scholarly journals The New Housing Segregation: The Jim Crow Effects of Crime-Free Housing Ordinances

2019 ◽  
pp. 173-231
Author(s):  
Deborah Archer
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Persistent Problem ◽  
Housing Segregation ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Criminal Legal System ◽  
Racial Lines

America is profoundly segregated along racial lines. We attend separate schools, live in separate neighborhoods, attend different churches, and shop at different stores. This rigid racial segregation results in social, economic, and resource inequality, with White communities of opportunity on the one hand and many communities of color without access to quality schools, jobs, transportation, or health care on the other. Many people view this as an unfortunate fact of life, or as a relic of legal systems long since overturned and beyond the reach of current legal process. But this is not true. On the contrary, the law continues to play a profound role in creating and legitimizing pat-terns of racial segregation all across America. Crime-free housing ordinances are one of the most salient examples of the role law plays in producing and sustaining racial segregation today. They are, in this respect, a critical mechanism for effectuating the new housing segregation. Crime-free housing ordinances are local laws that either encourage or require private landlords to evict or exclude tenants who have had varying levels of contact with the criminal legal system. Though formally race neutral, these laws facilitate racial segregation in a number of significant ways. This is the first article to explain precisely how they do so. The Article contends that crime-free housing ordinances enable racial segregation by importing the racial biases, racial logics, and racial disparities of the criminal legal system in-to private housing markets. While scholars have examined the important role local laws played in effectuating racial inequality, they have not paid attention to crime-free housing ordinances. In addition to foregrounding how crime-free housing ordinances reinforce and perpetuate racially segregated communities, this Article proposes an intervention: a “segregative effects” claim, an underutilized cause of action under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, to challenge this segregative impact. While this intervention would not end the pervasive nature of housing segregation across the United States, it could eliminate at least one of the causes of this persistent problem: a body of law whose formal race neutrality has obscured its racially segregative effects.

Rethinking Racial Justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Valls
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Institutions ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Lines

American society continues to be characterized by deep racial inequality that is a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. What does justice demand in response? In this book, Andrew Valls argues that justice demands quite a lot—the United States has yet to fully reckon with its racial past, or to confront its ongoing legacies. Valls argues that liberal values and principles have far-reaching implications in the context of the deep injustices along racial lines in American society. In successive chapters, the book takes on such controversial issues as reparations, memorialization, the fate of black institutions and communities, affirmative action, residential segregation, the relation between racial inequality and the criminal justice system, and the intersection of race and public schools. In all of these contexts, Valls argues that liberal values of liberty and equality require profound changes in public policy and institutional arrangements in order to advance the cause of racial equality. Racial inequality will not go away on its own, Valls argues, and past and present injustices create an obligation to address it. But we must rethink some of the fundamental assumptions that shape mainstream approaches to the problem, particularly those that rely on integration as the primary route to racial equality.

The Myth of the Latin American Race Monolith: Notes for Future Comparative Research on Racial Inequality in the Americas

2021 ◽  
pp. 003464462199600
Author(s):  
Diego Ayala-McCormick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Census Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unemployment Rates ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Racial Lines

It has become common to compare racial inequality in the United States with a “Latin American” pattern of racial inequality in which egalitarian racial ideologies mask stark socioeconomic inequalities along racial lines. However, relatively few comparative studies exist attempting to analyze variations in degrees of racial inequality in the Americas. To stimulate further research in this area, the following study analyzes census data on racial inequality in unemployment rates, educational attainment, homeownership rates, and income in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. The results suggest that while Brazil is similar to the United States in displaying large levels of racial inequality in the areas measured, Cuba and Puerto Rico display significantly lower levels of racial inequality and Colombia falls in between, undermining conceptions of a monolithic Latin American racial system.

The making of an uneven shore: How coastal management and housing policies shaped racial inequality in asbury park NJ

2022 ◽  
pp. 251484862110698
Author(s):  
David C. Eisenhauer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Coastal Management ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coastal Development ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
Housing Segregation

Recent work in urban geography and political ecology has explored the roots of housing segregation in the United States within governmental polices and racial prejudice within the real estate sector. Additional research has demonstrated how coastal management practices has largely benefited wealthy, white communities. In this paper, I bring together insights from these two strands of research to demonstrate how both coastal management and governmental housing policies combined to shape racial inequalities within and around Asbury Park, New Jersey. By focusing on the period between 1945 and 1970, I show how local, state, and federal actors repeatedly prioritized improving and protecting the beachfront areas of the northern New Jersey shore while promising to eventually address the housing and economic needs of the predominately Black ‘West Side’ neighbourhood of Asbury Park. This paper demonstrates that not only did governmental spending on coastal management largely benefit white suburban homeowners but also came at the expense of promised spending within Black neighbourhoods. The case study has implications for other coastal regions in the United States in which housing segregation persists. As climate change and sea level rise unfold, the history of racial discrimination in coastal development raises important considerations for efforts to address emerging hazards and risks.

MR. SECRETARY, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 441-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florent de Bodman ◽  
Pamela R. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Postsecondary Education ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Housing Program ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Systemic Discrimination ◽  
Socioeconomic Consequences

AbstractRacial segregation has been a persistent feature of the American social landscape and a longstanding contributor to racial inequality, particularly between Blacks and Whites. Affirmative action policies have been used to address the systemic discrimination and attendant socioeconomic consequences to which African Americans have been subjected. Yet affirmative action has not been widely used in all domains in which segregation and systemic discrimination occurred. Although such policies have been adopted in the domains of employment and postsecondary education, few federal affirmative action programs have been used in housing. This is surprising given high levels of segregation across the metropolitan United States, as well as the stated integrative objectives of the U.S. Congress when it passed the Fair Housing Act of1968. To understand this puzzle, we use the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, a housing mobility effort of the Federal government and the Chicago Housing Authority that used explicit racial criteria, as a surrogate for affirmative action in housing more broadly. We conduct a comparative analysis of Gautreaux and affirmative action in college admissions using insights from applied political philosophy and sociology. By confronting Gautreaux with a more traditional affirmative action program, we are able to identify and compare the judicial, moral, and instrumental justifications for each, enabling us to draw conclusions about whether and how affirmative action can justifiably be used on a large scale to reduce neighborhood segregation, the possible forms it could take, and the difficulties it would face. We close with a discussion of the recent shift toward integration taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration, its relationship to affirmative action, and its implications for declines in residential segregation in the United States.

Segregation by Design: Race, Architecture, and the Enclosure of the Atlanta Apartment

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1222-1260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Gordon Lasner
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Site Planning ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Apartment Complexes

This article explores the ways in which architecture, landscape design, and site planning helped maintain racial segregation in housing in Atlanta, Georgia, between the 1960s and 1990s. Under Jim Crow, apartment complexes in Atlanta hewed to national design norms. By the late 1960s, however, racial tension, rioting, and passage of the Fair Housing Act led to proliferation of the architecture of enclosure: design that helped code communities as white through pastoral symbolism and heavy, obscuring landscaping. The concept, which appeared to a lesser degree in other U.S. housing markets, was introduced to Atlanta at Riverbend (1966-1972), a swinging-singles complex developed in part by Dallas’s Trammell Crow with a site plan by California’s Lawrence Halprin & Associates. The practice was generalized in the 1970s and 1980s by Post Properties, which became one of the region’s largest builders.

Segregation

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Molly W. Metzger ◽  
Henry S. Webber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Housing Segregation ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
The 1960S

The introductory chapter to the book situates current housing segregation within a historical context. The chapter begins with a comparison of the current moment in housing to the circumstances preceding the signing of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The chapter then presents a snapshot of demographic continuity and change since the 1960s, including a description of patterns of segregation along lines of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. An argument is presented for why all residents of the United States should care about housing segregation: segregation fundamentally impedes shared economic prosperity, frays the fabric of US democracy, and calls into question the self-defining notion of equality of opportunity. The chapter closes with a preview of subsequent chapters in this volume, which provide frameworks for understanding the problem of segregation as well as proposed policy solutions.

Bargaining in the Dark

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Kupfer Schneider ◽  
Cynthia Alkon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Plea Bargaining ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Defense Counsel ◽  
Negotiation Theory ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
Criminal Legal System

Plea bargaining is the primary, and unavoidable, method for resolving the vast majority of criminal cases in the United States. As more attention is paid to reform and changes in the criminal legal system, plea bargaining has also come into the spotlight. Yet we actually know very little about what happens during that process—a potentially complex negotiation with multiple parties that can, at different times, include prosecutors, defense counsel, judges, defendants, and victims. Using negotiation theory as a framework, we analyze why more information about the process itself can improve this crucial component of the system. More information—more data—would permit informed judicial oversight of pleas, improve lawyers’ capacities to negotiate on behalf of clients and the state, and increase the legitimacy of the bargaining between parties where one side tends to have far more resources and power. Without increased transparency, many of the players in the criminal legal system are just bargaining in the dark.

scholarly journals “Dear White People Vol. 2”: Social networking as an enforcing tool for racial inequality

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Antonio Gallardo Gracia
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
The United States ◽  
White People ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Caucasian Students ◽  
Racial Lines

Recently, social networking sites have been used as a means of spreading an alarming narrative under the premise of freedom of speech, through enraging, provocative and harmful messages. Some of them, posted by powerful and influential people, have empowered a group of individuals who have spoken up and expressed their approval of said messages through increasingly harsher language, as well as violent actions. Some of them were racist in tone, and increasingly widespread on several social media platforms, such as Twitter, where the issue of racial inequality fuels increasing division and hatred. Dear White People is a Netflix series, based on a 2014 film of the same title, depicting Winchester University, an ethnically diverse college in the United States of America, where a conflict along racial lines erupts. At the same University, Samantha White, a junior Media Studies major, begins hosting a radio show called “Dear White People”, addressed to Caucasian students in order to make them aware of what Blackness means in a judgmental, predominantly white society. The aim of this article is to present how influential social networking is in society by using the example of Dear White People Vol. 2, as well as to illustrate how the issue of racism increases in magnitude through a narrative that spreads and encourages individuals to take verbal and physical actions against the black minority.

scholarly journals Making Advantaged Racial Groups Care About Inequality: Intergroup Contact as a Route to Psychological Investment

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 194-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda R. Tropp ◽  
Fiona Kate Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Personal Relevance ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
The World ◽  
Racial Lines

Racial inequality remains an objective reality in the United States and around the world, yet members of advantaged racial groups often deny or minimize its existence. Although we have well-developed theories to explain why advantaged racial groups would be motivated to deny or minimize inequality, at present we know relatively little about why Whites and other advantaged racial groups might be willing to acknowledge or care about racial inequality. In this article, we propose that contact between racial groups offers one of the most promising pathways to advance these outcomes. We review established and emerging research literature suggesting that contact contributes to these outcomes by encouraging members of advantaged racial groups to become psychologically invested in the perspectives, experiences, and welfare of members of disadvantaged racial groups. We propose that psychological processes such as building empathy, enhancing personal relevance, and humanizing other people can facilitate the extent to which contact leads to greater psychological investment in other racial groups. We conclude by discussing several factors that may serve as obstacles to psychological investment across racial lines and the relevance of contact and establishing connections between racial groups in light of current social divisions and racial tensions.

scholarly journals Through a Glass, Darkly: Systemic Racism, Affirmative Action, and Disproportionate Minority Contact

2021 ◽  
pp. 451
Author(s):  
Robin Walker Sterling
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
White People ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Disproportionate Minority Contact ◽  
Criminal Legal System ◽  
Two Sides

This Article is the first to describe how systemic racism persists in a society that openly denounces racism and racist behaviors, using affirmative action and disproportionate minority contact as contrasting examples. Affirmative action and disproportionate minority contact are two sides of the same coin. Far from being distinct, these two social institutions function as two sides of the same ideology, sharing a common historical nucleus rooted in the mythologies that sustained chattel slavery in the United States. The effects of these narratives continue to operate in race-related jurisprudence and in the criminal legal system, sending normative messages about race and potential using the same jurisprudential trick: denial of our country’s race-bound legacy. By juxtaposing the rhetoric and jurisprudence concerning the underrepresentation of white people in the criminal legal system with the rhetoric and jurisprudence concerning the underrepresentation of Black people in higher education, this Article illuminates a key feature of how systemic racism persists. Obscuring the history of how both affirmative action and disproportionate minority contact came to be, the racially contorted narratives that we have adopted about affirmative action in both guises described here—affirmative action that benefits people of color by accepting them into institutions of higher learning and that which benefits white people by diverting them from the criminal legal system—allow systems to thrive under a guise of presumed racial innocence. Unmoored from the force of history, we rudderlessly reinforce well-worn social norms, no matter how discriminatory they might be.

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