How Residential Mobility Patterns Perpetuate Segregation

Could young adults at their most experimental phase disrupt the cycle of segregation?

Britton did pull out one promising finding from an otherwise bleak report: Blacks and Hispanics who grew up in integrated neighborhoods later lived as adults in integrated neighborhoods, too, even after moving long-distance. That suggests at least a "bulwark against re-segregation," Britton says. "But," he adds, "it doesn’t point to a lot of reasons for optimism about major declines in residential segregation – particularly between blacks and whites, and even increasingly between Latinos and whites – over the next couple of decades."

There is one other way to interpret these findings: They suggest that fair-housing measures that enable black and Hispanic families to live in more integrated neighborhoods are all the more important because they have such long-term consequences. Those neighborhoods will likely impact not only the minority families living there, but also the types of neighborhoods their children grow up to live in. If there is a bright spot in this research, it is that integration may perpetuate itself in much the same way that segregation does.

Kenneth B. Clark

The works of Kenneth B. Clark

Prejudice and Your Child (1955)
King, Malcolm, Baldwin: Three Interviews (1963)
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965)
Social and Economic Implications of Integration in Public Schools (1965)
The Negro American (1966, with Talcott Parsons)
A Relevant War Against Poverty (1969)
Crisis in Urban Education (1971)
A Possible Reality (1972)
Pathos of Power (1975)

Unemployment rates by state and race, 2012Q4

http://www.epi.org/chart/unemployment-rates-state-race-2012q4/?view=embed-unemployment-map-2012q4

Promoting Equity through the Practice of Health Impact Assessment

Only 8 percent of African Americans live in a census tract with a supermarket, compared to 31 percent of whites.

In 30 years, people of color will constitute a majority of the U.S. population.


http://www.policylink.org/atf/cf/%7B97c6d565-bb43-406d-a6d5-eca3bbf35af0%7D/PROMOTINGEQUITYHIA_FINAL.PDF

bell hooks on black farmers and racial politics

http://sistahvegan.com/2009/10/03/bell-hooks-on-black-farmers-and-racial-politics/

Series of Brooklyn Billboards Put Racial Inequity on Display

Billboards are everywhere in New York City. They’re on subway trains and in stations, and on top of and inside taxis. But few, if any, have been anything like a series of anonymous billboards that have popped up on bus shelters in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. They’re not selling anything but a delcaration: that racism still exists.

That’s also the name of the appropriately titled campaign. At least half a dozen billboard sites have sprung up around the neighborhood since August, with each month dedicated to highlighting racial disparities that impact black people in America. So far, the billboards have touched on topics ranging from the entertainment industry, education, fast food, smoking, policing, and black wealth. Each month’s billboard is also accompanied by an detailed post on Tumblr that provides background information, news articles, studies, charts, and statistics to back up each claim.

A brief statement on the Tumblr page says, in part, that “RISE is a proejct designed to illuminate some of the ways in which racism operates in this country.” But who’s behind the project remains a mystery.

For the time being, the project seems dedicated to its anonymity. Both the Tumblr page and the billboards themselves are devoid of any contact information. Similarly, the private advertising company that’s contracted by New York City’s transit agency to host advertisments and billboards said that it does not give out information about who paid for the advertisements.

Even local activists who spend their time dedicated to working on racial justice issues can’t figure out who’s behind the billboards. Nonetheless, they’re intrigued by the campaign. This month’s billboard is dedicated to Stop-and-Frisk, the controversial NYPD tactic that’s drawn national criticism for its disproportionate impact on black and Latino men. The billboard’s provactive text reads, “Don’t want to get stopped by the NYPD? Stop being black.” On the heels of New York City’s 2013 mayoral race and the prominent role that critics of Stop-and-Frisk have taken in city politics, the billboards have become a meaningful part of local discussion.

“Bed-Stuy, and Brooklyn in general, is going through a very profound transformation and we gotta put that in context,” says Kali Akuno, an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s New York chapter, referencing the gentrification that’s drastically altered the borough’s demographics over at least the past ten years. “For many of the young yuppies and buppies, they see the police playing a positive role and trying to engage in a race neutral dialouge.

“What the billboard is doing is kinda opening up and exploding this myth that [stop-and-frisk] is taking place in a race neutral light — it’s making people confront it in a very real way.”

Akuno added, “I applaud the effort. If the intent was to shake things up, I think they did their job.”

It’s no accident that of all of New York City’s neighborhoods, the billboards have targeted this one. A historically black neighborhood, Bed-Stuy has become one of the most contested spaces in New York City. A 2012 study from the Fordham Institute found that Brooklyn is home to 25 of the country’s most rapidly gentrifying zip codes. That’s created a stark contrast between those in the neighborhood who have more upward social and economic mobility than others. Several high profile media accounts have recently noted Bed Stuy’s so-called “hip” transformation and “resurgence”, but the borough’s medium per capita income in 2009 was just $23,000, which was $10,000 below the national average.

The content of the billboard’s messaging may not exactly be news for most residents, but the presentation has nonetheless been powerful.

”I think it’s a different kind of communication than I think people are used to in this neighborhood,” says Mark Winston Griffith, the executive director of Brooklyn Movement Center, a community organizing group based in Bed-Stuy. “It tackles race very directly, even the way it has the conversation with an infographic.”

Despite the billboard’s powerful messaging, questions still remain.

“As someone who’s paid for billboards before, I know there was a significant cost to [the project], one that was clearly bankrolled and where no one claimed credit for it,” says Griffith. “All those different elements are what makes it really interesting.”

http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/01/bed_stuy_billboards.html

Rollin Detroit: Gangs, drug dealers, decline of the economy


Once upon a time, Detroit was the heart of the American Dream. Good jobs, big cars, and the world's most profitable companies placed the city at the heart of the global economy. But as this empire of cars began to crumble and the jobs evaporated, Detroit became the crime capital of America, and a new business, illegal drugs, took over the economy. Now the city lies in shambles: Detroit is the poorest and most violent major city in America. The heart of the American Dream has been shattered. From corrupt narcotics cop Henry Marzett to the infamous Young Boys Inc, White Boy Rick, and the Best Friends Murder for Hire gang: see the Kingpins and Killers that called Detroit home and became the Henry Fords and Lee Iacoccas of a new generation. What happens when the Ceo's and Politicians fail in their plans? It's called DETROIT.

Lose purpose, focus, no engagement in an institution, high school, college, unemployed.

Change your culture. Change your neighborhood. Because when you go back, you go back to the same dirt. Morale in the city is very low.

"Everyone is desperate."

Snowball effect of there not being a real economy in the city. By the time they're 19, they've already ruined their lives.

People need to build Detroit, not tear it down anymore.

The Origins of the urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, is the first book by historian and Detroit native Thomas J. Sugrue in which he examines the role race, housing and job discrimination played in the decline of Detroit. Sugrue argues that the decline of Detroit began long before the 1967 race riot. Sugrue argues that institutionalized and often legalized racism resulted in sharply limited opportunities for Detroit blacks for most of the twentieth century.

Brooklyn the Game

rooklyn: The Game will allow people to explore these questions by using their smartphones to tour Downtown Brooklyn, one of New York City’s most rapidly changing neighborhoods. The game turns the city into an interactive learning space while engaging a wide variety of constituencies in virtual and real world conversations about development policy and projects.

Players start by downloading the app and picking a tour such as Brooklyn Undergrounds: From Hip Hop to Abolitionism, A Great Bargain: Shopping Then and Now, or Designing Downtowns: Architecture an Urban Planning. The game’s augmented reality feature allows them to juxtapose the past, present, and future of individual sites by bringing together an array of historic and contemporary materials including images, photographs, film footage, and interview clips. Players travel through layers of time while standing in the actual built environment, giving them a fresh and nuanced perspective on neighborhood change.

The game is also fun and competitive. By answering questions and finding clues, players receive discounts at local businesses, discover “geotags” on buildings that provide information about developer subsidies and public benefit, and are rewarded for sharing their opinions through online social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

Brooklyn: The Game is a companion project to the feature documentary My Brooklyn. Together, these products are parts of a single package that will provide audiences with much-needed tools for understanding issues of race, class, and neighborhood change in historical context.

http://www.brooklynthegame.com/

The Racialization of Criminality and the Criminalization of Race

Even after the (partial) abolition of slavery, African-Americans were subject to judicial and extra-judicial execution, disproportionate punishment for an expanding range of offenses outlined by the black codes and the later Jim Crow Laws, and unpaid work in a convict leasing system that was, by some accounts, “worse than slavery.”

Angela Davis, Joy James and others have argued that the Thirteenth Amendment did not completely abolish slavery but rather reinscribed it within the US penal system by exempting convicted criminals from protection against slavery and allowing for the hyper-incarceration of African-Americans.

Mapping Diversity and Segregation in the USA

This website is designed to help you explore patterns of racial composition in major US metropolitan areas and individual states.

http://mixedmetro.us/

Place, Not Race, May Better Explain America's Health Disparities

Place, Not Race, May Better Explain America's Health Disparities

Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities

Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds
By SAM ROBERTS

William H. Frey, the chief demographer at the Brookings Institution, cautioned that “the report sends a potentially harmful message that black-white residential separation is no longer a priority issue in this country.

“While recent modest declines in black segregation levels are welcome, the 2010 census shows that the average black resident still lives in a neighborhood that is 45 percent black and 36 percent white,” he said. “At the same time, the average white lives in a neighborhood that is 78 percent white and 7 percent black. Black segregation levels are even higher for children, signaling the continued separation of black and white families across communities with different levels of resources available for schools and other services important for nurturing the next generation.”

John R. Logan, a Brown sociologist, said: “If we want to understand the long-term trends in segregation, we have to be aware both of the progress and of the resistance to change. We are far from the ‘end of segregation.’ ”

Still, Professors Glaeser and Vigdor found that only 20 percent of blacks now live in “ghetto” neighborhoods where 80 percent of the population or more is black, compared with nearly 50 percent who lived in similar neighborhoods a half-century ago.

The findings in the report, titled “The End of the Segregated Century,” for the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership did not denigrate decades of desegregation efforts. In fact, the authors said, “there is every reason to relish the fact that there is more freedom in housing today than 50 years ago and to applaud those who fought to create the change.” But they concluded that housing desegregation was not a magic bullet in providing equal opportunity.

“Residential segregation has declined pervasively, as ghettos depopulate and the nation’s population center shifts toward the less segregated Sun Belt,” Professors Glaeser and Vigdor wrote. “At the same time, there has been only limited progress in closing achievement and employment gaps between blacks and whites.”

The study’s definition of neighborhood was borrowed from the census: a tract that is home to 1,500 to 7,500 people. The analysis relied on the two most common segregation indexes: dissimilarity, or the proportion of individuals of either group that would have to switch neighborhoods to achieve perfect integration, and isolation, which measures neighborhoods where the share of the population of one group surpasses the citywide average.

By the dissimilarity index, Dallas and Houston are the least segregated big cities.

Los Angeles fared best on the isolation index.

Among cities with the largest black population, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis ranked highest in the dissimilarity index. Among metropolitan areas, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia did.

Since 1960, the share of blacks living in neighborhoods where they account for a minority of the population has risen to 59 percent from 30 percent.

“While it may be tempting to see the overwhelmingly white nature of many suburbs as evidence of stagnation or stasis, the presence of even modest numbers of African-Americans in suburbs demonstrates the remarkable change in American society,” the study said. “Indeed, measured by dissimilarity indices, suburbs are often among the most integrated parts of America.”

Only 424 of the nation’s 72,531 census tracts recorded no black residents. More than half were either in rural areas or in metropolitan regions where blacks account for less than 1 percent of the population. Every census tract in Connecticut, Maryland and New Hampshire recorded at least one black resident.

Awakening to Race Individualism and Social Consciousness in America

Awakening to Race Individualism and Social Consciousness in America

Jack Turner

To Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Ellison, and Baldwin, personal responsibility entailed at minimum (1) a refusal to be complicit in injustice, (2) a commitment to examine oneself for complicity, and (3) a willingness to overcome whatever complicity
one finds. Their sense of what counted as complicity was expansive:
one is complicit in injustice insofar as one authorizes it politically or enables
it socially or economically. On the basis of this idea of responsibility,
Emerson and Thoreau determined that they had to act against
racial slavery even though it took them away from the intellectual pursuits
they most loved. On the basis of this idea of responsibility, Douglass
exhorted American citizens after the Civil War to provide emancipated
slaves with the education and land they needed to lead free and
self- reliant lives. On the basis of this idea of responsibility, Ellison and
Baldwin called on white citizens to face up to the ways they benefi t from
both de jure and de facto white supremacy and to work for racial equality
not only in legal form but also in social and economic substance.

The civic project of “awakening to race” therefore
promises not only a morally reformed life, but also a keener sense of reality.
“We are capable of bearing a great burden,” Baldwin declares in
The Fire Next Time (1963), “once we discover that that burden is reality
and arrive where reality is.”13 The book also answers a question for
citizens: why should I be conscious of race and spend time and energy
eradicating racial injustice? The book responds: only by being conscious
of race can you be truly conscious of yourself and your world, and only
by working to overcome racial injustice can you ensure that you are not
complicit in it.

In 2009, African Americans were 80 percent more likely than white
Americans to be unemployed and 175 percent more likely to live in poverty.
Latinos were 38 percent more likely than whites to be unemployed
and 169 percent more likely to live in poverty.14 For every dollar of income
earned by white Americans, African Americans earned 60 cents
and Latinos 70 cents.15 For every dollar of net worth possessed by whites,
African Americans had 10 cents and Latinos 12 cents.16

In a 2008 National Election Study, 60 percent
of white respondents, 61 percent of Latino respondents, and 52 percent
of black respondents agreed that “it’s really a matter of some people not
trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just
as well off as whites.” Yet only 37 percent of white respondents—versus
51 percent of Latino respondents and 63 percent of black respondents—
agreed that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions
that make it diffi cult for blacks to work their way out of the lower
class.”17 This division in public opinion refl ects a distinctive “agencyversus-
structure debate” in American racial politics.18 Whereas white respondents
tend to see racial inequality as primarily the result of insuffi -
cient effort by African Americans (and presumably Latinos), blacks and
Latinos tend to see it as resulting from a combination of insuffi cient effort
and historical racial bias.19

Agency and structure are mutually constitutive rather than mutually
exclusive.20

STRUCTURAL RACISM AND COMMUNITY BUILDING

-How is it that a nation legally committed to equal opportunity for all—
regardless of race, creed, national origin, or gender—continually reproduces
patterns of racial inequality?

-Why, in the world’s wealthiest country, is there such enduring poverty among
people of color?

-How is it that in our open, participatory democracy, racial minorities are still
underrepresented in positions of power and decision making?

Without fully accounting for the historical and ongoing ways in which racial dynamics produce inequities between whites and people of color, the social justice and antipoverty field risks pursuing strategies that are misguided, incomplete, or inappropriate to the challenge.

The statistical portrait of the American population broken out by race reveals persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality of life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.

The statistical portrait of the American population broken out by race reveals persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality of life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.

The correlation between race and well-being in America remains
powerful.

Beginning with the expropriation of Native American lands, a racialized system of power and privilege developed and white dominance became the national common sense, opening the door to the enslavement of Africans, the taking of Mexican lands, and the limits set on Asian immigrants (8).

Over time, beliefs and practices about
power and privilege were woven into
national legal and political doctrine.
While committing to principles of
freedom, opportunity, and democracy,
America found ways to justify slavery,
for example, by defining Africans as nonhuman. This made it possible to deny
Africans rights and freedoms granted
to “all men” who were “created equal.”
Only when white Southerners wanted
to increase their political power in the
legislature did they advocate to upgrade
Africans’ legal status to three-fifths of a
human being. Thus, from the earliest
moments in our history, racial group
identities granted access to resources and
power to those who were “white” while
excluding those who were “other” legally,
politically, and socially.

Racism in twenty-first century America is harder to see than its previous incarnations because the most overt and legally sanctioned forms of racial discrimination have been eliminated. Nonetheless, subtler racialized patterns in policies and practices permeate the political, economic, and sociocultural structures of America in ways that generate differences in well-being between people of color and whites. These dynamics work to maintain the existing racial hierarchy even as they adapt with the times or accommodate new racial and ethnic groups. This contemporary manifestation of racism in America can be called “structural racism (9).”

White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks (18).

. . . . whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and
average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as
work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage . . . is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all.”
-Peggy MacIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the In

“. . . a child born in the bottom 10
percent of families ranked by income
has a 31 percent chance of ending
up there as an adult and a 51 percent
chance of ending up in the bottom
20 percent, while one born in the top
10 percent has a 30 percent chance
of staying there.”

Psychological studies of African American adolescents have demonstrated that consistent negative imaging contributes to negative self-acceptance and mental health problems (22).

Moreover, the attitudes that manifest
themselves at the individual level can
also aggregate all the way up into a
national consensus about race that,
in turn, influences policies, practices,
and representations. Experimental
studies of the effects of news stories
on the public suggest that television
images have the potential to catalyze
and reinforce opinions about public
policies that contribute to racially disparate outcomes: “A mere five-second exposure to a
mug shot of African American and Hispanic youth offenders [in a 15-minute newscast]
raises levels of fear among viewers, increases support for ‘get tough’ crime policies, and
promotes racial stereotyping.”


---EDUCATION---
Public education is probably the national system that holds the greatest potential for reducing racial inequities over time.

Looking closely at specific school districts reveals even greater inequities in investments. In the predominately white school district of Manhasset, just outside New York City, students receive twice as many resources as their predominately black and Latino counterparts in or close to New York City’s urban core (28).

RACIAL EQUITY ITSELF NEEDS TO BE A PRIORITY OBJECTIVE OF ANYONE COMMITTED TO PROMOTING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL JUSTICE.

The implication for action is that social change leaders must adopt an explicitly raceconscious approach to their work: they must factor race into their analysis of the causes of the problems they are addressing, and they must factor race into their strategies to promote change and equity.


Source