"Architecture of Segregation"

In a 2015 report by the Century Foundation entitled “Architecture of Segregation,” they conclude, based on an analysis US census data and various other objective meaures, that racial segregation has in fact increased since 2000, and without intervention will continue to do so, as the logical outcome of intentional policy decisions. They conclude that concentrated poverty (defined in the study as a census tract where more that forty percent of residents live below the poverty line) has been steadily increasing for years, but one factor in this trend has gone unnoticed—the return to raically determined areas of concentrated poverty. After the national conern about poverty and crime in urban “ghettos” and barrios of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, federal policy and improvement in the economy lifted many people out of poverty and concern faded and was thought by some to be largely a thing of the past. However, as concern faded interest dropped, and in the next decade concentrated povery gradually crept back. This was prompted in part by white flight to outer suburbs, a reaction to the breaking up of large public housing developments in the inner city and their residents’ move to the inner suburbs, that took their tax dollars with them. But more blatatnt forms of racism prevented African Americans from following them to the outer suburbs. Many wealthy subdivisions passed zoning ordinances that prevented the construction of public housing, or even apartments at all, while others mandated a minimum house size to prevent lower income people from moving in. Other factors, such as low-income housing tax credits discrimatorily applied to majority minority neighborhoods and Section 8 vouchers that restrict the poor to concentrated neighboorhoods where landlords will accept them, also add to the again increasing problem of race-based segregation. This is the predictable and inevitable result of policies that effectively framed racially-correlated issues in financial terms and allow for the de facto preservation of segregation long after it was eradicated in the law. This is entirely consistent with America’s long history of framing the subjugation of black people in slightly more positive and less offensive terms than is the reality at the time, allowing them to inflict all the abuse they want to without ever having to come to terms with themsleves for it—like framing chattle slavery as a benevolent necessity, casting racial segregation in thinly-veiled economic terms, is the nation’s means of justifying, to ourselves and to the world, the ultimately unjustifiable.