

Census: Segregation hits 100-year lows in most American metro areas - cwan
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2010/1214/Census-Segregation-hits-100-year-lows-in-most-American-metro-areas

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SMrF
I found this graph a while ago. It illustrates the segregation in Chicago:

<http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots>

I moved from Arizona to Chicago a few years ago. While Arizona was far from
perfect, I still find the segregation here shocking. While standing on a
platform waiting for an El train, it is possible to determine which people
will get on which train line based on the color of their skin.

Edit:

Another anecdote, but interesting to me. My wife and mother teach at two
different "urban" schools on the south side. There are no white students at
either school. My mom's school is 99% black and my wife's school is 95%
Hispanic. I know it's a common situation but it still just blows my mind.

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yummyfajitas
I wish news articles would stop conflating segregation with racial imbalance.
The former is but one possible cause for the latter.

 _"Racial imbalance is not segregation. Although presently observed racial
imbalance might result from de jure segregation, racial imbalance can also
result from any number of innocent private decisions, including voluntary
housing choices."_ \-- Clarence Thomas

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krschultz
The author simply doesn't know what segregation was at all. If all the black
people lived in one neighborhood and all the white in another, and they never
crossed, why would you segregate bathrooms? And restaurants? And water
fountains? And schools? And busses?

Housing was already integrated and the services were segregated on skin color.
That was one of the quantifiable objections to segregating school other than
the obvious moral reasons - the students had to walk or bus further to school
when there was a perfectly good building closer to their homes reserved for
white people. That's segregation.

Real estate agents preventing black people from buying near whites was called
Blockbusting, and was different.

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yummyfajitas
_Real estate agents preventing black people from buying near whites was called
Blockbusting, and was different._

You are thinking of redlining and steering. Blockbusting was a form of
fraud/extortion preying on racist homeowners:

Real estate agent: "Hey homeowner, blacks are moving into the neighborhood."

Homeowner: "I hate blacks! I'll sell my house at below market rates to get
away from them!"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting>

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krschultz
Journalists misuse (and overuse) the word "exponential" more than any other.
As in:

"Yet growing residential proximity between whites and blacks also contains the
potential for _exponential_ progress in bridging America's long-standing
racial divide, especially as families from different racial backgrounds share
schools and grocery stores." (emphasis mine)

Maybe there is potential for an improvement in the pace of reducing that
divide, but I highly doubt it can be described as exponential.

Though I guess that is a small nitpick. Probably a bigger one is that in their
words it is a "complicated story with lots of nuances" that they boil down at
the end to simply gerrymandering congressional districts and how it will
change the balance of Democrats/Republicans. I'm sick of every news story
coming down to politics, and by politics I mean electioneering.

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CWuestefeld
It's interesting to me that segregation of Asians isn't mentioned. By my own
observation (which may obviously be flawed), the integration of Asians outside
of urban Chinatown-like areas is pretty much complete.

In particular, Americans of Chinese ancestry (with which I'm more familiar,
since my wife came from China) can be found anywhere in suburbia.

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pchristensen
Asian immigrants and especially Asian-americans have higher IQs and incomes
than American whites. They can afford to go anywhere they want, while
generally poorer black or Hispanic people get the neighborhoods no one wants.

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charlesju
lol, as an Asian American myself, while thankful for your comment, I'm sure
that's all sorts of wrong.

~~~
pchristensen
Hold your head high, my friend!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence> \- "Intelligence quotient
(IQ) tests performed in the US have consistently demonstrated a significant
degree of variation between different racial groups, with the average score of
the African American population being significantly lower—and that of the
Asian American population being higher—than that of the White American
population."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_American> \- "As of 2008, Asian American
households had the highest median income at $65,637; however, 11.8 percent of
Asians were in poverty in 2004, higher than the 8.6 percent rate for non-
Hispanic whites.[8] Much of this poverty is concentrated in ethnic enclaves
such as Chinatowns in the cities[38] Census figures also show that a white
male with a college diploma earns in excess of $66,000 a year, far more than
similarly educated Asian men who earned more than $52,000 a year.[39] Asians
however are more likely to complete higher education particularly and are the
highest group by percentage with graduate degrees"

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untamedmedley
On a related note:

[http://www.gq.com/news-politics/mens-lives/200810/devin-
frie...](http://www.gq.com/news-politics/mens-lives/200810/devin-friedman-
craiglist-oprah-black-white-friends-obama)

This article, while somewhat old, does a great job of discussing just how
shallow that 100-year "achievement" really is. We may live near each other,
but that doesn't mean we interact in non-superficial ways.

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harry
FWIW - the feds restructured how ethnicity is defined for the 2010 census. Now
if you have multiple ethnicities you are reported as such - before it was only
what you considered your primary race. This will balloon diversity figures in
formerly non-diverse areas. I expect to see many media-filler articles such as
this once the full census report is published.

There's some additional depth to how the Hispanic grouping is classified.
Essentially if you self report any Hispanic lineage you are considered a
primarily Hispanic individual.

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grav1tas
While I can see why Gerrymandering is/was necessary to maintain the minority
voice in regions, has it become less socially relevant to do so? Does anybody
have an idea when Gerrymandering based on geographic location will "end"
because people are too well integrate? Not like that may be any time soon, but
it will probably be more the case than not sometime in the future. I guess
we're always looking for reasons to redraw the lines in favor of our
parties...and we'll use any reason to do so.

While I see it as a necessary evil in some cases, by and large, Gerrymandering
drives me insane.

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kingkawn
We've finally re-achieved the pinnacles of 1910.

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jsm386
Eric Fisher who also produced the tourists/locals photo maps has some pretty
dramatic visualizations of racial distribution in various metro areas:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4981444199/in/set-721...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4981444199/in/set-72157624812674967/)

