Census: Segregation hits 100-year lows in most American metro areas
csmonitor.com
csmonitor.com
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.
"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
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.
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!"
"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.
In particular, Americans of Chinese ancestry (with which I'm more familiar, since my wife came from China) can be found anywhere in suburbia.
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.
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.
The previous poster's comment that black descendants of slaves may have a different point from modern economic immigrants - many chinese immigrants on the west coast are the descendants of similarly unfortunate C19 workers.
Source here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_American_history
Even in the area with a large % of chinese americans, the percentage hovers around 1%. Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_Population_USA.jpg
They don't form a large population. It's a very small population that did not have much of a chance to form large ghettos. Chinatowns could be formed (they are much smaller), and they WERE formed.
The whole premise of this argumentation is wrong. First, the population is very low, and secondly, chinatowns do exist everywhere.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence - "Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests performed in the US have consistently demonstrated a significant degree of variation between different racial groups, with the average score of the African American population being significantly lower—and that of the Asian American population being higher—than that of the White American population."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_American - "As of 2008, Asian American households had the highest median income at $65,637; however, 11.8 percent of Asians were in poverty in 2004, higher than the 8.6 percent rate for non-Hispanic whites.[8] Much of this poverty is concentrated in ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns in the cities[38] Census figures also show that a white male with a college diploma earns in excess of $66,000 a year, far more than similarly educated Asian men who earned more than $52,000 a year.[39] Asians however are more likely to complete higher education particularly and are the highest group by percentage with graduate degrees"
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?
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.
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.
While I see it as a necessary evil in some cases, by and large, Gerrymandering drives me insane.