area, either–you couldn’t pay me to live on park ave, even in a $6000/month apartment.
Sailorman said, “Sending kids to a better school, or moving people to a safer neighborhood, will usually mean moving minorities to white neighborhoods. That’s a simple result of the current distribution.”
I think practically this is true today, but I do think if we sent more white kids from suburbs to city schools the city schools would improve.
I guess the point that you are kind of missing is what this is like from the child’s perspective. It’s difficult to be the only black child or one of a few black children in a predominantly white school. These children have to deal with things that their parents didn’t have to deal with, and almost no white have to deal with.
This can have longer term negative psychological effects. I have noticed this especially with the GenXers/Hip Hop Generation (i.e. people born between 1965-1980), who were black suburban pioneers. Segregation actually sheltered their parents from the direct sting of racism, but living or going to school in predominantly white neighborhoods exposed them to racism at a young age. These are the types of things that Black parents have to contend with. It’s your job to protect your child, but how long can you protect them from racism, especially in a predominantly white context. On the other hand, you want the educational and economic opportunities the suburbs provide.
I think practically this is true today, but I do think if we sent more white kids from suburbs to city schools the city schools would improve.
Because the magic whiteness will rub off on the benighted minorities, and their brains will start to work better?
Assuming that the grossly racist interpretation of your statement isn’t accurate, the only other thing I can think of that you mean is that white parents tend to be more politically connected, wealthy, and/or committed to being interested in their kids’ schooling, and that this added constituency of troublemaking/effective parents will spur the urban schools to improvement. Which is a reasonable thesis, until you reflect on the fact that politically connected, wealthy and/or committed suburban white parents aren’t the ones who will accede to their kids being bused into the ghetto to go to school.
Well Robert, that’s just the point. But we would also see a huge change in funding, which is the primary problem right now. Funding would be distributed state wide, not just based on local proporty taxes.
Rachel, just adding to your observation about taxes and education, I believe all the nations with better public education than ours have national funding. Our system is insane.
When speaking of the current system and “separate-but-equal,” it should be noted that the old system was never equal: “colored” schools got approximately one-fourth of the funding that “white” schools got. Ending the sham of “separate-but-equal” addressed racial inequality, but poor neighborhoods, no matter what their racial mix, still have poor schools.
Race-based busing was an attempt to solve a class problem indirectly, but middle-class black kids don’t get bussed to poor schools, and poor white kids don’t get bussed to better schools, and, most importantly, the schools that need more resources still don’t get them. Which sucks for everyone.
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