Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 February 14

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February 14

Reason for "segregation" in major U.S. cities?

I've heard that despite there being no official law in place enforcing racial segregation in U.S. there still is some form of it in major cities, one example being San Francisco. How come there are entire neighbourhoods that are either black or white and no one from other races living there? How come there is a difference in socio-economic statuses in average between these neighbourhoods? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.66.128.228 (talk) 18:46, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Although Cracked is a humor site, entry #1 of this article (second page linked to intentionally) does explain why many neighborhoods are still segregated, with additional sources. Ian.thomson (talk) 18:53, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Even if there is no official segregation, it is still likely that there will be some people who prefer to live with other people of the same ethnicity (or religious group, or whatever), all other things (wealth, income, etc.) being equal. One of the most interesting results in socioeconomics is that neighbourhoods that are almost entirely "black" or "white" arise naturally. This happens even if most people are not racist at all. This result was first discovered by Thomas Schelling, and he got a Nobel Prize for his work in this area.

Here is a highly simplified explanation: Imagine that at first everybody in town is randomly scattered around, so the proportion of people of different ethnicities is the same in every neighbourhood. Suppose also that there are a few empty houses, also randomly scattered around. Now imagine that every so often a family moves. One of two things can happen: either they won't care who their neighbours are, and so will simply pick the empty house that suits them best for other reasons. As far as we're concerned this is basically the same as choosing at random. Alternatively, they do care who lives next door. In that case, they will pick a house close to other people of their preferred ethnicity. This means that gradually people of the same ethnicity will tend to cluster together, because there is a consistent (though perhaps small) pressure on the geographical arrangement of society by the people who prefer to be segregated. There is no corresponding pressure to undo segregation: the people who aren't racist don't care who their neighbours are, so their choice is just more randomness on top of the randomness we started with. To read about this in more detail, take a look here and here. You may also find this blog entry and this video interesting (though the last 35 seconds of the video is just opinion, not real economics). As for the differences in socio-economic statuses between different neighbourhoods, this is not driven by race, but is simply because different neighbourhoods tend to have different housing stock and different amenities; rich people will tend to live in neighbourhoods with bigger houses and better amenities because that's what they can afford. The segregational element will overlay this, though, so we should expect to see richer and poorer white neighbourhoods, and richer and poorer black neighbourhoods (and we do!). RomanSpa (talk) 19:09, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

How come California voted for Proposition 14 in the 60's yet now is almost totally liberal, but this sort of segregation is still found? Because of the ethnocentrism of blacks?76.66.128.228 (talk) 19:17, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

As you will see from my comments above and from the reference cited, it only takes a very small proportion of people being racist to create substantial segregation. I have seen no evidence that there is particular "ethnocentrism" amongst black people. My personal impression is that black people are less focussed on their own ethnicity than white people (which is hardly surprising, given that black people in North America and Europe live in societies where the cultural and social focus is "white"). To be absolutely clear, there is no evidence that segregation arises from any kind of "ethnocentrism" by "the black community", or as a result of any concerted actions by black people at all. There is certainly good evidence that in the past there have been concerted actions by white people to act against segregation, but this has declined significantly over time. The point is that if there is even only a small proportion of the population who make their decisions on where to live on the basis of their neighbours' ethnicity, this will lead to the creation of neighbourhoods of different ethnicities. This segregation is an emergent property of the system as a whole, and cannot be blamed on the actions of an organised group, or, indeed, any particular individual making their housing choice in a free market. RomanSpa (talk) 19:37, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Also look up the annotated reading list (go to the bottom of the post) compiled by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the topic. Also see wikipedia's article on redlining, especially the parts covering housing. Abecedare (talk) 19:24, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

The reference to redlining is not relevant to the question, since redlining occurs after segregated districts have arisen. Though redlining may lead to a change in the amenities of the redlined neighbourhood this is an effect of the segregation; the questioner was asking about the cause. The reading list you mention also appears to contain rather more polemic than relevant research (as we would expect, given that the the blogger in question is largely interested in making political points. RomanSpa (talk) 19:42, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

RomanSpa, please read through the linked literature to understand how redlining is indeed a cause of racial segregation in American cities. And I wouldn't dismiss work by sociologists and historians, who are acknowledged authorities in this field, such as Kenneth T. Jackson, Thomas Sugrue, Arnold Hirsch, Douglas Massey, Robert Sampson, or the writings of Isabel Wilkerson as "polemics" but I understand that this topic is emotionally/ideologically charged and YMMV. Cheers. Abecedare (talk) 20:01, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Abecedare, I'm generally aware of most of these authors. Of the books cited that I have already read (Jackson, Wilkerson, Massey/Denton), either in whole or in part (and, admittedly, not recently), my principal concern is that all of them focus too much on the processes by which segregation occurred in the past. I took the thrust of the question to be concerned largely with "how segregation could happen 'now'", in a society where there is no legally enforced segregation. As you'll see from my note below, I had some reason to suspect that the questioner was seeking to "blame black people" for their current segregation, and was therefore primarily concerned to emphasise that segregation is not due to actions from the black community. (As for the question of redlining, whilst you are surely right that redlining can encourage continuing segregation once it is in place, redlining of a neighbourhood only takes place after the neighbourhood is already "black" (or at least, of a particular level of poverty, which is in practice the same thing).) I agree that this entire topic is fraught with emotion and ideology, which is why I am particularly concerned to focus on facts, and why I emphasised Schelling's work, which is purely abstract and thus less vulnerable to partisan readings. RomanSpa (talk) 20:46, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I should also note that I found Wilkerson waaay too anecdotal... RomanSpa (talk) 20:48, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

RomanSpa, in case it is not clear, I think that Schelling's work points to an important factor leading to segregation. One can hardly deny its import as a cause of creation/sustenance of Chinatowns, Little Italys, and Polish neighborhoods in many American cities, and it certainly played, and plays, a role in "racial segregation" in those cities. Where you and I possible differ, is whether blacks can be treated as just another ethnicity in US and the history of overt discrimination disregarded as a (IMO significant) factor leading to racial segregation; and whether racial segregation arises "entirely from non-racial economic factors" (I also disagree that people could/can "buy the best house they can afford, irrespective of their ethnicity", but that would be getting into the weeds of the debate and an interested reader can check out Sharkey's writing on the topic).

On redlining: I think you and I perhaps differ on our understanding of what the term exactly refers to, which is not surprising given that it has been used in different senses by different sources. You perhaps are referring to "Redlining" as lack of amenities in poor/Black neighborhoods, which would indeed be an effect of racial segregation and not a cause. I, on the other hand, am using it to refer to policies such as those of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in mid-twentieth century, which as the article I quoted below shows is recognized as a cause for the segregation. So in this case our disagreement may just be a matter of semantics, and not really substantive. Cheers. Abecedare (talk) 21:18, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I was actually just about to make the same point on redlining. I have been using the term in the sense given in the first sentence of our article on the subject: "...the practice of, in the United States, denying, or charging more for, services such as banking, insurance, access to health care, or even supermarkets, or denying jobs to residents in particular, often racially determined, areas". This is how the term is generally used in my area of interest. I was not using the term to refer to the actions of property developers or governmental agencies; it's perfectly obvious that if a developer sets aside different areas for different ethnicities this will lead to segregation, but this is not how I was using the term. Most current debate in the economics of banking and financial services would take "redlining" to refer to a decision not to provide services within a particular geographical area, generally because this would be seen as unprofitable. This kind of redlining certainly perpetuates areas of poverty, particularly by making it substantially more difficult for different ethnicities to access investment capital on the same terms, but it does require the redlined area to exist as a "problem" area before it can be redlined. RomanSpa (talk) 21:46, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I wouldn't say it has to be a "problem area", it might just be that the business in question would rather not deal with that minority. For example, if it's a Hispanic area, and they don't have anyone on staff who speaks Spanish, they might decide to not offer service there. StuRat (talk) 22:13, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

No, that wouldn't be a "problem" in the sense that we mean here, it would simply be an area where the business didn't have a desire to compete. Redlining, in the sense that we're talking about here, arises because statistically the behaviour of people living in the redlined area is different from that of people in other areas where the business proposes to offer its services. This is why the term appears all the time in discussions on the provision of banking services: the bank suspects that people in a particular neighbourhood have a different (higher) default probability from people in other neighbourhoods, and so uses the geographical area as part of its credit analysis when considering advancing loans. This creates a material economic disadvantage arising entirely from zip code. (The reality is, inevitably, more complicated than I have just said, but we don't need to bother about that for this comment.) The "problem" is to do with whether the geographical sample has the same characteristics as the whole population (made worse by the fact that most bankers don't understand how banks work, and nor do most members of Congress/Parliament). RomanSpa (talk) 23:11, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. Particularly as a result of the GI Bill many homes were sold after WW2. The real estate agents and bankers redlined certain areas, designating them as for minorities, perhaps because minorities were already there, but also because they were in some way undesirable, like downwind from factories. After that, they steered whites away from those areas and minorities into them. So, if you wanted to get a loan via the GI Bill, you had to go where they steered you. StuRat (talk) 20:33, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Note also that it was not just the realtors acting on their own initiative. The discrimination was also perpetuated by the federal policies. eg see this Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law paper (internal refs removed):

The role of federal and state government in creating and maintaining residential racial segregation must be understood, without excuse, as a reality of American history. On the federal level, the United States government reinforced discriminatory norms through various public policies. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) adopted the practice of "red-lining," a discriminatory rating system used by FHA to evaluate the risks associated with loans made to borrowers in specific urban neighborhoods. The vast majority of the loans went to the two top categories of the rating system, the highest of which included areas that were "new, homogenous, and in demand in good times and bad."[15] The second highest category was comprised of mostly stable areas that were still desirable. The third category, and the level at which discriminatory "red-lining" began, consisted of working class neighborhoods near black residences that were "within such a low price or rent range as to attract an undesirable element." Black areas were placed in the fourth cate gory. Mortgage funds were channeled away from fourth category African American neighborhoods and were typically redirected from communities that were located near a black settlement or an area expected to contain black residences in the future. As a result of these policies, the vast majority of FHA mortgage loans went to borrowers in white middle-class neighborhoods, and very few were awarded to black neighborhoods in central cities. Between 1930 and 1950, three out of five homes purchased in the United States were financed by FHA, yet less than two percent of the FHA loans were made to non-white home buyers. The FHA thus became the first federal agency to openly counsel and support segregation.

Wikipedia has an article on housing segregation, but it is not particularly well sourced. Abecedare (talk) 20:50, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

And note that this situation is by no means unique to the US. People of the same ethnicity often congregate in the same part of a city, especially if in addition to ethnicity they also have language, religion, and culture in common.

As for wealth, some ethnicities seem to value education more, and education level is a strong predictor of wealth. (I wouldn't say willingness to work hard is as much of a predictor, since some people work very hard at minimum wage jobs and never get ahead.) There could also be lingering discrimination against some ethnic groups, or perhaps there is no significant discrimination at present, but past discrimination left that group poorer, and they've never recovered economically from that. Currently, particularly in the US, it takes money to make money, so this situation could persist indefinitely. (There was a time, with high paying union jobs requiring minimal education, when the US had substantial upward mobility, but that all ended with free trade and the acceptance of China into the WTO.) StuRat (talk) 19:21, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

There are several factual errors or misleading phrases in your remarks, StuRat. There is no evidence that valuing education is linked to ethnicity; there does seem to be some evidence that it is linked to culture, but this is not the same thing. For the avoidance of doubt, and since I'm sure you wouldn't want anyone to impute any racist undertone to your remark in brackets, there is no evidence that a "willingness to work hard" is correlated to any particular ethnicity. There certainly is lingering discrimination against some ethnic groups, and there has certainly been discrimination in the past. From a mathematical point of view it is certainly not the case that the relative per capita wealth of different ethnic groups could persist indefinitely in the absence of any social or economic changes to current society: random changes in wealth over time time would, with probability 1, eventually ensure that the wealth distributions of different ethnic groups would be the same. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests this would take several centuries, though. Finally, it is certainly not the case that changes in the rates of social mobility in the US are due to the US adopting free trade policies in general: during the period of "high paying union jobs" that you allude to, the US was following explicitly free trade policies; in fact, it is highly likely that free trade helped create those "high paying union jobs" in the first place. RomanSpa (talk) 20:17, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, the difference in how much education and hard work is valued by the various ethnicities is due to cultural differences, if that wasn't already clear. As for hard work, it seems that many European nations value that less, with fewer working hours per week. And there has been a substantial increase in free trade agreements (such as NAFTA) and inclusion of large populations within those treaties, such as China's joining of the WTO. Combine them, and there are far more low paid workers in free trade competition with every American than there were at the height of union wages.

Re: "Random changes in wealth over time time would, with probability 1, eventually ensure that the wealth distributions of different ethnic groups would be the same". Sure they would, but that assumption is about as silly as a spherical cow. Despite a progressive tax system, wealth distribution in the US continues to become more uneven. This shows how strong the forces leading to an uneven distribution of wealth are, perhaps requiring the 90%+ former income tax rates the US once had on the richest people, in order to cancel those forces.StuRat (talk) 21:01, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Keep in mind that this is yet another race-baiting question from a Toronto IP. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:45, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I'd already noticed the similarity to earlier questions on race-related issues, which is why I have been careful to stress that segregation can in no way be laid at the door of the black community. The simple fact is that the best evidence we have, well-supported by Nobel-prize-winning theory, is that segregation arises from the individual decisions of a relatively small proportion of the population, both white and black. Further, the fact that different areas contain groups of different socio-economic levels arises entirely from non-racial economic factors (people buy the best house they can afford, irrespective of their ethnicity). There may be proportionately more "poor black" areas than "poor white" ones, but this is nothing to do with decisions made by black or white people, either as individuals or as organised (or partially organised), and arises simply because black people are, on any average (mean, median, mode), poorer than white people. This is a separate issue, separate from the question of the evolution of segregation in mixed-ethnicity cities. RomanSpa (talk) 19:55, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

• It's interesting that Thomas Schelling got a Nobel Prize for confirming what we've known forever: Birds of a feather flock together. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:53, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

No, that entirely misses the point of Schelling's work. What he showed was that even if the majority don't flock together we still end up with segregated neighbourhoods. RomanSpa (talk) 19:57, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

There's a major distinction to be made between voluntary vs. forced segregation. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:06, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

(e/c) RomanSpa, doesn't that still mean that significant minorities end up flocking together? Regardless of the underlying cause? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:11, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, we certainly end up with segregation, but this is not the result of herd/flock behaviour. In a flock, most or all birds have basically the same behaviour patterns. Racial segregation can arise even when only a few people have a particular behaviour pattern. RomanSpa (talk) 20:57, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I believe another factor which would maintain segregation post-segregation is that people would prefer to live close to family and friends. When young adults leave home they but stay in the same city they won't be thinking completely randomly but will consider where their friends, who likely lived in close proximity to their family home, live. Of course as those from other cities, nations, move it will dilute this effect, but it would slow down desegregation. 70.50.123.188 (talk) 20:39, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

For every person who prefers to stay close to their family, there is probably another who tries to move as far away from their family as possible! RomanSpa (talk) 20:51, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Parable of the Polygons —Tamfang (talk) 21:06, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

This is perfect - Schelling's work in interactive form. RomanSpa (talk) 21:57, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Self-segregation may be relevant. StuRat (talk) 21:13, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

76.66.128.228 -- Probably the persisting average wealth disparities between white and black Americans (much more severe than average income disparities), together with the fact that large numbers of whites do not feel comfortable living in neighborhoods with more than about 15% black residents, can account for a large part of remaining de facto segregation in the U.S... AnonMoos (talk) 06:18, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

White Flight can have a lot to do with it. In my hometown and in many other places, the oldest parts of town were originally inhabitated by the wealthy whites who could afford to live in the city, while the poorer blacks lived on the outskirts. As forced segregation and Jim Crow ended and the distribution of wealth began to even out, more black people could afford to move into town. The whites who didn't want black neighbors moved out to fancy new suburbs, leaving the inner cities to the blacks. As black people began to earn more and more money they naturally want nicer houses, better schools, things that white people already had, so the the black population begins to move into white areas, and the racist whites move away to live with other whites, so you end up with little segregated pockets of whites and blacks scattered around town.146.235.130.59 (talk) 14:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Best role for developing an industry

If you're interested in affecting change and developing the logistics industry from a high level, which of these roles within the industry would suit best? - operations management, engineering, logistics planning. 194.66.246.107 (talk) 22:31, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

We will not do your homework for you. Dismas|^(talk) 23:14, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

why is this a homework question? I think you are assuming bad faith. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.118.96.1 (talk • contribs) 13:05, 15 February 2015

It looks like the kind of question a teacher would assign to a class. But if you have a factual answer, feel free to post it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:32, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

"Affect" or "effect"? RomanSpa (talk) 23:15, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Affect.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.118.96.1 (talk • contribs) 13:05, 15 February 2015

In what sense? I assume not "To assume a false appearance of; to put on a pretence of, to counterfeit or pretend." (OED) . In British English, to bring something about, to implement, is to effect. I thought the same was true internationally, and at Liverpool University. Dbfirs 17:34, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Unless one is being intentionally dense for pedantary purposes, the very first definition given at Wiktionary is probably the one intended: "To influence or alter". Granted, one normally thinks of causing ("effecting") change, rather than altering ("affecting") it, but the concept of influencing the course of a change that is already occuring is not completely nonsensical. -- 162.238.240.55 (talk) 00:41, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I was being overly-pedantic for reasons of clarity (and education). See the usage note in your linked entry. Dbfirs 21:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)