The Great Racial Divide

We have watched seismic reactions to what have unfortunately become uncomfortable patterns of racial intolerance. People of color. Black. Asian. Latino. Native American. Those police departments that require their uniformed field officers to carry body cameras (when they are not “inadvertently” turned off) coupled with increasingly ubiquitous smart phone videos and CCTV video files have revealed the seemingly never-ending “us” versus “them” systematic disparity in the treatment of civilians by police departments. But are we remotely getting better? Changing?

As African Americans, for example, raised their voices in demands for equal justice, there has been an amazing responsive cry from white supremacists and too many state legislatures tripping all over themselves to justify reinforcing patterns of obvious racism, whether by way of making voting exceptionally difficult for people living in minority neighborhoods (but aren’t we more integrated so that shouldn’t matter?), reversing voting rights protections and minority housing support, banning teachings of our history of racial and ethnic prejudices and actions and insisting on the continuance of tributes to slave owners and those who fought to continue slavery as a basic American institution.

For those who believe that the United States has progressed far beyond the dictates of Brown vs Board of Education (1954 Supreme Court school integration case), the Civil Rights and Voting Rights federal statutes of the mid-1960s and the many judicial rulings that followed, that having elected a Black president with a cultural awareness of Black creativity and political power, that we have moved into a far more integrated society, think again. According to a study published on June 21st by the University of California, Berkeley (the Othering & Belonging Institute) entitled 

The Roots of Structural Racism Project, the United States today is far more racially segregated today than it was 30 years ago. Generated by a detailed statistical demographic analysis, here are some of the highlights of that report:

“In 2020, disparate rates of infection and deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic and a series of shocking police encounters captured on video, culminating in the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, prompted what media organizations labeled ‘a National Reckoning on race.’ A greater portion of the American public awakened to the fact that too many people of color were disadvantaged in ways that seemed to shape life chances and overall well-being. Demonstrations supporting the Black Lives Matter movement occurred not only in large metropolitan regions, but spread to many predominantly white and rural counties across the country. Books on race and racism shot up best seller charts, polls indicated a groundswell of public support for race-conscious policy reforms, and the term ‘systemic racism’ entered the mainstream lexicon.

“Racial disparities in health and well-being, policing and the criminal justice system, schools and universities, corporations and labor markets, and in neighborhoods and housing are stark and difficult to ignore. Whereas such disparities may once have been attributed to differences in intelligence, motivation or effort, the surge in anti-racism activism and reading has helped engender greater awareness of the structural inequities that underpin these outcomes. Journalists have probed these phenomena more deeply than in the past, revealing the circumstances and conditions that contribute to these outcomes or the subtle differences in treatment or care that create stunning inequities.

“Despite these efforts, however, there remains a surprising lack of appreciation for the centrality of racial residential segregation in forming and sustaining these disparities. It is residential segregation, by sorting people into particular neighborhoods or communities on the basis of race, that connects (or fails to connect) residents to good schools, nutritious foods, healthy environments, good paying jobs, and access to health care, clinics, critical amenities and services. [In addition to the above map, here are some of the specific results of the study:]

1. Out of every metropolitan region in the United States with more than 200,000 residents, 81 percent (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990

2. Rustbelt cities of the industrial Midwest and mid-Atlantic disproportionately make up the top 10 most segregated cities list, which includes Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Trenton

3. Out of the 113 largest cities examined, only Colorado Springs, CO and Port St. Lucie, FL qualify as “integrated” under our rubric

4. Neighborhood poverty rates are highest in segregated communities of color (21 percent), which is three times higher than in segregated white neighborhoods (7 percent)

5. Black children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn nearly $1,000 more as adults per year, and $4,000 more when raised in white neighborhoods, than those raised in highly segregated communities of color

6. Latino children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn $844 more per year as adults, and $5,000 more when raised in white neighborhoods, than those raised in highly segregated communities of color

7. Household incomes and home values in white neighborhoods are nearly twice as high as those in segregated communities of color

8. Homeownership is 77 percent in highly segregated white neighborhoods, 59 percent in well-integrated neighborhoods, but just 46 percent in highly segregated communities of color

9. 83 percent of neighborhoods that were given poor ratings (or "redlined") in the 1930s by a federal mortgage policy were as of 2010 highly segregated communities of color

10. Regions with higher levels of racial residential segregation have higher levels of political polarization, an important implication in the context of gerrymandering and voter suppression

11. The most segregated regions are the Midwest and mid-Atlantic, followed by the West Coast

12. Southern states have lower overall levels of segregation, and the Mountain West and Plains states have the least

Segregation is most pronounced in the crowed urban states in the north-central, northern Atlantic and Pacific regions, contrary to what most Americans might believe. That does not mean that those areas have a greater number of discriminatory laws and governmental practices, but wherever segregation exists, economic disparity seems to have become irrevocably ingrained. Generation after generation. In short, telling those in minority communities to work harder, rise above their station, flies within the factual nexus of substandard housing, inferior inner city schools, a vastly higher level of police focus on minorities with a different standard of respect and attitude, an abysmal lack of opportunities and a general feeling of hopelessness that suggests that working within the “system” is “not designed for us.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and unless we can truly begin to right this listing ship and do much better, the imposition of unequal opportunity and justice, the systematic denial of equality to minority ethnic and racial minorities, belittles each and every one of us who believe that America is or at least should be a land of “freedom and justice” for all.