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The Racial Ghetto as a Race-making Situation: The Effects of Residential Segregation on Racial Inequalities and Racial Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

David R. James
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Review Section Symposium
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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , Spring 1994 , pp. 407 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1994 

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References

1 The Souls of Black Folk 23 (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1961).Google Scholar

2 The world's most notorious remaining example of state-enforced discrimination was officially eliminated with the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa's new nonracial democracy on 10 May 1994. U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1993 (Washington: GPO, 1994); David R. James, “Slavery and today, but they also seldom prevent many forms of racial discrimination by other societal actors or redress injuries that result from them. Involuntary Servitude,” in E. G. Borgatta & M. L. Borgatta, eds., Encyclopedia of Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1992).Google Scholar

3 Coloureds are people of mixed race. Asians are predominately descendants of indentured sewants imported from India.Google Scholar

4 Laureen Platzky & Cheryl Walker, The Surplus People (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985); Anthony Lemon, ed., Homes Apart: South Africa's Segregated Cities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) (“Lemon, Homes Apart”).Google Scholar

5 Whereas poverty is concentrated on a racial basis in both systems, the spatial patterns are different. Poor nonwhite populations tend to be concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods in the central cities of major metropolitan areas in the United States. By contrast, South African segregation policies typically located coloured and Indian group areas and the African townships on the periphery of the “apartheid city.” See Anthony Lemon, “The Apartheid City,” in id., Homes Apart 1-25.Google Scholar

6 See at 15-16 for an explicit analogy between the United States and South Africa.Google Scholar

7 The implementation of the New Deal farm programs and succeeding farm policies that drastically reduced the acres devoted to cotton and tobacco in the South is the best example of a policy with unintended ghetto-building consequences. The northward migration of 4 million southern blacks between 1940 and 1970 provided the people necessary for the dramatic postwar expansion of the ghettos in northern cities. Out-migration from the South was closely linked to the implementation of crop reduction programs that, in turn, led to the demise of labor-intensive agricultural practices employing large numbers of blacks. See Karl E. Taeuber & Alma F. Taeuber, “The Black Population in the United States,” in M. M. Smythe, ed., The Black American Reference Book 159-206 (Englewood-Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976); David R. James, “Local State Structure and the Transformation of Southern Agriculture,” in A. E. Havens, ed., Studies in the Transformation of U.S. Agriculture 158-78 (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1986); Whatley, Warren, “Labor for the Picking: The New Deal in the South,” 43 J. Econ. Hist. 913 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 I attribute this contribution to Massey and Denton, although the first and most complete demonstration of how these four conditions combine to concentrate African American poverty appeared in Douglas S. Massey. “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass,” 96 Am. J. Soc. 329 (1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Blacks outnumber whites in the central cities of a number of metropolitan areas, but the entire metropolitan area is the appropriate ecological unit to examine here because the segregation of housing markets is a metropolitan process. Because work places can be far removed from home places, the concentration of blacks in central cities is part of the process that disperses whites into the suburbs.Google Scholar

10 See, e.g., Massey, Douglas S. & Eggers, Mitchell L., “The Ecology of Inequality: Minorities and the Concentration of Poverty,” 95 Am. J. Soc. 1153 (1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Only 16 of the 275 metropolitan areas defined by the Census in 1980 had black percentages in excess of 30%. All 16 cities were in the South. Jackson, Miss., had the highest black percentage (40.28%). US. Bureau of the Census, State and Metropolitan Area Data Book, 1986 (Washington: GPO, 1986).Google Scholar

12 See also Karl E. Taeuber & Alma F. Taeuber, Negroes in Cities (Chicago: Aldine, 1965); Reynolds Farley & Walter R. Allen, The Cob Line and the Quality of Life m America (New York Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

13 I have not been able to find a review of American Apartheid that recognized the importance of Massey and Denton's theorem. Most concentrate on the book's policy recommendations and documentation of discrimination in housing. See, e.g., Nathan Glazer, “A Tale of Two Cities,”New Republic 2 Aug. 1993, pp. 3941; Andrew Billingsley, “Separate and Unequal,”Book World, 4 July 1993, p. 5; Rich, Wilber C., “American Apartheid,” 108 Pol. Sci. Q. 574 (1993); Roberto M. Fenandez, “American Apartheid,” 22 Contemp. Soc. 364 (1993); Andrew Hacker, N.Y. Rev. Books, 7 Oct. 1993, pp. 21 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Poky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) (“Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged”).Google Scholar

15 Paul A. Jargowsky & Mary Jo Bane, “Ghetto Poverty in the United States, 1970-1980” (“Jargowsky & Bane, ‘Ghetto Poverty’”), in Christopher Jencks & Paul E. Peterson, eds., The Urban Underclass 235 (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1991) (“Jencks & Peterson, Urban Underclass”).Google Scholar

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17 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma 75 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944) (“Myrdal, American Dilemma”). “White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ‘cause’ each other.”Google Scholar

18 Massey and Denton mention the possibility that segregation affects racial attitudes, but this reverse causal link does not play a central role in their analysis (e.g., at 94-96, 236); see also Massey, 96 Am. 1. Soc. at 353 (cited in note 8).Google Scholar

19 “Although the plight of the Negro in the ghetto and the chance of his escape from his predicament depend on his own strength, they depend also upon the willingness of the white to accept that strength. Negroes alone cannot abolish the ghetto. It will never be ended as long as the white society believes that it needs it.” Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power 224 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). The term “race-making situation” is borrowed from Edgar T. Thompson, “The Plantation as a Race-making Situation,” in E. T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations and the South 115–17 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975) (“Thompson, “Plantation”).Google Scholar

20 Thomas C. Shelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (Toronto: Norton, 1978). Schelling's book examines a variety of social processes that are constrained by population compositions and other similar factors. His comments on racial segregation and the possibilities for integration are pertinent (at 141):Google Scholar

Counting blacks and whites in a residential block or on a baseball team will not tell how they get along. But it tells something, especially if numbers and ratios matter to the people who are moving in or out of the block or being recruited to the team. With quantitative analysis there are a few logical constraints, analogous to the balance-sheet identities in economics. (Being logical constraints, they contain no news unless one just never thought of them before.) The simplest constraint on dichotomous mixing is that, within a given set of boundaries, not both groups can enjoy numerical superiority.Google Scholar

21 Id. at 142.Google Scholar

22 Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged. Google Scholar

23 Id. at 50.Google Scholar

24 Jargowsky & Bane, “Ghetto Poverty” (cited in note 15). See also Mark A. Hughes, “Formation of the Impacted Ghetto: Evidence from Large Metropolitan Areas: 1970-1980,” 11 Urban Geography 265 (1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Id. at 269.Google Scholar

26 Wilson also recognizes that downward mobility contributes to the concentration of poverty but attributes greater significance to middle-class out-migration; see, e.g., Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged 50 (cited in note 14). Note that economic declines would increase down-ward social mobility of blacks and whites, but blacks would he affected disproportionately because of higher proportions of near-poor blacks.Google Scholar

27 See, e.g., Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; Jargowsky & Bane, “Ghetto Poverty” (cited in note 15); Massey & Denton, American Apartheid; Massey & Eggers, 95 Am. J. SOC. (cited in note 10); Hughes, 11 Urban Geography; Reynolds Farley, “Residential Segregation of Social and Economic Groups among Blacks, 1970–80,”in Jencks & Peterson, Urban Underclass 274–98 (cited in note 15).Google Scholar

28 The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is a large, longitudinal study that surveyed the members of the same sample households each year since 1968. Recently, PSID data were augmented with census tract identifying codes that permits linking the economic and social characteristics of individuals to the characteristics of the census tracts in which they reside. For details, see Douglas S. Massey & Andrew B. Gross, “Migration, Segregation, and the Spatial Concentration of Poverty” (presented at Population Association of America annual meeting, 1 April 1993).Google Scholar

29 Massey, Douglas S. & Kanaiaupuni, Shawn M., “Public Housing and the Concentration of Poverty,” 74 Soc. Sci. Q. 107 (1993).Google Scholar

30 Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Homing in Chicago 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

31 E.g., see Christopher Jencks. Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass (New York: Harper/Collins, 1992); Christopher Jencks & Susan E. Mayer, “The Social Consequences of Growing Up in a Poor Neighborhood,” in L. E. Lynn, Jr., & M. G. H. McGeary, eds., Inner-City Poverty in the United States 111 (Washington: National Academy Press, 1990) (“Lynn & McGeary, Inner-City Poverty”); Fernandez, 22 Contemp. Soc. (cited in note 13).Google Scholar

32 Christopher Jencks & Susan E. Mayer, “Residential Segregation, Job Proximity, and Black Job Opportunities,”in Lynn & McGeary, Inner-City Poverty 187 (“Jencks & Mayer, ‘Residential Segregation’”).Google Scholar

33 Id. at 196; Kasarda, John, “City Jobs and Residential Segregation,” 4 Econ. Dev. Q. 313 (1990). finds that residential segregation does diminish access to suburban jobs for blacks who live in cities.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Jencks & Mayer, “Residential Segregation” at 198.Google Scholar

35 Id. at 213.Google Scholar

36 Michael Fix & Raymond J, Struyk, eds., Clear and Convincing Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America (Washington: Urban Institute Press, 1992).Google Scholar

37 James, David R., “City Limits on Racial Equality: The Effects of City-Suburb Boundaries on Public-School Desegregation, 1968–1976,” 54 Am. Soc. Rev. 963 (1989); Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: Harper, 1991); William L. Taylor & Dianne M. Piche, “A Report on Shortchanging Children: The Impact of Fiscal Inequity on the Education of Students at Risk” (prepared for the Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives, Serial No. 101-U) (Washington: GPO, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Sampson, Robert J., “Urban Black Violence: The Effects of Male Joblessness and Family Disruption,” 93 Am. J. Soc. 348 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 The percentage reported here is for the adult nonblack population. Studies of the attitudes of college students show that the percentages who hold the “lazy blacks” stereotype declines from 75% in 1932 to 18% in 1982. Leonard Gordon, “College Student Sterotype of Blacks and Jews on Two Campuses,” 70 Sociology & SOC. Res. 200-201 (1986). See also Howard Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

40 Yancey, William L., Ericksen, Eugene P. & Juliani, Richard N., “Emergent Ethnicity: A Review and Reformulation,” 41 Am. Soc. Rev. 391 (1976); Harry C. Triandis, “The Future of Pluralism Revisited,”in P. A. Katz & D. A. Taylor, eds., Eliminating Racism 31–50 (New York: Plenum, 1988); Lawrence Bobo, “Group Conflict, Prejudice, and the Paradox of Contemporary Racial Attitudes,”in id. at 85-114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 The ambiguity introduced by defining a people as black if they have any known African black ancestors is unavoidable. Logical consistency is not required in race definitions; wide social acceptance of the rule is sufficient justification. A popular textbook of the 1950s stated that the social definition of race takes precedence over legal and biological definitions and then described the U.S. definition as follows:Google Scholar

According to this (social) definition, which holds throughout the United States, anyone is a Negro who has any known trace of Negro ancestry, regardless of how far back one must go to find it. “One drop of Negro blood makes one a Negro” is the popular way of expressing the idea. The Census takes recognition of the American practice in its instructions to enumerators: “A person of mixed white and Negro blood should be returned as a Negro, no matter how small the percentage of Negro blood.”Google Scholar

Brewton Berry, Race and Ethnic Relations 30 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). Berry points out that the race definition used in the United States is not applied in other countries (at 31). The U.S. Census adopted the practice of accepting respondents' self-definition of their race in 1960.Google Scholar

42 Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991) (“Davis, Who Is Black”).Google Scholar

43 For example, Vietnam assigns mixed-race persons to the most despised status. Mexico classifies the descendants of Spaniards and American Indians as the superior racial status. See id. Google Scholar

44 According to Davis (id. at. 82-122), the other four race definitions are (1) an intermediate status (e.g., coloureds in South Africa), (2) a highly variable status depending more on social class than on color (e.g., Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Brazil), (3) a variable status independent of racial traits (e.g., Hawaii), and (4) the status of an assimilated minority (e.g., the United States for the children of whites and either American Indians, Japanese Americans, or one of the other racially distinctive minorities except blacks).Google Scholar

45 Id. at 82.Google Scholar

46 Davis (id. at 12) states that individuals whose ancestry is one-quarter American Indian or less are not defined as Indian unless they want to be. For an example of an American Indian tribe seeking to enforce the one-drop rule, see Timothy Egan, “A Cultural Gap May Swallow a Child,”N.Y. Emes, 12 Oct. 1993, p. A8. In this case, the Oglala Sioux asked an Idaho court to remove a four-year-old boy from his white adoptive parents and return him to the tribe. The child's father, an Oglala Sioux, abandoned the child's white mother, who relinquished all parental rights in the adoption proceedings soon after birth. The basis of the suit is the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (passed in 1978), which gives Indian tribes special preference in adopting children of Indian parentage.Google Scholar

47 Thompson, “Plantation” (cited in note 19).Google Scholar

48 James, David R., “The Transformation of the Southern Racial State: Class and Race Determinants of Local-State Structures in the South,” 53 Am. Soc. Rev. 191 (1988).Google Scholar

49 Several competing race definitions existed at different times in the United States. Davis, Who Is Black? 30-66; see also Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulnttoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), who argues that the one-drop rule finally became almost universally accepted during the 1920s as a complicated result of the imposition of Jim Crow segregation in the South, black resistance to Jim Crow, and the development of a new American black culture in the cities (symbolized by the “Harlem Renaissance”) which reinforced black identity and pride.Google Scholar

50 The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Afro-Centrism Movement today are recent examples of social movements that resisted blacks' confinement to a subordinate status. As part of their resistance, both movements have been successful in nourishing and solidifying the racial identities of blacks. Michael Omi & Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).Google Scholar

51 Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). See also Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), and Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Ethnic Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).Google Scholar

52 Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) (“Anderson, Streetwise”). See also Elijah Anderson, “The Code of the Streets,”Atlantic Monthly, May 1994, at 81-94 (“Anderson, ‘Code’”).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 Id. at 239. Neither Anderson nor I argue that the culture that has developed in black underclass communities today was completely determined by social and economic conditions. Arguing that the oppositional culture that emerged in underclass communities is an adaptive response to the social and economic conditions in those areas does not imply that the emergence of that culture was inevitable nor that similar conditions would produce similar cultures elsewhere. Social and economic conditions place limits on the possibilities of cultural change, but many different cultures may be consistent with a particular set of conditions.Google Scholar

54 Anderson, “Code.”Google Scholar

55 See Massey & Denton at 5-7 for a brief review of the literature on the culture of poverty.Google Scholar

56 See also Jay MacLeod,Ain't No Mnkin' It: Leveled Aspirations in a Low-Income Neighburbod (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1987).Google Scholar

57 See also Richard Majors & Janet M. Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1992).Google Scholar

58 Feagin, Joe R., “The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places,” 56 Am. Soc. Rev. 101 (1991). For newspaper accounts, see, e.g., John Blake, “Miscast ‘Monsters’ of the Streets,”Chicago Tribune, 15 Sept. 1987, sec. 2, p. 1; Isabel Wilkerson, “Campus Blacks Feel Racism's Nuances,”N.Y. Times, 17 April 1988, p. 1; Brent Staples, “How a Young Black Scholar Learned the Language of Fear,”N.Y. ‘Times Mag., 6 Feb. 1994, pp. 22 ff.; David J. Dent, “The New Black Suburbs,”N.Y. ‘Times Mag., 14 June 1992, pp. 18 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 For example, angry, loud complaints about an unthinking racial insult or slur may appear exaggerated to the white person who committed the offense. The black victim tends to view the incident as the most recent example of a consistent pattern of abuse and discrimination. The white offender tends to view the insult as an isolated incident. Hence, the black victim's response is in part due to the cumulative effect of past discrimination. The white offender, on the other hand, does not feel responsible for the prior acts of others and therefore feels that the magnitude of the victim's angry response is not merited by the magnitude of the offense. See Feagin, 56 Am. Soc. Rev., for other examples.Google Scholar

60 Id. at 115.Google Scholar

61 Dent, N.Y. Times Mag. In 1980, Prince George's County's population of 729,268 was 50.7% blacks. Over half of the census tracts in the county were more than 70% black. Over 37% of the black population had household incomes greater than $50,000. Only 25% of the total U.S. black population had incomes that high. About 9% of black households in Prince George's had incomes below $15,000 compared to the 37% of black households nationwide.Google Scholar

62 id. at 20.Google Scholar

63 Id. at 20-21.Google Scholar

64 American Apartheid at 78-81. Similar patterns apply in the suburbs. Massey and Denton's probability calculations included controls for the presence of other racial groups in the neighborhood, the distance from Hispanic areas, rates of white and minority population growth, job creation rates, housing quality factors, and region.Google Scholar

65 A.46 probability of white population decline is just below the 50/50 point at which the chances of white decline and increase are equal; equivalently, there is a 54% chance of an increase in the white population.Google Scholar

66 By contrast, the neighborhood choices of blacks follow a pattern that is insensitive to the location of areas of high black concentrations: the probability of black population gain remains constant at about.56 to.58 up to a distance of 25 miles from city neighborhoods that are 30%-40% black. Massey and Denton argue that this pattern is consistent with decreased housing discrimination against blacks because the “old patterns of discrimination” should have produced high probabilities of black gain near black neighborhoods and smaller probabilities of black gain as distance from black areas increased (at 80). In fact, proximity to tracts with high or low black population proportions had little influence on the chances of black population increase.Google Scholar

67 Myrdal, American Dilemma (cited in note 17); Charles S. Johnson, Backgrounds to Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1943).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68 Anderson, Streetwise at 163-89 (cited in note 50). Anderson may be right about the preference of young black muggers for white middle-class targets, but the opportunities to act on this preference are small compared to the opportunities to assault other blacks. Consequently, most black assailants attack black victims. For example, about half of the murders committed in 1990 were committed by blacks, a proportion much higher than one might expect given that blacks make up about 13% of the population. About 11% of the victims of black assailants were white. By contrast, about 6% or 7% of the victims of white murderers were black. See Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Sepasnte, Hostile, Unequal 183 (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1992).Google Scholar

69 Anderson “Code” at 89.Google Scholar

70 Id. at 84.Google Scholar

71 Paul L. Jargowsky and Mary Jo Bane, “Ghetto Poverty: Basic Questions,”in Lynn & McGeary, Inner-City Poverty 16-67 (cited in note 32).Google Scholar

72 Matthijs Kalmijn, “Trends in Black/White Intermarriage,” 72 Soc. Furces 119 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73 U.S. Census data reported in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America 133 (New York: Norton, 1992). Most interracial marriages were between blacks and whites.Google Scholar

74 Massev, & Denton, , “Trends in the Residential Segregation of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians: 1970-1980,” 52 Am. Soc. Rev. 802 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

75 See, e.g., Interrace: The Source for interracial Living (Atlanta, Ga.), founded in 1989; New People: The Authority on Interracial News and Views (Oak Park, Mich.), founded in 1990; Biracial Child, founded in 1993 by the publishers of Interrace. Google Scholar

76 See, e.g., Just Black? Multi-racial Identity, a film produced by F. W. Twine and J. F. Warren (1992), Filmakers Library, Inc., 124 E. 40th Street, New York, N.Y. P. 924; Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).Google Scholar

77 See New People 4 (Nov./Dec. 1993), p. 25, for a list of interracial support groups complete with addresses and telephone numbers.Google Scholar

78 Although whites usually consider blacks to be members of a homogenous culture, increasing ethnic diversity among blacks stemming from recent voluntary migrations of blacks from Haiti, Africa, and Latin America creates additional pressure among blacks to resist the one-drop rule in America. American blacks increasingly differentiate themselves on the basis of ethnicity and national origins. See Roy Simón Bryce-Laporte, “Voluntary Immigration and Continuing Encounters between Blacks,” 530 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 28 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

79 Paul M. Sniderman & Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1993). Typical surveys of racial attitudes ask respondents how much they support or oppose racial equality on a variety of social and political issues. Responses to such questions are treated as accurate indicators of the fixed attitudes of the respondent. Sniderman and Piazza recognized that people hold opinions with varying levels of conviction and designed an experiment to test how strongly racial opinions were held. After a respondent expressed support (or opposition) to racial equality on a particular issue, the respondent was presented with a strong argument contradicting their stated position. They then were asked whether they had changed their minds on the issue. The survey's innovative design made it possible to assess the probability that white Americans would change their mind on a racial issue and identify the reasons that they changed if they did.Google Scholar

80 Id. at 177.Google Scholar