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4 INSTITUTIONAL PATTERNS AND TRANSFORMATIONS: RACE AND ETHNICITY IN HOUSING,EDUCATION,LABOR MARKETS, RELIGION,AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE  Amanda E. Lewis, Maria Krysan, Sharon M. Collins, Korie Edwards, and Geoff Ward WHERE PEOPLE LIVE, go to school, work, and pray—as well as the system purported to protect them as they go about these and other pursuits—continues to be fundamentally shaped by race and ethnicity. An individual’s race and ethnicity shapes how he or she is treated by the institutions of housing, education, labor markets, religion, and the criminal justice system, and issues of race and ethnicity are embedded in how these institutions operate. This is not a new story. But what is new are the particulars of how race and ethnicity operate and the larger context within which they operate. Specifically, the manifestations and expressions of racial stratification, prejudice, and discrimination have become more subtle, and the causes and consequences correspondingly more complex. Increases in immigration from Asia and Latin America, which have resulted in a dramatic demographic change in the racial-ethnic composition of the United States, have also made the dynamics of race and ethnicity more complex. In this chapter, we examine five social institutions, providing a brief historical context for each institution before reviewing recent trends in racial and ethnic inequality within it. We highlight the current key debates on the impact of race and ethnicity on each of these institutions and then pose key questions for the future. Within our discussion of each institution, our aim is to clarify how race and ethnicity play out at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Taken together, these detailed examinations of five institutions provide important insights into how race and ethnicity continue to affect individuals in their everyday life. HOUSING Throughout our nation’s history, there have been few moments when whites and blacks shared residential space. During some times and in some places the separation was not as severe, and in recent decades the levels of integration have risen modestly in some areas, but it is still difficult to survey America’s landscape without concluding that whites and blacks live in different neighborhoods and communities. Although the overall terrain has changed only somewhat , the context in which these patterns are created and perpetuated has shifted substantially, and the causes of these patterns continue to be the subject of much research and debate. Prior to 1968, explicit and in many cases legally and politically mandated laws and public policies kept African Americans out of white neighborhoods. These policies shaped where people moved, encouraged neighborhood turnover, and turned a blind eye to the deterioration of the communities in which African Americans predominated. For example, local governments instituted restrictive zoning ordinances to keep blacks out of certain neighborhoods, and the federal government’s policies on public housing and other housing programs were complicit in these efforts as they encouraged white movement to the suburbs and discouraged investment in urban housing stock, where most African Americans lived (Oliver and Shapiro 1995). These patterns were exacerbated by actions taken in the private realm. Neighborhood improvement associations and the real estate industry used restrictive covenants to prohibit white owners from selling to African Americans. Brokers and lenders were often bound by their codes of practice and ethics to refuse their services to those who were making pro-integrative moves, and others in the industry took direct action to prompt racial turnover through various “block-busting” strategies (Massey and Denton 1993; Meyer 2000). In fact, as Stephen Meyer (2000) has recently argued, government policies were constructed in part as a response to the civil disruption created by whites— individually as well as collectively through homeowners’ associations, neighborhood groups, and mobs—upon the arrival of African Americans on their block. Whites responded with intimidation, scare tactics, buyouts, and protests (see also Sugrue 1996). After years of resistance through the work of individual black homeowners making integrative moves and through collective action by civil rights groups waging legal and political battles, the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act signaled the end of “legal” housing segregation. Although explicit barriers and policies limiting blacks’ housing choices were made illegal by the act, continued research and persisting patterns of segregation reveal that free and open access to housing is still not a reality for racial and ethnic minorities in the twenty-first-century United States. The most recent census data document modest declines in black-white residential segregation, mainly in newer areas 68 THE...

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