When speaking of the current system and “separate-but-equal,” it should be noted that the old system was never equal: “colored” schools got approximately one-fourth of the funding that “white” schools got. Ending the sham of “separate-but-equal” addressed racial inequality, but poor neighborhoods, no matter what their racial mix, still have poor schools.

Race-based busing was an attempt to solve a class problem indirectly, but middle-class black kids don’t get bussed to poor schools, and poor white kids don’t get bussed to better schools, and, most importantly, the schools that need more resources still don’t get them. Which sucks for everyone.

Because the magic whiteness will rub off on the benighted minorities, and their brains will start to work better?

Assuming that the grossly racist interpretation of your statement isn’t accurate, the only other thing I can think of that you mean is that white parents tend to be more politically connected, wealthy, and/or committed to being interested in their kids’ schooling, and that this added constituency of troublemaking/effective parents will spur the urban schools to improvement. Which is a reasonable thesis, until you reflect on the fact that politically connected, wealthy and/or committed suburban white parents aren’t the ones who will accede to their kids being bused into the ghetto to go to school.

I think practically this is true today, but I do think if we sent more white kids from suburbs to city schools the city schools would improve.

I guess the point that you are kind of missing is what this is like from the child’s perspective. It’s difficult to be the only black child or one of a few black children in a predominantly white school. These children have to deal with things that their parents didn’t have to deal with, and almost no white have to deal with.

This can have longer term negative psychological effects. I have noticed this especially with the GenXers/Hip Hop Generation (i.e. people born between 1965-1980), who were black suburban pioneers. Segregation actually sheltered their parents from the direct sting of racism, but living or going to school in predominantly white neighborhoods exposed them to racism at a young age. These are the types of things that Black parents have to contend with. It’s your job to protect your child, but how long can you protect them from racism, especially in a predominantly white context. On the other hand, you want the educational and economic opportunities the suburbs provide.

Murphy Writes:
July 5th, 2007 at 11:22 am
…Too often, though, I get to the point where I throw up my hands and say, people will live where they want, the best place they can afford, around people who are like them, and they’ll take so many factors into account that’s it impossible to get a word in edgewise from a policy perspective.

This seems like a pretty accurate statement.

Also, I think it’s interesting how often the burden of integration is placed on the shoulders of people of color — the study above doesn’t even mention segregation levels among white people — giving the impression that it’s just not an issue for white people. I’ve read one account, The Failure of Integration by Sheryll Cashin, that mentions the monetary costs associated with majority white communities, namely that white people pay through the teeth to live in places with no people of color. I find that particularly sad.

That’s unsurprising. White people tend to have more of what “everyone” wants–money, nice houses, better social services, and better schools. People want to move UP, not down, in their life. Sending kids to a better school, or moving people to a safer neighborhood, will usually mean moving minorities to white neighborhoods. That’s a simple result of the current distribution.

It’s true that there are other ways to achieve technical equity. Instead of sending 500 kids from the shitty Boston schools to newton, you could send 250 kids to newton, and require that 250 kids leave the outstanding newton schools to go to Boston. But that’s politically unfeasible.

LaLubu, I’d oppose denser construction near me as well–not because I have anything against the residents of said construction, but because I don’t want to live in a dense area. I don’t want to live in a RICH dense area, either–you couldn’t pay me to live on park ave, even in a $6000/month apartment.

The surrounding suburbs where I live put up a fierce fight against the construction of apartments or townhouses whenever developers propose them, because cheaper housing brings in the riffraff (y’know, like me).

Well, let’s see. I’d fight if someone tried to put high-density housing in my area. I woudn’t give a shit about the color of whoever moved in. But it would mean more traffic and congestion on the roads as well as more wear and tear on them. It would mean that the parks I pay taxes for would be more crowded and would cost more to maintain. There’d be more noise. There’d be more demand for the various municipal services and less tax money per person to pay for them. No thanks. If I want to live in a crowded area I’ll move to Chicago. Not that it doesn’t have attractions, mind you. But it’s not what I want. Where I live now is, and I like it the way it is.

Why should anyone need to move to the suburbs in order to access a good quality public school? There certainly isn’t anything inherent in a city as to why this should be so.

Because in most suburbs the average income per person and the average taxes paid per person is higher than in the city. So there’s more $ per kid to spend. There’s also generally less crime in and around the schools. Of course, I figure that the City of Chicago should put a cop in every classroom; it would improve security so the kids can concentrate on their studies, and would give the cops a live demonstration that not every kid is like the ones they end up having to deal with in the majority of their job; the vast majority of them want to learn and be decent kids. In the normal course of events it’s not the job of a city cop to deal with that kind of kid, it’s their job to deal with the assholes. I think giving them exposure to the non-assholes might benefit both the kids and the cops.

Note that I said most suburbs, not all. There are certainly suburbs (that my kids played interscholastic sports against) whose schools’ quality is equal to that of Chicago schools (that’s not a compliment, folks). Those suburbs face a catch-22. They’re mostly poor (and mostly latino or black), so their schools suck since the school funding formula in Illinois emphasizes local property taxes and the people there can’t afford to pay high taxes. So well-to-do people move to suburbs that have better schools. Now things in that suburb are even worse. We’ve actually had suburbs go bankrupt (or come damn close) because there wasn’t enough property tax and sales tax money coming in to pay for minimum municpal services. Imagine if your town was so poor that it couldn’t pay it’s own cops and the Sheriff and State Police had to take over. It’s happened here.

Now, say school funding was picked up more by the State of Illinois. Even if you worked that out so that it was tax-neutral over all (the State’s total property tax levies dropped down as much as it’s income tax levy went up), people who were middle-class and up figure that more of their taxes would go towards other people’s kids and less to their own. They don’t want to see that!

I’m actually in favor of this kind of thing, though. I think the #1 way to break the cycle of poverty and crime is not to give people money to live on and have them be dependent on the State; we need to improve education and thus their ability to independently earn their own. First, there’s the moral issue. Second, I figure that overall productivity would rise to the point that in the long run it would actually be cheaper.

Seriously, thanks for the info. I guess when you have lower overall population densities you’d be more likely to see school districts follow municipal boundaries. I used to live in Massachusetts and out there everything - sewer, water, library, mosquito abatement, schools, fire departments, parks, etc., etc. were municipal services provided by the town you lived in, or very rarely by a combination of towns. You didn’t have this hodgepodge you have around Chicago.

I had heard that a lot of this was an invention of the Illinois legislature as a reaction to the 1970 Constitution. That document was structured to limit the taxing powers of municipalities, and I was told that the plethora of separate school districts, library districts, park districts, fire protection districts, mosquito abatement districts, community college districts, etc., etc. was an invention of the legislature to get around that. But I don’t know that for a fact.

Brandon Berg:

I do think that blacks are at a disadvantage, but I think that the bulk of that disadvantage comes from the environments in which they spend their formative years, not from discrimination they face as adults.

An example; MIT accepts all black students that qualify for it. Yet the percentage of black students is lower than the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population. In this case we’re not even dealing with black adults, and they’re getting special treatment to boot. Yet their numbers stay low. It’s because of what’s led up to that point, not discrimination at that point.

As for your “in some fields” example, the study the article talks about has been (to put it mildly) controversial and contested. (As the article acknowledges.)

It’s a given that any study that purports to show that the black-white achievement gap in any area may be due to anything other than discrimination is going to be hotly contested and controversial, regardless of its merits.

Putting aside the question of whether Sander is right about the reason for the high attrition rates of black law firm associates, I don’t see anything in the article that indicates any credible objections to the point I cited it to make: That a black candidate has a considerable edge over a white candidate with an identical resume when applying for a job as an associate at a major law firm.

Yes, there’s some hand-wavy stuff about how it’s impossible to measure qualifications objectively, but we’re given no reason to believe that black candidates’ superiority in these unmeasurable qualities is not only not reflected in their grades, but so great as to be sufficient to make up for their much lower average GPA.

Yes, it’s conceivable that, for some unknown reason, grades might dramatically underpredict the true qualifications of black candidates relative to white candidates. But barring at the very least a plausible mechanism (and ideally some empirical support) for this, the parsimonious explanation is that, facing simultaneously both pressure to hire black associates and a dearth of qualified (by conventional criteria) black candidates, law firms choose to relax hiring standards for black candidates relative to white candidates.

This should go without saying, but I should probably say it anyway: That there is a dearth of qualified black candidates for law firm positions doesn’t mean that blacks are inherently less qualified than whites to be lawyers (or doctors, or engineers, or whatever). Black infants, children, adolescents, and even fetuses are subjected to environments that are on average less conducive to helping them reach their full potential than are those environments in which whites are raised. I do think that blacks are at a disadvantage, but I think that the bulk of that disadvantage comes from the environments in which they spend their formative years, not from discrimination they face as adults.

Do you remember what time period the writer was researching? I’ve read about middle-class black neighborhoods where the whites moved in because those were the best buys. But I can’t swear the memory’s accurate; I haven’t seen anything about this in ages.

So, yeah. Class affects residential segregation. It’s a factor. Race also affects residential segregation. You can talk about one without denying the other. I’m just confused as to why you were so adamant about not talking about race, which happened to be the point of the post.

But hey. I should have just waited to join the post on school segregation. I always get super frustrated trying to suss out the intricacies of residential segregation because it’s a hugely complicated issue with a bunch of competing factors at play.

If class affects integration, I would think that talking about class is relevant to this discussion. If it doesn’t, it’s not, of course.

When you say, “white people pay through the teeth to live in places with no people of color,” don’t all people “pay through the teeth” to live in expensive neighborhoods? Or do you mean there are all-white neighborhoods where the cost of living is higher than other expensive neighborhoods because those neighborhoods have managed to preserve the standards of 1955?

Hey, never discredit simple sloppiness!

She said, “Noobody said anything about economic justice. The focus was on racial justice.” What I was trying to say is that I don’t see how you can focus on racial justice without focusing on economic justice. Isn’t racial justice a subset of economic jusice? I can see how you can separate race and class in some contexts, primarily tribal ones—why do churches tend to be segregated, why is there very little interracial rape (if the statistics are accurate), why are certain forms of entertainment race-based (Chris Rock on CW, perhaps) and others class-based (Chris Rock on HBO, definitely), etc.

I’m really not one of those assholes who says that racism doesn’t exist anymore. I’m one of those assholes who says that if you look only at race, your results may be distorted. For example, I’ve done a bit of reading on the death penalty and drug penalties. Both appear to be racist when you ignore class. But when you add in class, the death penalty is astonishingly fair (though still morally reprehensible), while our drug penalties continue to be astonishingly racist, at least, based on the data I’ve seen so far.

Apologies for being part of the topic drift. I think Rachel did fine work here, and I’m looking forward to her next post.

I’m not sure I can take you too seriously if you chop off the rest of the sentence - “though differences are modest” - without even an ellipsis. I read the sentence as a pretty clear indication that class status does not insulate people of color from residential segregation, though it does have an effect. Extrapolating, I get to this: magically increasing everyone’s class would not make residential segregation disappear. There’s another factor at play: race.

But, maybe we could start to talk about racial segregation? You know, the subject of the post? I’d be interested in thinking more about what can be done to address the problem, since it’s become a pretty vital concern after the recent court decision. Residential segregation was a key issue before school desegregation blipped onto the radar screen, and, in a lot of ways, desegregating the schools was a band aid solution to greater iniquities. Too often, though, I get to the point where I throw up my hands and say, people will live where they want, the best place they can afford, around people who are like them, and they’ll take so many factors into account that’s it impossible to get a word in edgewise from a policy perspective.

Also, I think it’s interesting how often the burden of integration is placed on the shoulders of people of color — the study above doesn’t even mention segregation levels among white people — giving the impression that it’s just not an issue for white people. I’ve read one account, The Failure of Integration by Sheryll Cashin, that mentions the monetary costs associated with majority white communities, namely that white people pay through the teeth to live in places with no people of color. I find that particularly sad.

I’ve never seen an audit study done of job entry in fields that require advanced degrees.

As for your “in some fields” example, the study the article talks about has been (to put it mildly) controversial and contested. (As the article acknowledges.)

Ampersand, apologies for not quoting there. I was referring to this: “Noobody said anything about economic justice. The focus was on racial justice.”

Yes, she did, referring to the focus of her post. To interpret someone saying “the focus of my post is on racial justice” as if they had said “I am concerned with racial justice, not economic justice” is unfair at best, dishonest at worst.

It’s possible for someone to have concerns about X, Y and Z, but to write a post or make an academic career focusing on Z in particular. To assume that a focus on Z means that they are not concerned with X or Y is illogical and, in this context, insulting.

Finally, as I recall, the audit studies matched the auditors for general appearance, grooming, and accent, among other factors.

I think Rachel was just typing quickly there. I do that often enough. I completely agree that we need to cut each other slack, especially when talking about issues like race and class.

“It’s also worth pointing out other audit studies have found that when blacks and whites are trained to interview identically and given fictional, equally-qualified resumes, whites are on average more likely to be offered jobs, and the jobs they are offered have better future prospects.”

Apologies for doing the broken record thing, but do those studies factor in class? “Trained to interview identically” may mean the applicant isn’t hiding class markers like accent, hair style, or dental health.

It’s also worth pointing out other audit studies have found that when blacks and whites are trained to interview identically and given fictional, equally-qualified resumes, whites are on average more likely to be offered jobs, and the jobs they are offered have better future prospects.

Has a study like this ever been done for jobs which require bachelor’s or advanced degrees? I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true for low-wage jobs, where statistical discrimination might well be a viable strategy, but I would expect the effect to be much weaker in jobs where qualified candidates are few enough and the stakes are high enough that it makes sense to do a more thorough evaluation of each candidate. In some fields (law, for example) the effect is actually reversed due to diversity initiatives.

But I must say it’s odd to say that you’re concerned with racial justice, not economic justice.

Will, Rachel didn’t say that, nor anything that can be fairly interpreted that way. If you’re going to continue posting comments here, I’m going to have to ask you to try and give a reasonable benefit of the doubt to the bloggers here; it’s only by bending over backwards to make the least fair interpretation of her words imaginable that you can say the above.

Freakonomics found that a name that sounds black on an application does not hurt the applicant’s chances of getting a job.

No, that’s not proven by their study. As the Freakonomics authors themselves point out, one possible reason for their results is that “Black names are used as signals of race by discriminatory employers at the resume stage, but are unimportant once an interview reveals the candidate’s race.”

They don’t challenge the fact, found by many audit studies, that if you send out identical job applications with the name “Molly” on one and “Shanice” on the other, Molly will get more interview offers.

I think that for the measurement of this one particular factor — whether or not a name that is statistically used more by blacks will do worse in the job market than a name that is statistically used more by whites — the audit design is superior to the regression analysis that Freakonomics used.

It’s also worth pointing out other audit studies have found that when blacks and whites are trained to interview identically and given fictional, equally-qualified resumes, whites are on average more likely to be offered jobs, and the jobs they are offered have better future prospects.