This chapter explains how racial residential segregation affects the health of Black Americans. Housing is highly racially segregated in most American cities. While this occurs to some extent because people want to live with other people similar to them, it is primarily due to governmental policies and private business practices that created widespread residential segregation by severely restricting where Black people could live. The neighborhoods to which Black Americans were relegated were typically in undesirable areas, physically separated from the larger community, and containing few resources. Once these neighborhoods were created, the practices of banks (e.g., refusing loans) and real estate firms (e.g., restrictive covenants) made it difficult for Black Americans to improve these areas or to leave them. Living in these neighborhoods makes poverty more likely, which, by itself, is associated with poorer health. These neighborhoods are also more likely to have high levels of environmental toxins (e.g., polluted air and water), limited availability of healthy food, unhealthy built environments (e.g., dangerous housing, absence of green spaces), and limited access to healthcare. In sum, residential segregation, which is the product of anti-Black racism, creates living conditions that threaten Black Americans’ health.

One of the most destructive features of modern life is to deprive people of the sense that they are essentially creative beings. The industrialization and commercialization of work have a lot to do with this, but so too does the elevation of the fine artist as a lonely (often tortured) genius, and the reduction of people to passive consumers. In this chapter, Wirzba gives an account of good work as an indispensable means through which people contribute to the making of a beautiful world and thriving communities. To be creative is to respond to the sanctity of fellow creatures with the skill and devotion that contribute to shared flourishing. But for people to be creative in this way, the personal, social, economic, and political contexts through which they live need to be properly cultivated. The highest form of creativity is to focus and train one’s love into practical skills that join with the sacred love that is already at work in the world.