Race, Space, and Exclusion

Segregation and Beyond in Metropolitan America

Robert Adelman, Christopher Mele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138779303
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317675228
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of original essays takes a new look at race in urban spaces by highlighting the intersection of the physical separation of minority groups and the social processes of their marginalization. Race, Space, and Exclusion provides a dynamic and productive dialogue among scholars of racial exclusion and segregation from different perspectives, theoretical and methodological angles, and social science disciplines. This text is ideal for upper-level undergraduate or lower-level graduate courses on housing policy, urban studies, inequalities, and planning courses.

CHAPTER 1Racial Exclusion and Spatial Inequality in Metropolitan America

CHRISTOPHER MELE AND ROBERT M. ADELMAN

DOI: 10.4324/9781315771380-1

American society has changed dramatically in the last sixty or so years, and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in race relations. Racial inequality between blacks and whites has not disappeared, but neither has it been swept under the rug and ignored. Rather, black– white stratification has been addressed in legislation, modified via attitudinal and cultural adjustments, and lessened in large social institutions, such as education and work, in American life. Where once blacks and whites lived in almost completely separate neighborhoods regardless of income or education, today blacks, especially middle- and upper-class blacks, are more likely to reside with whites than they were, say, in the 1960s (Adelman 2004; Fischer 2003; Freeman 2008; Iceland and Wilkes 2006). But even in 2014 about 28.0 percent of blacks are impoverished compared to around 11.0 percent of whites; the proportion of blacks who are unemployed is twice that of whites, 13.0 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively; the proportion of blacks (age 25 and over) who have graduated from college stands at 21.0 percent versus about 35.0 percent for whites; and blacks live largely in black and minority neighborhoods, while whites reside in predominantly white neighborhoods in American metropolises (Logan and Stults 2011; National Urban League 2014).

Our focus in this book is on spatial forms of racial inequality rooted in past and current discrimination, from residential segregation to newer, often subtler forms of exclusion. As is evident in the title, we chose to use the term exclusion to capture a wide range of racial– spatial processes: the persistence of residential segregation, its newer manifestations, and the onset of elusive forms of spatial separation that have developed in this so-called postracial era. Most social scientists continue to use the term segregation to refer to the spatial divide between minorities and whites in cities and metropolitan areas. Although the United States continues down a path of increasing racial and ethnic diversity, the main and persistent form of racial residential segregation is black– white (Massey and Denton 1993). Although there are examples of integrated neighborhoods and decreasing levels of segregation of blacks and whites in certain areas of the country over time, in most metropolitan areas whites and blacks continue to live separated from one another (Ellen 2000; Logan and Stults 2011; Squires and Kubrin 2005). As the populations of Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic and racial groups increase in metropolitan areas due to international and internal migration, the long-standing segregation patterns are increasingly subject to pressures of change (Farrell and Lee 2011; Iceland 2009).

These spatial and social processes that reproduce black– white segregation have persisted, because discriminatory ideologies that account for differences between blacks and whites have undergirded them (Massey and Denton 1993). Historically, blacks who served whites as slaves and then as household workers lived with whites in the South and in the North. However, the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North in the early twentieth century began a reactive process of whites segregating themselves away from blacks, especially in the North. By the 1960s blacks and whites for the most part lived in separate neighborhoods (Massey and Denton 1993).

Although the civil rights era, certain pieces of federal legislation, and cultural and ideological shifts about the appropriateness of assumed racial differences have led to considerable gains for blacks (e.g., the development of a black middle class), the United States is not a postracial society (Bonilla-Silva 2009; Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich 2011; Sharkey 2013). Not only does residential segregation still exist, but across a series of measures the life chances for blacks compared to whites (and other groups) are not the same (National Urban League 2014). Class-based factors, such as income and education, and other social factors, like family wealth, interact with racial segregation to produce pockets of deep, concentrated poverty and areas of extraordinary wealth; in most central cities neighborhoods that scholars and residents call ghettos are areas of concentrated disadvantage, while better-off neighborhoods are most often found in the suburbs, though they also occur in gentrifying city neighborhoods (Haynes and Hutchison 2008; see also “Symposium on the Ghetto” 2008).

Segregation or Exclusion?

In today’s American cultural and political landscape, segregation is used to describe a historical condition of forced separation of blacks from whites in residential neighborhoods, at workplaces, and in public places and spaces. Films like Mississippi Burning (1988) depict the harsh realities of segregation during the Jim Crow era, a period marked by strong social conventions and laws separating blacks from whites in the South (the North, though marked by less overt forms of racism, also maintained a strong distance between racial groups). But by 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminal “I Have a Dream” speech, a number of corrective measures had improved the lives of America’s most disadvantaged social group. Indeed in everyday parlance, the glaring realities of overt discrimination in work, education, and public service have been addressed and remain well on the path to being rectified. In fact, due to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the passage of federal and state legislation targeting discrimination, and vast improvements in everyday racial interactions, race relations have improved markedly, especially in the areas of work, education, and politics.

In the arenas of politics and popular culture, the message is that we live in an increasingly color-blind society, especially in comparison to a mere half century ago (see, e.g., Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich 2011). As Deirdre Oakley shows in chapter 3, racial residential segregation developed through discriminatory federal and local government housing policies, such as redlining, racial steering, racial covenants, and overtly exclusionary zoning practices. For the most part, though, these particular issues have been largely addressed through legislation. With steady improvements in race relations, the remaining vestiges of segregation and periodic episodes of overt discrimination seem destined to disappear. Or so it may seem. The reality— based on a large and ever-growing literature— is that segregation and exclusion continue to characterize the present lives of many minorities in the United States. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the racial composition of America’s residential landscape remains shaped by the forces of discrimination, be they in persistent forms of segregation with ties to the past or in newer patterns of exclusion that are more subtle than those of the past (Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich 2011).

Our use of exclusion captures past forms of residential segregation as well as those that persist today. But we also use exclusion to acknowledge and avoid two related temporal problems associated with using the term segregation exclusively. First, although we (and the other authors in this book) see the continuity of today’s segregation with its past forms, we are also interested in its present manifestations; as such, this book is not a history of segregation. Second, as is indicated in the discussion above, the current political and cultural climate that trumpets a postracial or color-blind society views racial segregation as a condition relegated to the past and of little relevance to the present. The term exclusion encompasses residential segregation and various additional forms of spatial separation and isolation that are clearly alive and well today.

Residential Segregation and Racial Exclusion

We first turn our attention to the most studied and well-known form of spatial exclusion, residential segregation. We introduce the major causes and consequences of residential segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas with an emphasis on segregation of black and white households. The causes of segregation are many and interconnected. For purposes of clarity, we divide explanations into three categories: (1) collective and organized forms of exclusion that prevent or severely restrict blacks from living in white neighborhoods, (2) institutional policies and practices that contribute to and enable residential segregation, and (3) social factors that inhibit the residential choices, mobility, and preferences of black households and enable those of whites.

Collective and Organized Forms of Residential Segregation

Whites have used collective and organized legal and illegal means to exclude blacks from predominantly white neighborhoods. Historically, racial residential segregation remained secured through the efforts of white homeowners or businesses to exclude black households from white neighborhoods. In metropolitan areas across America white homeowners collectively entered into racially restrictive covenants (legally enforceable contracts) that prohibited the sale or rental of their property to or occupancy by black families and other racial and religious minorities (see, e.g., Jackson 1987). In his study of race and real estate in Kansas City prior to 1950, Kevin Fox Gotham (2000; 2002) found racial covenants in the majority of postwar housing developments. Whites formed homeowners associations to proactively restrict the movement of blacks into their neighborhood by purchasing homes and revoking the real estate licenses of brokers who violated covenants (Gotham 2000, 627– 628). In its 1948 Shelley v. Kramer decision the Supreme Court invalidated restrictive covenants, but property owners could still refuse to rent or sell to black households on an individual basis until the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 (see chapter 3 by Oakley). The Fair Housing Act directly addressed the practices of individual homeowners and landlords taking race into account when selling their homes or renting property. Yet the Act’s weak enforcement measures meant that racial discrimination in housing markets continued. The historian Thomas Sugrue (1996) argues that in Detroit grassroots homeowners associations served a discriminatory function similar to the now-banned racial covenants in mostly white neighborhoods.

Most scholars argue that blacks continuxe to face discrimination by homeowners, landlords, and realtors, though sometimes with more subtle and sophisticated means than in the past; white homeowners may still refuse to sell to black households on an individual basis (Pager and Shepherd 2008; Turner et al. 2002; Yinger 1995). Landlords may unfairly levy additional surcharges on or make the situation difficult for minorities when renting apartments (Massey and Lundy 2001). Evidence strongly suggests that realtors and rental agencies direct prospective buyers and renters to certain neighborhoods on the basis of race. This process, known as racial steering, is a form of private housing market discrimination that encumbers residential choice among minority renters and homebuyers. Steering is a practice in which realtors, brokers, and other private-market actors intentionally and systematically present their minority clients housing options in neighborhoods typically overrepresented by minority residents (Galster 1990; Galster and Godfrey 2005). Given that housing legislation legally upended race-based constraints on residential mobility, the practice of racial steering is particularly pernicious; brokers and agents can easily modify their available property inventories based on the race of a prospective client. Consequently, steering precludes minority households from similar choices of residential mobility. Minority suburbanization in effect has been thwarted by such racial practices designed to channel potential home-buyers to some areas and not others; it keeps suburbs off-limits to many black homebuyers and renters. As evidence indicates, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Photographs
• Foreword
• 1 Racial Exclusion and Spatial Inequality in Metropolitan America
• Section 1 Racial Exclusion in Policy and Practice
• Section 2 Racial exclusion in the Production of Urban Space
• Section 3 Visualizing Racial Exclusion in Buffalo, New York
• Section 4 Race, Exclusion, and Narrative Position
• Section 5 Racial and Spatial Inequality in the Twenty-first Century
• Contributor Biographies
• Index