The Persistence of Racial Divide & Residential Segregation

The questions posed in this week’s prompt are really interesting and difficult to answer. Racial divide still exists in the 21^st century in Chicago due to discrimination against African Americans. The 21^st century discrimination against African Americans today is a bit different when compared to the discrimination against African Americans in the past. In the past, African Americans faced overt discrimination, such as Jim Crow Laws, Redlining, financial institutions refusing mortgages, and so on, that resulted in African American to live in isolated neighborhoods. Today, discrimination against African Americans is done in ways that are covert rather than overt. What I mean by this is that many individuals still harbor strong stereotypical and racist beliefs towards African Americans, which allows for the continuation of residential segregation in urban and suburban areas. For example, Koval (2006) discusses a study done by Devah Pafer in 2003, which demonstrated the ways that employers practiced “under cover” discrimination by calling back more white applicants with jail records than black applicants with jail records. This study illustrates why some African Americans are more likely to live in lower income neighborhoods because they are less likely to obtain jobs when competing with white Americans.

Also, another reason why I believe that racial divide still persists today is because “African Americans, especially males, remain concentrated in jobs requiring little formal education beyond high school and that offer little promise of significant upward social mobility” (Koval, 2006, p. 87). Since many African Americans are not viewed equally to white Americans even if they have the same qualifications, they are more likely to be clustered in jobs that pay less and offer no benefits. With lower incomes and no benefits, African Americans are basically forced to live next to each and apart from the rest of society. Even though there are African Americans who have middle to upper incomes, these families and individuals are still likely to live in racially segregated areas due to the continuation of discrimination. There are people who are afraid to live next to others who are not like them because they believe that certain groups are more harmful than others. With this being said, not only are neighborhoods segregated based on race but also based on class. Many urban and suburban areas have constructed this “invisible” fence that keeps those in poverty and in the lower class away from the rest of the area. This allows for the segregation of residents in an area not only based on race but also on class.

To answer the second part of this prompt is a difficult one. Honestly, I am not sure what society could do to dismantle residential segregation. There have been many policies trying to integrate neighborhoods, such as mixed-income housing efforts; however, this does not always lead to the dismantlement of residential segregation. What needs to happen is educating society on how racism and classism exists today rather than ignoring the issues. If more people knew about what was really going on in urban and suburban areas, then maybe, just maybe things could change. Also, implementing policies that focus on education and providing better schools and better teachers in all areas could possibly allow for the dismantle of residential segregation. If people from different races and classes saw that schools located in lower income neighborhoods were just as good as schools found in high income neighborhood then maybe residential segregation would slowly disintegrate. It takes time for these changes to occur… hopefully our generation can aid in this change.