Are We Segregated?

 Bob Somerby has griped about descriptions of various aspects of our society as "segregated".   He's not as old as I am, but we share a memory of the civil rights movement which fought "segregation".  So how can the movement be considered victorious, and the US still have segregation?

The answer is obvious--the word "segregation" now has multiple meanings.  Back in the day it meant legal segregation, usually the result of statutes or legal contracts, but always enforced by both the police and sheriffs and by informal community pressures.  That segregation was ended by the victories of the civil rights movement.

Today "segregation" means essentially disparate outcomes: residential areas, schools, or institutions which by some measure are predominately one ethnic/racial group or which don't have appropriate representation of other ethnic/racial groups; the group usually being white or black.

By changing means current day liberals are, in my humble opinion, changing the measuring stick, minimizing the gains of the past and accentuating the problems of the present. 

The Pull of the Familiar, the Push of the Foreign

Both the Post and Times  had Sunday articles discussing the Asian American community in Atlanta. The Post had a map showing its recent growth, which was concentrated in certain areas.

What struck me was the likelihood that the concentration mostly reflected the choice of the immigrants, the desire to live in areas with people with whom you might share something.  (Since "Asian-American" covers some 20 countries or so, you might not be able to speak your neighbor's language, but presumably you might have neighbors more accepting of you than in a 95 percent white, or 95 percent black, community.)  

It's always hard to untangle the factors behind residential concentrations (I almost wrote "segregation" but concentration is the better term.)  All other things being equal, a person might decide where to live based on the likelihood of finding people with similar backgrounds, tastes, opinions, values, or based on the fear of having to deal with strangers. 

Then moving from the viewpoint of the person moving into a residence to the viewpoints of the potential neighbors you bring up other factors.  I'd venture that in most cases in today's America the weight of the emotion involved is heavier on the side of the mover, than on the side of the neighbors.

Back in the day we had "lily-white" areas, so someone moving in of a different race could cause the potential neighbors to have a lot of emotion.  I don't think we have "lily-white" areas much these days, so there's less emotion.  Where you get emotion is NIMBYism, questions of zoning in particular.

Diversity Now and Then

I was struck by this tweet the other day:

The suburbs are actually a lot more diverse than NIMBY-in-Chief Trump seems to realize. NIMBYism is still partly about racism, but to an increasing degree it's about classism too.https://t.co/yxOeDJIpW7

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) July 29, 2020

Back in the 1950's and 60's suburbs were often seen as white, because the narrative was evil realtors were using "block-busting" tactics to get whites to sell their city homes for low dollars and flee to the suburbs while they turned around and sold the homes to blacks for high dollars.

With that narrative, anyone moving to the suburbs was "white", regardless of whether they were moving from a formerly Italian, Polish, Jewish, Irish, or whatever neighborhood.  With a different narrative we could have seen the suburbs as diversifying since they were, I believe, the site of mixing of ethnicities into "white Americans". 

But suburbs weren't "integrated", in the terms used then.  A number of prominent blacks have in their history the memory of being the "first" black family on the block. 

These days we say the suburbs aren't "diverse", by which we tend to mean they're segregated by class--typically a subdivision has only a limited range of prices, meaning it is affordable to a group of families limited by their income.  I think in most areas the middle income suburbs are integrated--they've a small number of "minority" families living in them, but not a great diversity.  At least in the DC area, that description might apply to the black-majority neighborhoods in Prince Georges, or the smaller Hispanic, Korean, or other ethnicity areas scattered around the Beltway.

The rule seems to be, if you have the money, groups with the greater feeling of identity (often more recent immigrants) will tend to buy in the same area, while a minority will go elsewhere. If you don't have any feeling of ethnic/racial identity, you buy wherever, usually based on the school system if you have or are going to have children.

Race Makes Me Crazy

The NYTimes had an article on LA and homelessness and blacks today.  It had a graphic with a heading that caught my eye.  The closest I can find in the online version is this sentence: "These maps show the loss of majority-black neighborhoods in Los Angeles County over the last 50 years."

Why did it make me crazy, at least most discombobulated than usual?

In the past the Times has run articles discussing the integration/segregation of our cities.

As a good liberal, I know integration is good and segregation is bad.

But I also take from the Times piece today that the "loss of majority-black neighborhoods" is bad.

So I'm left with two competing ideas.

To use a metaphor, it's like cooking, or baking.  Do you want a real smooth batter with no lumps of flour or do you want a fruit cake composed entirely of lumps?  I don't know, and that's why I'm crazy today.

Any how:  Merry Christmas. 

Housing Segregation: Is Government Tail or Dog?

TaNehisi Coates has popularized some academic research showing how geographically segregated America is.  Sometimes the assertion is that white-dominated government programs have enforced and propagated segregated housing. 

The assertion is true.  But it's also incomplete.

Emily Badger in the Post reports on"...new research,[studying]  how the arrival of blacks in 10 northern cities at the time influenced white behavior. Over the course of the first three decades after the turn of the century, coinciding with the start of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, this pattern accelerated: As blacks arrived in northern neighborhoods, more whites left. By the 1920s, there were more than three white departures for every black arrival."

These patterns mostly preceded formal and legal patterns (restrictive covenants, redlining).

The Post article doesn't mention it, but there's also the phenomena of chain migration leading to ethnic neighborhoods.  We can see that in American history as Irish, Italians, East European Jews,  Germans, each settled in distinct neighborhoods.  I suspect that's the result of mixed forces: the comfort and familiarity of living close to others from the same country, sometimes the same town and the economics of buying and selling--the newcomer is willing to pay higher prices (usually in the form of crowding) for housing than other potential buyers, so you get a force which leads to segregation.  (See Schelling and his general theory of tipping.) 

What the economist doesn't throw into the mix, at least as I remember the essay which is 45 years old now, is the emotions generated by attachments to home and fear of the "other".  Nor does he address the effects of a general level of bias.   

So, in my mind, we have a vicious circle which can start relatively innocently, is propelled by economic logic, and becomes intermixed with emotion and bias, leading finally to the erection of legal and formal barriers.  We saw the extreme case of that in South Africa in the days of apartheid, and in Nazi Germany.

So my answer to the question asked in the title: government is often, at least in the US, more the tail than the dog.  

The next question is: can you make government the dog and reverse the vicious circle? That's what we've been trying, fitfully, off and on since the New Deal.