Sociological images has a link to some great resources on residential patterns by race/ethnicity. Here are another interesting set of interactive maps by USC historian Phil Ethington for the Southern California region. Both sets of maps reveal persistent levels of residential segregation by race.
In Won’t You be my Neighbor, Camile Zubrinsky Charles does interesting research on why segregation persists. She challenges the idea that we settle in homogeneous clusters because we like being near people like us. She suggests that people report wanting to live near others like them not because of a sense of comfort with racial/ethnic peers, but rather to protect themselves from potential hostility from whites. However, across all groups, Whites are viewed as the preferred neighbors, followed by Asian-Americans, Latinos and African-Americans.
She finds the majority of Blacks in Los Angles would like to live in integrated neighborhoods. However other groups are not as willing to reciprocate. She finds that, on average, Latinos in Southern California have negative attitudes towards blacks in the U.S.. She suggests it takes five years of until anti-black attitudes to turn into action (i.e. decisions to move away from Black neighbors). Props to my California Lutheran University Race and Politics students for finding some interesting articles (here and here) on anti-black racial resentments in Mexico and Latin America generally.
Comments 3
Khoa Nguyen — September 19, 2008
"What happens in LA will ultimately happen to the rest of the country."
According to Amile, the motivation behind choosing to live in a segregated neighborhood is constraint. Minorities are financially, mentally and reluctantly constrained when choosing to buy a house.
Amile also said that LA was like a Disney dream to her when she was a kid for the city's diverse forms of entertainment: good Mexican restaurants, different kinds of people... However, now that she is an assistant professor of Sociology. Fantasy doesn't exist anymore when one is exposed to knowledge. Now, Amile is sophisticated enough to identify the small, but racially unfair treatment her white neighborhood has for her. Seldom neighbor invitations or ignorance, that's enough.
Still, Amile believes that someday integration will happen.
In the interview, there was a part of an immigrant asking her that why people have to care about this stuff. There are people out there who won't care racial residence problems. The reply was that where you live affects what you can do: better ability to accumulate wealth, better education and there is always an ideal existed in America's Declaration of Independence. Therefore, there will always be people working hard for that ideal.
Kenneth M. Kambara — September 19, 2008
I think another interesting pattern that's evolving is how gentrification is creating demographically diverse census tracts but with a lot of tension between "old neighborhood" and "new neighborhood" types, as (stereotypically) Yuppies and hipsters "colonize" once red-lined areas. This is happening in Venice (CA), as well as parts of Culver City, not to mention in other urban areas with astronomical property valuations (San Francisco, S. Berkeley/N. Oakland, Williamsburg & Clinton Hill Brooklyn, Spanish Harlem-NYC, etc.). It would be interesting to overlay SES or some kind of "gini coefficient" (to measure disparities in incomes in a given census tract) to examine how class moderates patterns of diversity.
Derek — September 21, 2008
Coming from a Mexican neighborhood in East Los Angeles, most people do have a negative feeling towards African Americans. They see them as distrustful and always up to no good. I think this comes from the gangs from the neighborhood. Most people have a sterotypic view on African American. And I dont think this will change in the upcoming years. People will always have racial distrust between each other do to the idea that one race in better than the other. this is something that has bred into our lives