Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing

5. When Class Trumps Race: Explaining Perpetrator Motivation in Interclass Cases

136 > 137 committed specifically by working-class whites is the group position model of prejudice. This model asserts that a measure of a specific group’s prejudice toward members of another group is captured by the extent to which members of other groups are viewed as a competitive threat.1 Research has suggested that white working-class individuals’ prejudice stems from a sense of competition with African Americans. Predominately white blue-collar ethnic neighborhoods have come to be referred to as defended neighborhoods, described by the Chicago School sociologist Gerald Suttles as a residential area that “seals itself off through the efforts of delinquent gangs, by restrictive covenants, by sharp boundaries or by a forbidding reputation.”2 Suttles departs from earlier analyses of white ethnic neighborhoods by the sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, noting that though they often contain many members of the same ethnic group, defended neighborhoods do not need to be ethnically homogeneous to be stable.3 Instead, stability comes from the geographic boundaries of the neighborhood. Residents of defended neighborhoods are often primed to react to a lurking threat. The threat has various forms, ranging from minority integration to urban decay. A cohesive identity makes it easier to see outsiders as threatening. Ethnographers of blue-collar urban neighborhoods describe residents as having a very strong sense of place.4 The residents know what they want to defend. The Beltway, a working-class neighborhood in Chicago , was such a place. According to the sociologist Maria Kefalas, “The people of the Beltway seem to share a collective understanding of how their place ought to look and, in a philosophical sense, how its residents ought to be. . . . Individuals who violate the landscape—and that includes other working-class whites—become the object of scorn and derision.”5 Often such neighborhoods act as a cohesive community where residents are tied to each other through large networks, common ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds, and community organizations. They also frequently interact with one another. Whether because of the ethnic ties within the community, the neighborhood’s history, or the neighborhood’s neat bungalows, residents maintain a very fierce pride about living in the area. Several ethnographies have explored the issues of white identity in working-class white ethnic neighborhoods that are populated by 138 > 139 and his colleagues, in 1990 Sheepshead Bay was 84 percent white, 7 percent Asian American, 6 percent Latino, and just 2 percent black.9 Green and his coauthors compared incidents classified and investigated as racially motivated bias crimes with census data showing racial change for Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos between 1980 and 1990 in a selection of predominantly white neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. To test whether a large percentage of whites in an area were threatened by minorities moving in, Green and his colleagues used census data to calculate the change in the black, Latino, and Asian American population proportions in the neighborhoods they were studying. Comparing this data with hate crime data in each of the areas being studied, Green and his colleagues found that anti-minority crime was correlated with increases in Asian American, Latino, and black migration to neighborhoods. It was not just that numbers of hate crimes increased as the number of minorities in the city as a whole grew. Green and his colleagues were careful to link increases in hate crime directly to change in the composition of formerly white neighborhoods. Increases in hate crime against each of the groups “hinged on the spatial arrangement of population growth, in particular, the extent to which newcomers cross into areas where whites have traditionally been numerically dominant.”10 Following the work of Green, Strolovitch, and Wong, scholars tried to replicate the research in other cities, hoping to evaluate the reach of the defended neighborhood thesis—that many more bias crimes would occur in homogeneous white neighborhoods in the process of integration . Evaluating the defended neighborhood hypothesis in Sacramento, California, Ryken Grattet compared predominately white Sacramento neighborhoods that were integrating with more mixed neighborhoods and found that homogeneous white neighborhoods to which a large number of nonwhites moved had twice as many bias crimes as expected in comparison to neighborhoods not in the process of integration. In mixed neighborhoods, nonwhite in-migration in Sacramento was associated with a lower rate of bias crimes.11 Another study evaluating the defended neighborhood thesis in Chicago used similar data...