Still Separate And Unequal

By Paul Street - ZNet
Article Dated 8/9/2002
Posted on The Black World Today
http://athena.tbwt.com/content/article.asp?articleid=1339

The Dream Gone Mainstream

     In the eyes of many white Americans, there was more than a hint of dangerous radicalism in the civil rights leader Martin Luther King's 1960s claim that "integration is the ultimate goal of our community." Many white eyebrows raised and some white fists clenched when black civil rights activists were heard expressing faith in what civil rights activist John Lewis called "the possibilities of one America, one community, one community, one house, one family." Much of the nation felt uneasy about the civil rights movement's call for a color-blind "Promised Land" in which "all God's children," would live together in "a beloved community."

     More than 35 years later, these words no longer carry the weight of perceived extremism or naïve utopian idealism in the US. The core sentiment they express has gone mainstream, becoming the official and publicly declared commitment of the nation's business, educational, media and political establishments in a time when US officials refer to the US as what US NATO Ambassador R. Nicholas Burns recently called "the world's leading multiracial democracy."

     For a considerable portion of whites in the US, black-white integration is more than an accepted ideal. It is also, many believe, an accomplished reality, reflected in the elimination of discriminatory laws and barriers, the high visibility of African-American personalities like Michael Jordan and Colin Powell, and the official playing of King's "I Have A Dream" speech on television screens and in schoolrooms across the nation.

The View From Chicago
A Racial Tour

     The lived reality of race in America, alas, is rather different than the official and public ideal, something that would obvious to an even moderately race-sensitive traveler on a sociological tour in and around Chicago, the first northern metropolis to which King brought his anti-segregation Freedom Movement in 1966. Such a tour might begin on State Street in the city's famous downtown, known as "the Loop" at the beginning of the workday. There one could observe a steady stream of overcrowded busses disgorge thousands of nearly all-black and mostly low-rung employees from very predominantly black and poor neighborhoods on the city's South Side, home to the largest contiguous concentration of African-Americans in the US.

     The tour could proceed westward through the city's bustling, world-class downtown. It would pass droves of well-dressed and very predominantly white commuters hurrying to professional positions from state-of-the-art commuter rail stations, where they will board to return to lush homes in predominantly white bedroom communities on the outer edges of the metropolis.

     From here the tour could push further west on Madison Avenue, past the stadium that Michael Jordan built (the United Center) and into the heart of desperately impoverished West Side neighborhoods like North Lawndale and West and East Garfield. There shocking numbers and percentages of the residents are unemployed, attend and drop out from substandard schools, struggle to find affordable homes in dilapidated tenements and rotting Chicago Housing Authority projects, and possess criminal records. The endemic stress, disappointment, and danger of inner-city life is etched on the faces of the many of the community's residents, nearly all of whom are black.

     The tour could then head out to the western suburbs of Naperveille or Wheaton, where median homes sells for $254, 200 and $222, 100, respectively, and where children are expected to graduate to good universities rather than to prisons. In both of these suburban communities, just 3 out of every 100 faces are black and more than 85 of the faces are white.

Measuring Segregation

     The not-so-color blind picture painted by such a tour is based on social realities that are more than skin deep, so speak. Recent work by academic researchers at the State University of New York-Albany, Northern Illinois University (NIU), and Roosevelt University (Chicago) shows that African-Americans continue to live in extreme concentrated isolation from other racial and ethnic groups in and around Chicago.

     The researchers' central analytical tool is what they call the Index of Dissimilarity, a measure of the extent to which two groups live near or apart from one another. The Index ranges from a score of 0 if two groups are evenly spread across a region or municipality, to 100 if they are completely separated. It measures the extent to which two groups inhabit different areas of a community. The Index can be interpreted as the fraction of members of any race group that would have to switch areas to achieve an even racial distribution citywide.

     Based on recent census data, the researchers made a larger number of darkly disturbing determinations on race and residence in and around Chicago:

Why Place Matters

     An outside observer sympathetic to black equality but unfamiliar with the spatial distribution of social and economic opportunity in modern America might well ask, "so what?" Contrary to the Supreme Court's reasoning in its famous Brown v Board of Education (1954) decision, racial separation is not inherently racial inequality. There is no absolute or inviolable law of social and historical development mandating that African-Americans could not thrive while living in essentially separate communities.

     In actually existing society, however, crucial social and economic opportunities simply are not distributed evenly across and between space and community. Between 1991 and 2000, for example, 98 percent of job growth in the Chicago metropolitan area took place in the predominantly white suburbs and not in the City, which houses two-thirds of the area's African-Americans.

     Chicago's 19 disproportionately black zip codes all lost jobs during the 1990s, a decade that the Chicago Tribune recently heralded as one of remarkable prosperity for the city. Nobody has stated the core problem posed by residential segregation of African-Americans more concisely than University of Pennsylvania sociologist Douglas S. Massey, who notes that:

     Housing markets are especially important because they distribute much more than a place to live; they also distribute any good or resource that is correlated with where one lives.

     Housing markets don't just distribute dwellings, they also distribute education, employment, safety, insurance rates, services, and wealth in the form of home equity; they also determine the level of exposure to crime and drugs, and the peer groups that one's children experience. If one group of people is denied full access to urban housing markets because of the color of their skin, then they are systematically denied full access to the full range of benefits in urban society.

     It should come as little surprise, then, that, with no special craving for white neighbors, African-Americans overwhelmingly prefer to live in racially mixed communities. Contrary to much self-satisfied white opinion, black segregation is not the result of free black choice and preference.

     It is more significantly the consequence of persistent discrimination in the real estate and home-lending industries. Exclusionary zoning, practiced by many Chicago suburbs, prohibits the development of affordable housing in communities that tend to offer the most in terms of basic social and economic opportunity.

A National Problem

     While the Chicago region is the fourth most racially segregated metropolitan area in the nation, residential separation by race remains a strong national characteristic.

     According to exhaustive reports produced by John Logan and colleagues at the Lewis Mumford Center ( www.albany.edu/mumford/census) , "the average white person in metropolitan America lives in a neighborhood that is 80% white and only 7% black." A "typical black individual," they find, "lives in a neighborhood that is only 33% white and as much as 51% black. Residential segregation remains high in cities and suburbs around the country."

     Also still high are black-white socioeconomic inequality and the related wealth and income gap between disproportionately black central cities and disproportionately white suburbs - what the Mumford Center calls "the suburban advantage."

     A typical example is the city of Rochester, New York, and the country of Monroe in which it is located. While the county's population is more diverse than it was 20 years ago, 84 percent of the county's African-Americans live in the city; the suburbs are 82 percent white.

     While Rochester takes up just 5 percent of the county's land, it is home to almost 75 percent of the county's poor, who are very disproportionately black and Hispanic. In a similar vein, Cleveland, Ohio contains 80 percent of the Cleveland metropolitan area's predominantly black poor while 85 percent of the area's entry-level jobs are in the suburbs and just one quarter of those jobs are accessible by public transit.

     These statistics, a small piece of what could be cited, bring to mind a comment made by Martin Luther King that is not typically noted in American rhetoric claiming to honor the great assassinated civil rights leaders. "I see nothing in the world," King wrote in 1967, "more dangerous than Negro cities ringed by white suburbs."

Blame The Victim

     Throughout the nation, blacks are very disproportionately concentrated in the country's worst urban ghettoes. These neighborhoods host the worst public school systems in the country and are home to a tragic tangled web of pathologies that emerge wherever disadvantaged people are concentrated and cordoned off from "respectable society."

     Their predominantly African-American populations live, writes African-America writer and activist Elaine Brown, "in conditions of deterioration and disrepair, lacking needed services, with few community-based businesses." A shocking number and percentage of their younger residents now provide crucial raw material for the nation's massive prison-industrial complex, one of the great growth industries to emerge in the wake of the loss of industrial jobs that used to employ millions of urban African-Americans.

     They are still trapped in what King more than 30 years ago called "a triple ghetto: a ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty, and a ghetto of human misery." The misery is reflected in behaviors that provide fodder for the ideological barracudas of the right, including sell-out African-American intellectuals like John McWhorter, who have made a mini-industry out of blaming blacks for their presence at the bottom of the American System.

     Such is the persistent reality of race in a time when white America can't stop congratulating itself for dropping the word "nigger" from its regular vocabulary, abolishing lynch-mobs, letting blacks sit in the front of the bus, and claiming to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

     Paul Street is Director of Research and Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League, Chicago, IL.