Won't You be My Neighbor: Race, Class, and Residence in Los Angeles

2. Theoretical Perspectives on the Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation

Theoretical Perspectives on the Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation At the dawn of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois (1903/1990, 120–21) recognized the importance of neighborhoods—the “physical proximity of home and dwelling-places, the way in which neighborhoods group themselves, and [their] contiguity”—as primary locations for social interaction, lamenting that the “color line” separating black and white neighborhoods caused each to see the worst in the other. Indeed, students of racial inequality from Gunnar Myrdal to Karl and Alma Taeuber have believed that segregation is a major barrier to equality. The Taeubers (1965, 1) asserted that segregation “inhibits the development of informal, neighborly relations” and “ensures the segregation of a variety of public and private facilities,” and Myrdal (1944/1972, 618) believed that segregation permits prejudice “to be freely vented on Negroes without hurting whites.” Moreover, as Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993, 2–3) have observed, residential segregation “undermines the social and economic well-being” irrespective of personal characteristics. By the late 1960s, unrest in urban ghettos across the country had brought residential segregation—and by implication racial inequality—to the public’s attention, leading to the now-famous conclusion of the Kerner Commission (1968) that America was “moving toward two societies , one black, one white—separate and unequal,” as well as to passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. In addition to ending legal housing market discrimination, the Fair Housing Act marked the end of public discussion of residential segregation, since many believed that antidiscrimination legislation would be the “beginning of the end of residential segregation.” With legal barriers to educational, occupational, and residential opportunities removed, blacks could finally achieve full-fledged 39 Chapter Two integration, and social scientists, politicians, and the general public would ignore the residential dimension of “the color line” for the next two decades (Massey and Denton 1993; Meyer 2000). By the late 1970s, with conditions in the nation’s urban areas—where the majority of blacks were still concentrated—in precipitous decline, social scientists began scrambling to explain the emergence of a disproportionately black urban underclass, but they paid little or no attention to persisting residential segregation by race. In The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), William Julius Wilson outlines the most widely accepted theory of urban poverty: geographically concentrated poverty and the subsequent development of a ghetto underclass resulted from structural changes in the economy combined with the exodus of middle- and working-class black families from many inner-city ghetto neighborhoods. The shift from a goods- to a services-producing economy caused huge declines in the availability of low-skilled manufacturing jobs that paid enough to support a family; owing to past discrimination , blacks were disproportionately concentrated in these jobs and therefore suffered massive unemployment. Wilson argues that middleand working-class blacks, having benefited more substantially from affirmative action policies and antidiscrimination legislation, were able to take advantage of residential opportunities outside of the ghetto. These shifts led to an “exponential increase” in the now well-known social dislocations associated with sudden and/or long-term increases in joblessness —under- and unemployment, welfare dependence, out-of-wedlock births, and blatant disregard for the law. The out-migration of nonpoor blacks, Wilson (1987, 56–60) argues, removed an important “social buffer,” leaving poor blacks in socially isolated communities that lacked material resources, access to jobs and job networks, and exposure to conventional role models, and therefore “generate[d] behavior not conducive to good work histories.”1 Massey and Denton (1993) show, however, that, without residential segregation, structural changes in the economy would not have had monumentally disastrous social and economic effects on American inner cities. Retooling existing theories of urban poverty to include processes of racial residential segregation, they argue, resolves unanswered questions regarding the disproportionate representation of blacks and Puerto Ricans in the ranks of the underclass, as well as the concentration of underclass communities in the older, larger cities of the Northeast and Midwest . In the largest urban areas, blacks and Puerto Ricans have been the only groups to experience both extreme residential segregation and steep rises in poverty, owing to the fact that areas of black concentration were especially hard hit by the economic reversals of the 1970s (Massey and 40 Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Denton 1993, 146–47).2 Emphasizing the interaction of segregation and rising poverty also furthers our understanding of the inability of nonpoor blacks...