Census: Segregation hits 100-year lows in most American metro areas

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2010/1214/Census-Segregation-hits-100-year-lows-in-most-American-metro-areas

by cwan • 16 years ago

17 21 16 years ago

SMrF• 16 years ago

I found this graph a while ago. It illustrates the segregation in Chicago:

http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots

I moved from Arizona to Chicago a few years ago. While Arizona was far from perfect, I still find the segregation here shocking. While standing on a platform waiting for an El train, it is possible to determine which people will get on which train line based on the color of their skin.

Edit:

Another anecdote, but interesting to me. My wife and mother teach at two different "urban" schools on the south side. There are no white students at either school. My mom's school is 99% black and my wife's school is 95% Hispanic. I know it's a common situation but it still just blows my mind.

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

I wish news articles would stop conflating segregation with racial imbalance. The former is but one possible cause for the latter.

"Racial imbalance is not segregation. Although presently observed racial imbalance might result from de jure segregation, racial imbalance can also result from any number of innocent private decisions, including voluntary housing choices." -- Clarence Thomas

krschultz3• 16 years ago

The author simply doesn't know what segregation was at all. If all the black people lived in one neighborhood and all the white in another, and they never crossed, why would you segregate bathrooms? And restaurants? And water fountains? And schools? And busses?

Housing was already integrated and the services were segregated on skin color. That was one of the quantifiable objections to segregating school other than the obvious moral reasons - the students had to walk or bus further to school when there was a perfectly good building closer to their homes reserved for white people. That's segregation.

Real estate agents preventing black people from buying near whites was called Blockbusting, and was different.

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

Real estate agents preventing black people from buying near whites was called Blockbusting, and was different.

You are thinking of redlining and steering. Blockbusting was a form of fraud/extortion preying on racist homeowners:

Real estate agent: "Hey homeowner, blacks are moving into the neighborhood."

Homeowner: "I hate blacks! I'll sell my house at below market rates to get away from them!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

It's interesting to me that segregation of Asians isn't mentioned. By my own observation (which may obviously be flawed), the integration of Asians outside of urban Chinatown-like areas is pretty much complete.

In particular, Americans of Chinese ancestry (with which I'm more familiar, since my wife came from China) can be found anywhere in suburbia.

maxklein3• 16 years ago

I'm not sure how relevant that is. The asian-american percentage is quite small, and is relatively modern. There are a lot few traditional places for asians to go to, as there are for blacks, for example.

It's like saying - what's the segregation level of romanian-americans. Black people, jewish people, hispanics have more traditional places where there are already large concentrations, and where they are more likely to move to, leading to the geographical racial imbalance.

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

is relatively modern

I don't know how true that is. In the middle of the 19th century, piles of Chinese were used as low-cost labor to build the railroads. (And were, generally, treated far worse than the black slaves because the latter were property assets that needed to be preserved, whereas Chinese men could still be imported and paid a subsistence wage)

A century ago, Americans were arguing about the Chinese "immigration problem". Governments were passing laws preventing them from competing with native-born (white?) Americans for jobs, so great was their influx perceived to be.

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

> By my own observation (which may obviously be flawed), the integration of Asians outside of urban Chinatown-like areas is pretty much complete.

That's because there are so few of them in most areas (i.e., outside those Chinatown-like areas you mention) that they're forced to integrate. The reason blacks and Hispanics are segregated is because they're minorities that are big enough to form their own communities. If blacks made up 1% of the population, they'd have integrated a long time ago.

pchristensen2• 16 years ago

Asian immigrants and especially Asian-americans have higher IQs and incomes than American whites. They can afford to go anywhere they want, while generally poorer black or Hispanic people get the neighborhoods no one wants.

charlesju• 16 years ago

lol, as an Asian American myself, while thankful for your comment, I'm sure that's all sorts of wrong.

krschultz3• 16 years ago

Most historians won't compare blacks and native americans to "voluntary minorities".

The bulk of blacks in America today are descendant from people who were taken here involuntarily and have had a completely different history up until about 1970 than any other minority. Native Americans have their own history obviously that is similiarily oppressed.

Compare that to someone from Asia or South/Latin America or Mexico who came here for largely the same reasons as the Europeans did in the 1700s and 1800s - better job prospects or for some reason a better life in America. That self selects who comes a lot more than most people realize.

Obviously most people were born here and are not immigrants, but we are largely descendent from immigrants and that shapes our views. If you grow up with your family story being praise about how much better life is now than in the old country, wouldn't that be a whole lot different than growing up and your family story being about how you were kidnapped, dragged here, enslaved, and then discriminated against for 115 years after you were no longer slaves?

kingkawn• 16 years ago

We've finally re-achieved the pinnacles of 1910.

untamedmedley• 16 years ago

On a related note:

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/mens-lives/200810/devin-frie...

This article, while somewhat old, does a great job of discussing just how shallow that 100-year "achievement" really is. We may live near each other, but that doesn't mean we interact in non-superficial ways.

krschultz3• 16 years ago

Journalists misuse (and overuse) the word "exponential" more than any other. As in:

"Yet growing residential proximity between whites and blacks also contains the potential for exponential progress in bridging America's long-standing racial divide, especially as families from different racial backgrounds share schools and grocery stores." (emphasis mine)

Maybe there is potential for an improvement in the pace of reducing that divide, but I highly doubt it can be described as exponential.

Though I guess that is a small nitpick. Probably a bigger one is that in their words it is a "complicated story with lots of nuances" that they boil down at the end to simply gerrymandering congressional districts and how it will change the balance of Democrats/Republicans. I'm sick of every news story coming down to politics, and by politics I mean electioneering.

jsm386• 16 years ago

Eric Fisher who also produced the tourists/locals photo maps has some pretty dramatic visualizations of racial distribution in various metro areas: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4981444199/in/set-721...

grav1tas• 16 years ago

While I can see why Gerrymandering is/was necessary to maintain the minority voice in regions, has it become less socially relevant to do so? Does anybody have an idea when Gerrymandering based on geographic location will "end" because people are too well integrate? Not like that may be any time soon, but it will probably be more the case than not sometime in the future. I guess we're always looking for reasons to redraw the lines in favor of our parties...and we'll use any reason to do so.

While I see it as a necessary evil in some cases, by and large, Gerrymandering drives me insane.

harry• 16 years ago

FWIW - the feds restructured how ethnicity is defined for the 2010 census. Now if you have multiple ethnicities you are reported as such - before it was only what you considered your primary race. This will balloon diversity figures in formerly non-diverse areas. I expect to see many media-filler articles such as this once the full census report is published.

There's some additional depth to how the Hispanic grouping is classified. Essentially if you self report any Hispanic lineage you are considered a primarily Hispanic individual.

Census: Segregation hits 100-year lows in most American metro areas

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