8 ms·
Why don't black and white Americans live together?
- Symbiote 10y agoThe maps led me to wondering what a similar diagram of cities in the UK would look like, and I found a map of England and Wales with dots coloured by race. It's much more mixed. Where black/white/asian areas still exist the boundaries tend to be pretty blurred. http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/ http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/
- pwinnski 10y agoStill quite a bit of segregation, but yes, much less than many (most?) large American cities. http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/#lat=51.516369&lon=-0.126331&z=11&bw=0&refs=0&hide=0 http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/#lat=51.51...
- clock_tower 10y agoIn the UK's case, I'd think that you'd see relatively little race-based self-segregation but a lot of class-based; I've always heard that the UK is classist but not very racist, and that non-whites tend to be higher-class than a lot of the locals.
- sp332 10y agoVi Hart and Nicky Case made an interactive demonstration of how easy it is to accidentally create segregated neighborhoods: http://ncase.me/polygons/ http://ncase.me/polygons/
- baddox 10y agoAnd even very slight preferences for living near people who look like you can lead to intense segregation: http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/10/28/game-theory-and-racism-the-schelling-segregation-model/ http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/10/28/game-theory-and...
- slededit 10y agoThis analysis clearly doesn't explain everything. If you move bias over to 100% and run the random move simulation segregation quickly falls below 10%. If the simulation were an accurate view of the world the take-away would be everyone should become more biased to prevent segregation, a nonsensical result.
- dwaltrip 10y agoYour assessment is incorrect. It falls below 10%, but the majority of the polygons are "unhappy" and waiting to be randomly moved. The program gets stuck continually shuffling the polygons around and it looks like it will never finish (I waited several minutes and no progress was made). It seems likely that this is because each polygon that is moved has a high chance of also being "unhappy" at the new random location. By definition, with 100% bias, the program won't stop until there is full segregation.
- slededit 10y agoCorrect, but unbounded continual iteration more cleanly represents real life. The real flaw in the simulation is the limitation of free space, the world is a much bigger place.
- dwaltrip 10y agoWell, if we are talking about a city, space is often somewhat scarce. Regardless, I don't think that would reduce segregation. I think the biggest limitation is "unhappy" polygons moving to random locations, instead of having some choice in the matter. Reducing this limitation would result in faster convergence towards a stable, segregated state, as the choices made would reflect the bias of the participants.
- gravypod 10y agoFor those who don't live here I'd say a majority of the places, at least here on the east coast, don't follow this trend. This definitely isn't the case where I grew up, in New Jersey, and is absolutely incorrect for New York City. I'd hope that this article would have done a better job in explaining that this isn't the rule but that these are a few exceptions to such.
- santaclaus 10y agoI dunno man, the racial makeup in neighborhoods in NYC changes fast, like cross the street fast: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/08/us/census-race-map.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/08/us/census-race...
- crooked-v 10y ago> This definitely isn't the case where I grew up, in New Jersey, and is absolutely incorrect for New York City. It's not something that's nearly as sharply defined in NYC, but there's definitely some racial separation by neighborhood if you look at statistical maps on the subject. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/map-segregation-america-race_n_3824693.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/map-segregation-ame... http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1321377/original.jpg http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1321377/original.jpg
- asldfiang 10y agoNYC is ranked as the second most segregated city in the country. Just because we all ride the subway together doesn't mean we live together: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/12/08/census-shows-modest-declines-in-black-white-segregation/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/12/08/census-...
- _of 10y agoYou kiddin'? NYC is a massively segregated city, essentially whole neighborhoods are defined by race.
- andreasklinger 10y agowhy would this be incorrect for nyc? isnt harlem, the bronx, spanish harlem parts of NYC? i agree nyc is extremely fast in gentrification - but that doesnt make it mixed on the long run
- overcast 10y agoBlack, and white families, are nearly every other house in my Upstate New York neighborhood.
- llamataboot 10y agoThis was my public policy research area for about a decade. In my mind this remains one of the best treatments of the topic: American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass - Massey and Denton https://www.amazon.com/American-Apartheid-Segregation-Making-Underclass/dp/0674018214 https://www.amazon.com/American-Apartheid-Segregation-Making...
- Kluny 10y agoIt seems like there's a business opportunity for someone who wants to set up a lending company that offers black families fair and favorable terms on mortgages.
- jtchang 10y agoWhy would there be a business opportunity here? Banks can already do this but they don't. Maybe it is more risky so they charge higher rates.
- maerF0x0 10y agoOr maybe racism falsely informs that risk model? If that's the case then one can likely deploy capital like its low-risk to "higher-risk" (and thus higher APR) loans. Of course competition will eventually destroy this model, but initially it could be profitable.
- angry-hacker 10y agoI don't think the models for giving loans are racist, they are based on facts and reality.
- pwinnski 10y agoSadly, this is demonstrably untrue. A purely-math-based approach would still bear the weight of past racist policies and their residual effects, but that's not even what we have today.
- stult 10y agoIt's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Denying minorities equal access to lending limits demand for houses in minority-dominated areas, which in turn limits the return on housing in such areas. Similarly, when white people start fleeing a neighborhood because of increased minority (especially black) residents moving in, that drives down house prices, driving further white residents out. The resulting price spiral guts what once made the neighborhood desireable. Thus, it is actually rational for a white home owner to sell immediately after minority residents move into their neighborhood, even if they aren't motivated by any racial animus. It is correspondingly rational for bankers to price loans to minorities at higher rates because of the increased risk they represent. So to a certain extent, bankers don't loan to minorities because bankers don't loan to minorities. Someone, somewhere needs to break the negative feedback loop. That was the intention of the Fair Housing Act, but it hasn't been enough. Partially because of inadequate enforcement and partially because home ownership is only one tiny aspect of the vast and complicated beast that is race in America. Even if black Americans had perfectly equal access to lending and housing, the racial income gap would still exclude them from many of the least integrated areas, which also happen to be where the best schools and opportunities for improving income are. It's shitty and I don't pretend to have any inkling of how to address these problems. But I don't think you can justify bankers or white flighters or blockbusters or whomever by saying they are responding rationally to real risks and incentives. That just means the risks and incentives need to be changed, because the social consequences have been awful for Americans in general and minorities in particular.
- aidenn0 10y agoThe town where I live (SoCal) has 14 elementary schools. Only two of them are between 20% and 80% hispanic student population, with the other 12 in the outer two quintiles. At least some of this is due to economic reasons. It's about $200k extra on a 3BR house to go from a "bad" school zone to a "good" school zone. That has fall-on effects that includes gerrymandering. The school boundaries are very much not compact. I know of at least one boy who walks through areas zoned for another school to get to his school. The differences are so extreme, that I have mentioned multiple times that if you were to replace "California" with "Virginia" and "hispanic" with "black" you would have federally mandated cross-town busing of students.
- ryandrake 10y agoIt's a vicious cycle: good schools -> increase demand -> high home prices -> affluent residents -> more tax revenue -> better schools -> repeat The reverse happens with bad schools.
- alkonaut 10y agoIs school funding distributed in such a small district that tax revenue in the district itself affects the school budget?
- aidenn0 10y agoIn many places in the US, this is the case, but not for the sample I was choosing (see my sibling reply).
- pcl 10y agoThat is often the case in the US, yes. A recent court ruling in Connecticut may change that, at least in that state. Some links: https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/nyregion/connecticut-public-schools-inequality-judge-orders.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/nyr... https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/nyregion/in-connecticut-a-wealth-gap-divides-neighboring-schools.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/nyr... http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/nyregion/connecticut-education-ruling-appeal.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/nyregion/connecticut-ed...
- neaden 10y agoOak Park is a suburb next to Chicago that managed to integrate fairly well, but when reading how it happened I was struck at how draconian it was handled. They purposefully wanted an integrated city and tried to sotftly limit or "steer" how many Black people moved in, and to spread them throughout the whole city. There were restrictions on who could sell your home. For sale signs were banned even. They expanded the police force to assure people they would still be safe. In short they used quite a bit of government force to establish an integrated city with no noticeable Black or White area. And it worked, even today it's one of the most integrated suburbs of the city. I'm honestly not sure what lesson we should take from it.
- kasey_junk 10y agoHyde Park on the cities south side is similar. It started out in a draconian battle against integration, and then switched to a draconian battle for integration. It didn't hurt that the University of Chicago drove most of the land ownership and maintained a massive private police force. I'm with you, not sure what the lesson was, but it led to an integrated neighborhood.
- negamax 10y agoSame policy in Singapore. All government houses is distributed as such that people from all backgrounds (religions) get intermingled.
- seanwilson 10y agoAny views on how well it worked and if it was a good idea?
- negamax 10y agoIt was a great idea. Singapore is harmonious and everyone understands each other better, to a major part because of this. People who grow up in singular neighbourhoods simply don't realise what they are missing in understanding each other. Attending each other's weddings, funerals; talking about political issues forms a strong bond above religious lines
- jasode 10y agoIf you want to explore more areas than just the 4 cities in the article, this demographic map based on 2010 US Census data has a plot of race: http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html (it's zoomable)
- 13of40 10y agoJust looking at the map, the ten mile radius around where I work seems like it's got several sharply segregated areas full of Asian people. From the ground, I know those areas are just apartment complexes where (highly skilled and not at all impoverished) Indian people on temporary work visas tend to stay, and most of them would probably be able to buy a house on my block if they intended to be here permanently. The west side of the city has some old-fashioned segregation, though.
- nostrademons 10y ago'According to the Brookings report, "more than half of blacks would need to move to achieve complete integration". Some have pointed out that the wording of this part of the report itself highlights the challenges in these issues - why can't this be measured in the number of whites who would have to move?' Because that would be a much less catchy soundbite. Assuming a 1:1 black-white switch, and that the population of the U.S. is 12% black and 72% white, then roughly 8% of whites would have to move to achieve racial integration.
- baddox 10y agoAssuming a simplistic model where households swap locations (without handling population growth and new housing), a black household would have to move for every white household that moves.
- nostrademons 10y agoExactly - that's how I got the numbers above. 50% of the black population = 6% of the total population = 8.3% of the white population. My point is to assume self-interest on the part of the publication; it may or may not be representative of deeper unconscious bias in the population (there's no rule against both self-interest and unconscious bias being true), but a simpler explanation is that the Brookings Institute wanted to make their finding sound more dramatic. Incidentally, phrasing it as "8% of whites need to consciously seek out diversity to end racial segregation" makes the problem seem eminently solvable.
- baddox 10y agoIt seems reasonable to give the 50% statistic, because it may show why blacks may be more reluctant or unable to participate in this mass movement. It's easy for a white person to say sure, let's move, given that there's only an 8% chance of any specific white person having to actually move.
- SwellJoe 10y agoClass plays a big role in why white migration is not considered a net good. White migration does happen, and we call it gentrification, because it usually means wealthy young (mostly white) folks moving into poor neighborhoods on the edges of "cool" cities, causing rents to rise dramatically over a short period of time, and pushing out longtime residents who are too poor to afford to continue to live in the hip new neighborhood with fancy bistros and cat cafes (yes, there's really a cat cafe...it's in East Austin on the site of a business once owned by a Hispanic family whose business was bulldozed). Integration almost has to go the other way, or it is more of a disruptive force, and a force for further damaging communities of color. Race and class are so closely correlated in the US that you can't talk about one without the other on most issues. In this case, it means that white people moving into a black or brown neighborhood are often displacing black or brown people who can no longer afford to live there, because wealthier whites have driven up rents (and home ownership among black and brown people is much lower than ownership among white people in the US, so that doesn't provide a very good buffer to protect those black and brown neighborhoods from being "flipped" into white neighborhoods). In short: Integration is a good goal. But, without some care, moving white folks into black and brown neighborhoods can be harmful.
- ausjke 10y agoit's more about economic status instead of colors? also there is some culture difference as well, “Birds of a feather flock together", maybe it's just natural and has nothing to do with the political pov.
- bdamm 10y agoSome places even embrace that approach. Canada, for example.
- jkaunisv1 10y agoEhn, we're pretty segregated too. You notice a big difference in racial distributions going to different malls and bus stations, especially outside of the downtown core (at least in the nation's capital where I live). Not to mention the white/indigenous divide that is particularly prominent in our prairie provinces. Winnipeg has a literal wrong side of the tracks.
- smallnamespace 10y agoAll you need for self-segregation to occur is that individuals don't want to be a small minority in their local area. As people exercise that preference by moving around, they will create enclaves where certain groups dominate. http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segregation/ http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg... http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/an-immersive-game-shows-how-easily-segregation-arisesand-how-we-might-fix-it/383586/ http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/an-immersive-game-show...
- coldtea 10y ago>All you need for self-segregation to occur is that individuals don't want to be a small minority in their local area. If that was the case (or enough), we wouldn't have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_steering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_steering and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_Uni... I don't think many blacks care of being a "small minority" on a posh white neighborhood...
- nostrademons 10y agoNot necessarily. It's possible for individuals to not want to be a small minority in their local area and for real estate brokers to steer them away from the area. There's no rule against overkill.
- coldtea 10y agoPossible yes. The case? I doubt.
- baddox 10y agoRacial steering could simply be the result of real estate agents recognizing the tendencies of people's preferences and prioritizing the showing of units that are the likeliest to be a good fit.
- 10y ago
- andrenotgiant 10y agoWhat countries/cities worldwide are the least racially segregated?
- maerF0x0 10y agoOriginally from Canada, now in the USA. I've noticed palpable distrust and hatred on both sides of the street. Its not just that whites are racist against blacks, its the total breakdown of trust on both sides of the coin, leading to social exclusion. Just as a black person may have trouble breaking into a white man's only club, a white person would have no possibility of entering black only spheres w/o experiencing racism as well. IMO the only solution is deeply intentional integration such that all classes and colors begin to experience all aspects of life together, ultimately including marriage and child birth. Until we see "them" as "us" there will be allegiances.
- wppick 10y agoDid the article answer the question of why black and white Americans don't live together? I didn't seem to see any theories besides saying that real estate agents wouldn't show one black couple houses in the white neighborhoods. How does black American integration compare with Chinese American integration, and what can we learn from that? Is there a bigger, subconscious (possibly genetic) reason why black and whites don't live together? Or is it simply due to the the events of American history?
- nostrademons 10y ago(Half-Chinese here, with an immigrant parent on the Chinese side.) Interestingly, Asian-American integration seems to happen only within higher socioeconomic classes. Asian-Americans as a group seem bifurcated into South or East Asians who immigrated into highly-technical, well-paying jobs after 1965 (when U.S. immigration policy opened up to let them in), and East Asians who came over for things like the California railroads in the late 1800s or Southeast Asians who arrived as refugees in the 70s and 80s. The latter group is much more likely to live in Chinatown, work in restaurants or laundromats rather than software companies, have few friends of other races (indeed, inner-city Asian-Americans I knew in college seemed more likely to hang out with the black kids than the white ones), and speak relatively poor English. This makes me think the root cause is economic. It could have to do with these groups not being able to afford houses in nicer areas, or it could be people not wanting to associate with people who they view as a rung down on the socioeconomic ladder.
- clock_tower 10y agoGenetic? Cultural is more likely. American blacks are mostly descended from Ibo and Ibibo from Biafra -- the best peoples in Black Africa, the market-dominant minority of the whole Gold Coast, a dynamic, energetic, ambitious group -- but they came down with a case of redneck-ism in their long stay in the South, and middle- or upper-class whites don't live among rednecks any more than they live among blacks. You see a lot of white-on-white conflicts that look almost exactly like white-on-black ones wherever hillbillies and non-hillbillies try to coexist -- particularly in the southern Rust Belt, where it's common for Catholic ethnics to be the middle class and hillbillies/rednecks the former factory hands. I'd recommend reading _Hillbilly Elgy_, Thomas Sowell's _Black Rednecks and White Liberals_, and of course _Albion's Seed_ for details. Jim Webb also had some essays on this subject, before he was elected to Congress; he had plans to unite hillbillies and blacks as a single interest group, and I'm not sure if that would have been a good idea or a bad one.
- mudil 10y agoTribalism is a natural human condition (maybe it's an instinct, I don't know). It's integral part of us. Comes from evolution, really. Everybody hates everybody. Heck, Russians and Ukrainians hate each other, and you wouldn't find more similar groups of people. (I am from Ukraine.) To deny human tribalism is to deny reality. We need to fight tribalism and hatred but unfortunately it's not going away. So, the question is why we constantly hear about one minority but not the others? After all, we have people of all colors and origins in America from Chinese and Indian, to Russian and Samoan. My feeling is that blacks have been highjacked by politicos and turned into pawn for political games. And the result is that children and families suffer. How is it not failure of political science that 72% of black kids are born to single mothers? Blame Republicans all you want, but blacks are represented by the Democrats on all levels of government, from city to state to Congress. How is it not a failure of representation? I think if we get politicos from dividing us, everyone will benefit, especially blacks.
- redwards510 10y agoYes, I don't understand the logic of how people can push identity politics and yet also be against racism/segregation.
- mudil 10y agoTribalism is a natural human condition (maybe it's an instinct, I don't know). It's integral part of us. Comes from evolution, really. Everybody hates everybody. Heck, Russians and Ukrainians hate each other, and you wouldn't find more similar groups of people. (I am from Ukraine.) To deny human tribalism is to deny reality. We need to fight tribalism and hatred but unfortunately it's not going away. So, the question is why we constantly hear about one minority but not the others? After all, we have people of all colors and origins in America from Chinese and Indian, to Russian and Samoan. My feeling is that blacks have been highjacked by politicos and turned into pawn for political games. And the result is that children and families suffer. How is it not failure of political science that 72% of black kids are born to single mothers? Blame Republicans all you want, but blacks are represented by the Democrats on all levels of government, from city to state to Congress. How is it not a failure of representation? I think if we get politicos from dividing us, everyone will benefit, especially blacks.