The Price of Paradise: The Costs of Inequality and a Vision for a More Equitable America

4. The Promise Half Empty: Assuming That Segregation Is a Thing of the Past

91 4 THE PROMISE HALF EMPTY ASSUMING THAT SEGREGATION IS A THING OF THE PAST If you took a poll to see which of three subjects Americans would prefer to have a ninety-second discussion about, and the three choices were segregation, slavery, or irritable bowel syndrome, I’m pretty sure irritable bowels would win going away. If the mere mention of slavery elicits claims of African American whining, segregation beyond the black-and-white pictured past is more than avoided—it is flatly denied. Besides, it’s over. The increasing diversity of growing inner-ring suburbs —an argument made in this very book—is proof of positive change. The assumption, then, is that racial segregation was triumphantly overcome decades ago. Whatever remains of it is the natural consequence of voluntary preferences. People of similar backgrounds tend to cluster together, which is their right. If this assumption is true and is a fair assessment of a victorious national struggle, then we should celebrate the tangible distance we’ve covered since the days of freedom marches in the South. We don’t. Every Fourth of July, we would party in neighborhood streets, parks, school yards, and boulevards so racially mixed that they blur distinctions. THE PROMISE HALF EMPTY 92 Segregation would be hard to imagine, but the collective will to overcome it would be well-known to everyone, especially immigrants and schoolchildren, a hard-fought element of their identity as Americans. If the assumption that we have overcome segregation were true, there might be no greater claim to American exceptionalism, because, as most of us really do believe, racial segregation was the spatial manifestation of our greatest hatreds and miseries, the visible landscape of a young nation’s formation by racism. It wasn’t a black thing then. It was an every thing. Yet as the last chapter shows, segregation—the economic and racial condition of systematic sorting by place—is part of a far more acceptable social distancing that is routinely mediated through income and socioeconomic status. Both racial and economic separation produce unsustainable costs to all of us, with the same combination of direct and indirect effects. Racial segregation has a different heritage, though. Government at all levels fought for it, then against it, then for it again. It joined with private attitudes and the private sector to create racial maps that were hard to undo. Then with the advent of colorblindness came something most Americans probably do not recognize for what it is: resegregation. In housing. In schools. To explore the character of segregation today, this chapter begins by trying to feel segregation before we measure it, then calculating how we suffer segregation today before examining how legal localism helped to remake it. Finally, we’ll look at three subjects I have long personally avoided for their complexity: returning to Detroit where I was born, examining the problem of segregated schools, and reconsidering integration as a goal. Feeling Segregation I myself was ambivalent about the continued relevance of segregation. I appreciateditssignificancewithahistoricalsentimentality.Afterall,Igrew up in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. We invented multiracialism and multiculturalism before Californians had even heard of it. But reading THE PROMISE HALF EMPTY 93 about housing lawsuits and school diversity battles, even protesting South African apartheid in the 1980s, reminded me of something my father used to like to do when I was a boy. He would take me to a particular intersectionontheUpperEastSide —96thStreetandParkAvenue—andwewould standtogetherontheislanddividingnorth-andsouthboundtraffic. “Look downtown for a minute,” my father would say, squaring my shoulders to the south. “Now look uptown for a minute. Tell me what you see.” It was a trick, a favorite one he’d play on me and anyone who visited us from out of town. Looking downtown I saw perhaps the richest avenue on earth, with beautiful gray stone and brown brick buildings, white-gloved doormen and the (then) Pan Am Building standing tall at the end of it, almost with its hands on its silver hips, a gateway to Midtown’s office wealth. Everybody, everybody except the nannies and deliverymen there was white. Looking uptown, the avenue was immediately split down the middle by the rise of the Metro-North commuter line, the rails encased in a thick stone elevation that darkened the street around it, crowded the sidewalks except for the long waiting line of red brick high-rise housing projects on either side. Here at the...