Vi Hart and Nicky Case made an interactive demonstration of how easy it is to accidentally create segregated neighborhoods: <a href="http://ncase.me/polygons/" rel="nofollow">http://ncase.me/polygons/</a>
Oak 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.
All you need for self-segregation to occur is that individuals don't want to be a small minority in their local area.<p>As people exercise that preference by moving around, they will create enclaves where certain groups dominate.<p><a href="http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segregation/" rel="nofollow">http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg...</a><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/an-immersive-game-shows-how-easily-segregation-arisesand-how-we-might-fix-it/383586/" rel="nofollow">http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/an-immersive-game-show...</a>
Tribalism 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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>I think if we get politicos from dividing us, everyone will benefit, especially blacks.
This was my public policy research area for about a decade. In my mind this remains one of the best treatments of the topic:<p>American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass - Massey and Denton<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Apartheid-Segregation-Making-Underclass/dp/0674018214" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/American-Apartheid-Segregation-Making...</a>
The 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Originally 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.
The 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.<p>It's much more mixed. Where black/white/asian areas still exist the boundaries tend to be pretty blurred.<p><a href="http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/" rel="nofollow">http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/</a>
If 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:<p><a href="http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html</a><p>(it's zoomable)
it'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.
'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?'<p>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.
It 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.
Did 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.<p>How does black American integration compare with Chinese American integration, and what can we learn from that?<p>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?
For 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.<p>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.