Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage

8. Locked In: How White Advantage May Now Have Become Hard-Wired into the System

108 > 109 neighborhoods in 1970 were also the poorest in 1990, only much more so. Over time, neighborhood positions remained remarkably stable despite a high turnover of families and individuals. Not surprisingly, the racial makeup of neighborhoods also stayed fairly stable, as race was linked closely to poverty. The poorest neighborhoods were also the blackest neighborhoods. For the beginning and end of the period, poverty was highest in the neighborhoods that formed the core of the city’s historic black belt: Grand Boulevard, Oakland, Woodlawn , and Englewood to the south, and Garfield Park and North Lawndale along the city’s western corridor. Indeed, race seemed to constitute the magic key that determined whether neighborhoods would remain poor. Persistent racial poverty appeared to kick in at a specific threshold: neighborhoods that were at least 40 percent black in 1970 remained black and poor or became blacker and poorer over the next twenty years. And poverty wasn’t just associated with a neighborhood’s African American composition. Chicago had become more heavily Latino during the twenty years under study. Sure enough, the study’s results showed that over time, the presence of Latinos in a neighborhood came to be linked to higher poverty rates. White neighborhoods were affected by race as well. Neighborhoods with the fewest homeowners and those closest to the black belt experienced the biggest increases in poverty. For both black and white neighborhoods , the study showed what long-time Chicago residents had already known—over time the white rich got richer, or at the very least stayed richer, and the black poor got (or stayed) poorer. Whites who got poorer were the ones who lived closest to black neighborhoods. Sampson and Morenoff’s findings suggest that race was closely correlated to the economic status of the neighborhoods. How is it that neighborhoods remain racially segregated and desperately poor generation after generation? This chapter suggests that white self-reinforcing advantage may now be “locked in” because it costs too much to switch to a more inclusive path. People of color would have to come up with the money to buy into wealthier neighborhoods. White 110 > 111 keyboard found on all electronic devices today—to two seemingly minor historical events. Initially, in the late 1800s, a number of typing schools decided to use the QWERTY keyboard to develop a typing course. A short time later, a typist using this QWERTY keyboard scored a decisive victory in a typing contest in 1888. These minor events gave the QWERTY keyboard a small but important competitive lead early on in the keyboard market. That advantage then became self-reinforcing, owing to the relationship between typist preferences and employers labor needs. New typists were eager to train on the most popular keyboard adopted by the widest range of employers. In turn, employers wanted to buy the keyboard that would give them access to the greatest pool of trained typists. Each bump in the number of QWERTY typists triggered an increase in the number of employers who bought the keyboard. In turn, the keyboard’s greater popularity with employers persuaded even more typists to train on the keyboard, and so on and so forth. Eventually, the QWERTY keyboard captured the market. At some point during the market competition, QWERTY’s initial advantage became virtually impossible to dislodge. Once QWERTY had become sufficiently popular, typists and employers were no longer willing to pay the costs to switch to an alternative keyboard. For one thing, typists on an alternate keyboard would have to duplicate their costs to train on using the board, rendering the cost to train on QWERTY wasted. Typists using another keyboard would also reduce their number of potential employment opportunities. For their part, employers using another keyboard would risk having too small a pool of trained typists from which to draw. At some point, owing to these switching costs, the likelihood that either employers or typists would switch dropped quite dramatically. The Polya Urn We can explore a slightly more sophisticated description of lock-in by examining the Polya urn model that we discussed in the first chapter. Recall that in a Polya urn model experiment, researchers fill an urn with 112 > 113 little difference a few draws later in the process, once the urn has tipped to majority white. In the second phase, the urn has settled at some fixed...