Segregation Still Matters

Last week's This American Life highlighted the strenuous research/reporting that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been doing for the journalistic non-prof ProPublica on housing discrimination and segregation in America. 

What I think was most critical to take away from the hour long segment, is that de facto racism is still a huge force in American politics, as much as the GOP want's us to think it is not.

America, years after the civil rights movement, is still heavily divided by zip code, and those five digits may be the most important numbers in your life. 

The study — based on millions of anonymous earnings records and being released this week by a team of top academic economists — is the first with enough data to compare upward mobility across metropolitan areas. These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas. 

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota. 

“Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”

Knowing how important, and random birth location is, it is intuitive to say that segregation is a major political problem worthy of devoting our time and energy to combat. It can be harder once we try to stop and think about it to qualify what makes it such a problem. After all, the civil rights movement is over. We won right? Any outcomes now are normal and acceptable, based on self selection?

All it takes is a ride through Harrisburg city to know this is not the case. The perpetuation of the status-quo leads us down an already well worn road of segregation, isolation, and othering. 

Highlighted in the TAL program was President Lyndon Johnson's 1967 Kerner Commission Report. The report was produced to try and establish the causes of race riots that dominated American cities in the late 1960's. Hannah-Jones quoted from it

"This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."

"Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it."

The creation of these separate societies are as real today as they ever were. Black and white experience separate lived experiences, realities.

The failure to truly integrate haunts us still today. Separateness enables us to only further separate. White families live in income exclusive suburban environments with good schools, while people of color reside in urban, low income hoods with crumbling infrastructure and institutions. 

"The most segregated parts of the country are, and have been for decades, the Northeast and the Midwest. Milwaukee is consistently one of the most segregated cities in the country. In Milwaukee and in other cities, including New York, the level of black-white segregation by one important measure has declined only by a trickle in 30 years. 

I've got a map on the wall in my office of Brooklyn that shows a giant red cluster right in the middle, where African Americans make up over 80% of the population, even though they're only 25% of the city overall, and even though on the street, New York feels like a very integrated city."

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"The average African-American household making $75,000 a year or more, that family lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average white family making less than $40,000 a year. That is, a black family making twice as much money as a white family probably still lives in a poorer neighborhood. That's according to a study from Brown University."

The availability heuristic easily takes hold and to us, what you see is all there is. The reality of white suburban conservatives and even some liberals is a racial empathy gap. 

George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin because he perceived him as dangerous. The defense argues he was, the prosecution argues he wasn’t. No one, of course, argues that Zimmerman approached Martin with kindness, or stopped to consider the boy as anything other than suspicious, an outsider. Ultimately Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. A lack of empathy can produce national tragedies. But it also drives quieter, more routine forms of discrimination.

It includes advocacy for cutting taxes, tough on crime stances, austerity budgets, and states' rights, and local sovereignty.