The Integration Debate

Competing Futures For American Cities

Chester Hartman, Gregory Squires

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780415994590
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135846879
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

Racial integration, and policies intended to achieve greater integration, continue to generate controversy in the United States, with some of the most heated debates taking place among long-standing advocates of racial equality.

Today, many nonwhites express what has been referred to as "integration exhaustion" as they question the value of integration in today's world. And many whites exhibit what has been labeled "race fatigue," arguing that we have done enough to reconcile the races. Many policies have been implemented in efforts to open up traditionally restricted neighborhoods, while others have been designed to diversify traditionally poor, often nonwhite, neighborhoods. Still, racial segregation persists, along with the many social costs of such patterns of uneven development.

This book explores both long-standing and emerging controversies over the nation's ongoing struggles with discrimination and segregation. More urgently, it offers guidance on how these barriers can be overcome to achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns.

CHAPTER 1
Integration Exhaustion, Race Fatigue, and the American Dream

CHESTER HARTMAN AND GREGORY D. SQUIRES

I love Puerto Ricans and Negroes
As long as they don’t move next
door. (Phil Ochs 1965, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”)

When the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 was being debated, Senator Walter Mondale famously stated that “the reach of the proposed law was to replace the ghettos by truly integrated and balanced living patterns.” But the nation has had a long, uneasy relationship with the concept of integration. Several legal mandates, social science research reports, and advocacy positions have endorsed the pursuit of integration, but segregation remains a dominant reality in virtually all U.S. cities and their surrounding areas. In recent years, the value of integration appears to be losing its hold. “Integration exhaustion” on the part of nonwhites and “race fatigue” on the part of whites have deflated some of the pressure for integration. Many suggest that today we live in a “post-civil rights world,” and so perhaps the need for integration, like the Civil Rights Movement itself, has faded.

This would be an unfortunate vision on which to base public policy or private practice when it comes to issues of race, and particularly racial inequality, in the United States today. Certainly, there has been substantial progress in recent years. Racial minorities now occupy positions in business, entertainment, politics, and virtually all areas in larger numbers than ever before, with the election of Barack Obama being the most significant, but hardly the only, breakthrough of recent years. At the same time, racial inequality and racial segregation stubbornly persist, and at great cost to both the victims and to society as a whole. If many barriers have been broken, significant gaps remain. If recent efforts to desegregate the nation’s neighborhoods have disappointed, new and better approaches are required. If integration does not “work,” as some critics claim, it may well be because it has never really been tried, as most fair housing advocates assert. Separate but equal has been tried and clearly found wanting to all but the most diehard racists. The challenge, for all, remains the dismantling of remaining vestiges of discrimination and the realization of “truly integrated and balanced living patterns.”

Integration Exhaustion? Race Fatigue?

As Sheryll Cashin and many other scholars observe, for many nonwhite, particularly African-American families, integration is not the goal that it was a generation ago. In The Failures of Integration, Cashin quotes one black resident of a middle-class Atlanta neighborhood: “When I have to work around them all day, by the time I come home I don’t want to have to deal with white people anymore” (Cashin 2004, 18). A young African-American journalist wrote on the editorial page of the Washington Post:

In the small act of choosing to buy our home where we did, I believe that we became part of a growing group of African Americans who are picking up where the civil rights movement left off. From our perspective, integration is overrated. It’s time to reverse an earlier generation’s hopeful migration into white communities and attend to some unfinished business in the hood. (Hopkinson 2001 quoted in Cashin 2004, 19)

And as Cashin herself recounted,

But in conversation after conversation with black friends, acquaintances, and strangers, integration is simply not a priority in the way that getting ahead is. What black people now seem most ardent about is equality of opportunity. As one black acquaintance once put it, rather than wanting to integrate with whites, black people now seem more interested in having what whites have. (Cashin 2004, 28)

Joe Feagin and Melvin Sikes interviewed middle-class blacks who expressed similar attitudes, many of whom report experiences of being a “pioneer” and question if it is worth it all, clearly expressing integration exhaustion. One corporate executive described the maltreatment he received because of his race and concluded: “The only place it probably doesn’t affect me, I guess, is in my home…but outside one’s home it always affects me” (Feagin and Sikes 1994, 224).

If many blacks are tired of the struggle for racial integration, many whites believe American society has done enough. Race fatigue has set in for many, according to Thomas and Mary Edsall (1991), who describe the antipathy many whites have to paying taxes they believe go to support programs that are no longer needed. A 2008 New York Times poll found that 48% of whites oppose programs to help minorities get ahead, with 26% believing that they themselves are now victims of racial discrimination (Blow 2008). Cashin (2004, xii) reported that approximately half of all whites believe blacks and whites have equal access to jobs, education, and health care, even though black family income persists at about two-thirds the white median, with similar gaps in health, education, and other areas of life.

In a more fundamental redefinition of the situation, some scholars, white and nonwhite, believe the key battles of the Civil Rights Movement were fought and won in the 1960s, and that any remaining racial gaps can be explained largely by cultural failures on the part of nonwhites, particularly blacks, themselves (McWhorter 2000, 2006; Sowell 1984; Steele 1990; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997). Pointing to the “cult of victimology” (how many blacks see themselves only as victims), “separatism” (the belief that they do not have to play by conventional rules because of their victimization), and “anti-intellectualism” (going to school means acting white and identifying with the oppressor), John McWhorter (2000, x) concludes: “The black community today is the main obstacle to achieving the full integration our Civil Rights leaders sought.”

The Continuing Costs of Segregation

But racial segregation persists, and the social costs are compounded by increasing economic segregation. If nationwide statistical measures of segregation have declined somewhat for African Americans, segregation from whites for Hispanics and Asians has increased slightly. And in those major metropolitan areas where the black population is concentrated—cities like Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee—black/white segregation persists at traditionally hypersegregated levels (Iceland, Weinberg, and Steinmetz 2002). And racial isolation has been exacerbated by a dramatically increased concentration of poverty.

If some middle-class, professional minorities are residing in neighborhoods previously closed to them, poor people—particularly poor people of color—are increasingly falling down and dropping out (Massey 2007). The number of high-poverty census tracts (those where 40% or more of the residents live on incomes below the official poverty line) surged from 1,177 in 1970 to 2,510 in 2000, with the number of residents in those neighborhoods growing from 4.1 million to 7.9 million (Jargowsky 1996, 2003). Preliminary research by Paul Jargowsky (2008) reveals that since 2000 these numbers have continued to shoot upwards. These patterns are not race-neutral. Whereas just 5% of poor whites lived in high-poverty areas in 1990, 30% of poor blacks did (Rusk 1999, 106). In perhaps a more revealing sign of the times, the share of middle-income census tracts declined from 58% to 41% between 1970 and 2000 while the share of poor people living in middle-income areas declined from just over half to 37%, and their share living in low-income areas grew from 36% to 48% (Booza, Cutsinger, and Galster 2006).

The combination of persistent racial segregation and rising concentration of poverty has had serious, oftendeadly, consequences for many who are in fact victims.

A wealth of social science research has documented that residents of predominantly nonwhite, segregated neighborhoods experience a wide range of disamenities. Such families are far more likely to:

• be victims of crime, while being underserviced and overpoliced by a criminal justice system in which incarceration rates have skyrocketed in recent years;
• attend inferior schools, which leads to inferior job opportunities and less opportunity to move into more stable (and more integrated) communities;
• receive fewer and inferior public services and private amenities (access to retail stores, entertainment, convenient transportation);
• be exposed to polluted air and water, toxic waste facilities, and other environmental hazards;
• have less access to health care;
• be victimized by predatory lenders and other fringe bankers (e.g., payday lenders, check-cashers, pawn shops) and have less access to conventional banking services; and
• have difficulty learning about job opportunities and getting to those jobs that are available. (Carr and Kutty 2008)

In sum, as Douglas Massey (2001, 424) concluded: “Any process that concentrates poverty within racially isolated neighborhoods will simultaneously increase the odds of socioeconomic failure within the segregated group.”

Integration Initiatives and Emerging Controversies

Several public policy initiatives have been launched in recent years in efforts to replace at least some ghettos with more balanced living patterns. Gautreaux, Moving to Opportunity (MTO), and HOPE VI are just some of the better-known buzzwords in housing circles that have generated some new housing opportunities, a growing body of social science research, and intense controversy.

Many families who participated in these programs were able to move to safer, healthier communities, where their children are more likely to graduate from high school and go on to college, and to have fewer encounters with police. The benefits are clearest in the Gautreaux program, where many more poor black families made long-distance moves from predominantly poor black to predominantly white suburbs than in the MTO program, where most moves were from poor to nonpoor neighborhoods, but oftenin nearby communities, frequently within the same school district. And the HOPE VI findings are even more ambiguous and problematic because, unlike Gautreaux and MTO in which participants volunteered to move, HOPE VI families were involuntarily relocated (Buron 2004; Goering and Feins 2003; Rosenbaum, DeLuca, and Tuck 2005).

But these initiatives have not been universally hailed. Even among some long-standing civil rights advocates, they have come under harsh scrutiny. Some claim these mobility initiatives have met with less success than their proponents and some researchers suggest; that the primary objective and outcome is to displace poor people and provide unjustifiable subsidies to well-connected developers who profit by the gentrification that ensues; that they constitute another version of urban renewal which undervalues the social capital of even poor communities, destroying the lives of many vulnerable families in the process; and that the entire discussion of concentrated poverty unfairly stigmatizes poor people and particularly poor people of color (Fullilove 2004; Goetz 2003; Reed and Steinberg 2006).

These critiques also invoke related long-standing debates over strategies for replacing ghettos with balanced living patterns. For example: Is there a right to stay put (Hartman 1984), with the expectation that adequate public services and private amenities will be available? To what extent should public policy and private practice emphasize gilding the ghetto (community reinvestment and development) versus deconcentration (helping people move out)? Should we eliminate, expand, or modify current mobility programs? Clearly, there is a role for fair housing law enforcement, but should that authority remain at HUD or be moved to an independent agency (National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity 2008), and to what extent can law enforcement lead to more integrated neighborhoods? These are some of the emerging controversies explored in the chapters that follow.

The cast of characters we assembled for this book is an extraordinary collection of researchers and activists (most playing both roles), all of whom have a deep commitment to racial justice (see their minibios in the Contributors Section, p. 265), but with a range of well-informed views on the best ways to achieve that goal.

Shanna Smith and Cathy Cloud are central figures in the nation’s most important fair housing organization, and they lay out realistically the current scene with regard to residential patterns by race and the nation’s efforts to change those patterns. Sociologist/demographer Nancy Denton offers an impressive picture of how current and future changes in the nation’s population composition offer possibilities for progress toward integration.

Then there are those all-important actors, the lawyers, putting forward their views and plans regarding legal strategies to achieve integration. John Relman and his current and former lawfirm colleagues Glenn Schlactus and Shalini Goel have achieved remarkable success in winning cases and large awards after proving discriminatory behavior by a variety of malefactors. Michael Seng and Willis Caruso of the John Marshall Law School, where essential fair housing work is done via its Fair Housing Legal Support Center, detail the ways in which private litigation strategies can succeed. Florence Wagman Roisman, a long-time legal theoretician/tactician/activist, puts forward a set of specific proposals, the most innovative of which is use of the Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery. And Elizabeth Julian and Demetria McCain of the Inclusive Communities project describe their varied and effective assistance strategies in Dallas to bring about racially integrated neighborhoods.

The next set of chapters deals with the deleterious consequences of segregated housing patterns in key areas of residents’ lives. William Darity, Jr. of Duke and Alicia Jolla, formerly of Charlotte, address the educational consequences. Samuel Myers, Jr. of the University of Minnesota, Prof. Darity again, and Kris Marsh of the University of Maryland explore the impact on earnings inequalities. Dolores Acevedo-Garcia and Nancy McArdle of the Harvard School of Public Health and Theresa Osypuk of Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences examine the negative health consequences for children. George Lipsitz and Melvin Oliver of the University of California, Santa Barbara lay out what increasingly is recognized as a central racial issue: wealth disparities. And Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project demonstrates the negative consequences of segregation for crime and criminal justice policy.

Lastly, we present a series of more sweeping chapters that focus on housing policies and the politics associated with them. Stefanie DeLuca of Johns Hopkins and James Rosenbaum of Northwestern University detail both positive and mixed/limited results from Chicago’s Gautreaux Program and the subsequent multicity Moving to Opportunity Program. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero, and Robert Fullilove of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health present a disturbing framework for looking at mobility strategies, drawing on urban renewal history, with emphasis on the destruction of positive social capital/networking/supportive functions that even neighborhoods in poor physical condition can provide for their residents, and the difficulties of renewing such positive features in a new and different area. Stephen Steinberg of the City University of New York offers a damning critique of the entire notion of concentrated poverty and its presumed impacts, blasting it in particular for its role in leading activists, researchers, and others to pay insufficient attention to the structural issues underlying poverty and racism in the United States. And Janet Smith of the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a critique somewh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 Integration Exhaustion, Race Fatigue, and the American Dream Reviews current debates over the merits of racial integration and current policy initiatives to desegregate the nation’s metropolitan areas. Acknowledges continuing and wide-ranging costs of segregation (exacerbated by rising economic segregation) for those victimized by discriminatory processes, and identifies issues that will have to be addressed if the nation is to truly move towards more balanced and integrated living patterns.
• 2 Welcome to the Neighborhood? The Persistence of Discrimination and Segregation Outlines how the federal Fair Housing Act could be utilized as a valuable tool to promote integration but has not been properly enforced; explains how the creation of diverse communities has been inhibited by discriminatory actions on the part of the real estate community; and provides information about steps that have been and could be taken to achieve neighborhood integration.
• 3 From Segregation to Integration: How Do We Get There? Outlines the increasing diversity of the U.S. population, including how it varies by age, metropolitan area, and region; argues that these demographic changes could foster integration if we have place-specific policies that can take advantage of them; and discusses how moving from segregation to integration is a process which must begin with examination of the types of neighborhoods that actually exist, not segregation indices.
• 4 Creating and Protecting Prointegration Programs Under the Fair Housing Act Examines judicial responses to different strategies that have been employed to promote and maintain integrated communities; identifies types of strategies and situations where prointegration programs are most likely to be upheld by the courts; illuminates the relevant legal considerations by closely examining how courts might respond to a creative prointegration program in Ohio that has not been challenged.
• 5 Achieving Integration Through Private Litigation Traces how private litigation has been a primary vehicle for enforcement of the substantive provisions of the Fair Housing Act; reviews the limitations of lawsuits in removing the structural barriers to fair housing in our society; and recommends statutory and regulatory reforms that would make litigation a better tool to achieve integration.
• 6 Constitutional and Statutory Mandates for Residential Racial Integration and the Validity of Race-Conscious, Affirmative Action to Achieve It Reviews the inconsistent treatment of race-conscious government actions since the 1940s, focusing on affirmative, race-conscious conduct designed to promote housing integration. Discusses the 1866 and 1968/1988 federal fair housing acts and their authority in the Thirteenth Amendment, and considers ways in which the Thirteenth Amendment allows broader scope than might be warranted for statutes rooted only in the Fourteenth Amendment.
• 7 Housing Mobility: A Civil Right Argues that housing mobility is a remedy for the Constitutional violation of racial segregation in federally-assisted housing programs; proposes statutory language giving individuals the power to assert that right on their own behalf; and describes how the Dallas housing mobility program operated by the authors’ nonprofit organization works.
• 8 Desegregated Schools With Segregated Education Reviews how educational inequities are no longer solely shaped by residential segregation but are increasingly based on differential access to quality instruction and curricula within schools, selectively determined by race. Effective alternatives include evidence from an urban elementary school that challenged this tendency by expanding access to its gift ed and talented program and from Project Bright Idea, a K-2 critical thinking curriculum.
• 9 The Effects of Housing Market Discrimination on Earnings Inequality Examines the empirical relationship between residential segregation in a metropolitan area and racial wage disparities in the same metropolitan area; details the correlation between loan denial rates and racial wage disparities in MSAs and accounts for competing factors explaining these patterns; concludes that eradicating residential segregation or diminishing racial gaps in loan denials will not have any immediate impact on narrowing earnings gaps.
• 10 Racial/Ethnic Integration and Child Health Disparities Discusses the effects of neighborhood environment on child health and development. Examines the extent of racial/ethnic disparities in neighborhood environment—a result of residential segregation—facing U.S. children, and their implications for racial/ethnic disparities in child health and development and along the life course.
• 11 Integration, Segregation, and the Racial Wealth Gap Examines how housing discrimination has allowed whites to “lock in” advantages of homeownership and its attendant subsidies while limiting the ability of African Americans to accumulate wealth. Explains how government and financial institutions have conspired to limit and even “strip” hard-gained home equity from Black and other minority communities, most recently evidenced by the racial effects of the subprime mortgage crisis. Remedies should include asset-building strategies for individuals, but also adequate government investments in Black communities capable of addressing the cumulative, collective, and continuing costs of discrimination and segregation.
• 12 Two-Tiered Justice: Race, Class, and Crime Policy Analyzes the forces in recent decades that have produced a “race to incarcerate” resulting in a world-record prison population in the U.S.; and assesses the intersection of policy changes in criminal justice with the dynamics of a segregated society, including racially biased law enforcement practices and disproportionate imprisonment for people of color that in turn results in declining life prospects and political influence.
• 13 Residential Mobility, Neighborhoods, and Poverty: Results from the Chicago Gautreaux Program and the Moving to Opportunity Experiment Examines how residential mobility may impact the experiences and outcomes of low-income black families. Reviews small and large studies of the Gautreaux program, showing its impact on education, jobs, integration, and long-term residential location. While MTO attempted to improve upon Gautreaux, analyses indicate that it provided a stronger research design, but a weaker mobility program. Discusses implications for the design of subsequent residential mobility programs.
• 14 The Ghetto Game: Apartheid and the Developer’s Imperative in Postindustrial American Cities Reviews the series of urban policies that have led to displacement: segregation, redlining, urban renewal, catastrophic disinvestment/planned shrinkage, HOPE VI, gentrification, and others. Proposes that tools of urban design have a repairng role to play. Reviews the work and ideas of renowned French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart.
• 15 The Myth of Concentrated Poverty Challenges the validity and political uses of the concept of “concentrated poverty.” Research has failed to prove the two core assumptions—that concentration per se exacerbates the negative effects of poverty, and that deconcentration of poverty is beneficial for the poor. This dubious theory, moreover, is deployed when poor minorities occupy urban space that is ripe for gentrification, and has provided moral and intellectual justification for the demolition of public housing under the HOPE VI program.
• 16 Integration: Solving the Wrong Problem Examines the limits to past and current integration strategies; offers a framework that builds on a human rights agenda and on the Right to the City movement in order to demonstrate how critical it is to look beyond trying to attain some end (integration) and instead focus on reducing racism and eliminating policies that privilege the white position.
• 17 The Legacy of Segregation: Smashing Through the Generations Delineates the self-replicating phenomenon of black urban poverty, which is older than the nation itself. Discusses the psychic, physical, and economic brutality employed to make slaves out of black human beings and how shunning (separating and segregating) removed most blacks from the richness of life and served to pump the pride in whiteness to grotesque proportions that led from denial of education to the campaign of lynchings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Describes how this enduring American cultural trait (without the lynchings) has created toxic and impoverished black communities—even aft er all of the civil rights and uplift activity of mid-twentieth century America. The result is compacted poverty in urban areas that can be deadly to children born into it, whether death comes from early criminality, illiteracy, from a bullet or disease. The result is not simply an American dilemma, but an American disgrace.
• Contributors
• Rights and Permissions