American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton

...Black poverty in this earlier period of U.S...

...The leap from an analysis of segregation and poverty to an assertion that poor ghetto residents form an underclass, or reside in areas that are legitimately labeled as underclass communities, is problematic...

...White voices, the authors note, "are more committed to open housing and residential integration in principle than in practice...

...This bit of folk sociology made the rounds in Chicago during the bloody open occupancy and fair housing marches of the 1960s...

...After the violence ended it seemed for a while that hard-won legislation could help ensure a future of racial integration in communities throughout America...

...African Americans in the cities encountered hostilities far more deeply ingrained and more violent than experienced by any other urban migrant people in the period...

...The major urban ghettos are home to more than one-third of the nation's African Americans...

...The law also places a further burden on the victims of discrimination by making plaintiffs liable for court costs and attorneys' fees...

...On the other hand, because the black population was relatively small 420 • DISSENT Books in northern cities before the turn of the century, it was also true that most blacks lived in residential neighborhoods that were at least 90 percent white, and blacks were more likely to encounter whites in their residential life than other blacks...

...It seems to us amazing," they write, "that people were even debating whether race was declining in importance when levels of residential segregation were so high and so structured along racial lines...

...These responses in no way diminish the importance of this book...

...They note that in the nineteenth century it was common for blacks and whites to live on the same blocks: "Before 1900, blacks were not particularly segregated from whites, and although they were over-represented in the poorest housing and the meanest streets, their residential status did not differ markedly from that of others in the same economic circumstances...

...AMERICAN APARTHEID: SEGREGATION AND THE MAKING OF THE UNDERCLASS, by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton...

...Massive industrialization and urbanization rapidly changed the situation...

...The burden of proof of discrimination rests with the buyer, who must show that whites are chosen in preference over them...

...There is a good deal of rich material here about the influence of institutional racism on persistent segregation...

...As a result of compromises with conservatives (led at SUMMER • 1994 • 421 Books the time by Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen) the federal Housing and Urban Everett Development Department has little power to punish real estate agents who steer black home buyers and renters away from housing where only whites live...

...And in many of them it was the influence of the military, the most desegregated institution in American life, that established the patterns of residential integration that show up in the demographic research...

...It is also true, however, 422 • DISSENT Books that many of these cities do not have substantial numbers of African Americans...

...Massey and Denton make it clear that it is the persistent failure of legislators (and of respected intellectuals as well, I would add) to confront the causes and consequences of our separation as a people that threatens our democratic institutions and endangers the civility of American life...

...They advocate stricter enforcement of present laws so that agents who steer blacks away from homes they might like to buy and banks that refuse mortgages to qualified blacks, would be more heavily punished...

...The suburban bias in mortgage and tax policies, tolerance of bank "redlining," construction of massive and understaffed housing projects in already segregated ghettos, and failure to enforce fair housing legislation are only a few of the forms of institutionally sanctioned racism...

...Sociologists with long credentials in the quantitative study of population, the authors provide stark evidence for what they term the "hypersegregation" of American blacks in most urban centers and suburbs...

...Unless there is more progress toward residential integration, the authors do not hold high hopes for significant improvement in the economic future of people trapped in the ghettos of deindustrialized cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland...

...These observations lead the authors to say that "racial segregation— and its characteristic institutional form, the black ghetto—are the key structural factors responsible for the perpetuation of black poverty in the United States...

...In a short review of the history of U.S...

...There are now more up-to-date figures available on urban racial segregation based on 1990 census analysis...

...Otherwise, why would they continue to look away from the obvious persistence of discrimination in housing markets...

...When the white couple in the audit appears they are often shown the places that the blacks were told were unavailable...

...Most blacks in this land of the free and home of the market cannot even buy their way out of the ghetto...

...Recent research by Reynolds Farley and William H. Frey at the University of Michigan, for example, shows that segregation persists but may have peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s—the period most frequently referred to by Massey and Denton...

...Blacks encountered far worse hostility, far higher levels of residential and occupational segregation, and incomparably more violence than Jews, Italians, Irish, or any other white ethnic group...

...SUMMER • 1994 • 423...

...Children growing up in the ghettos of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Newark, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, and the others have, the authors tell us, "little direct experience with the culture, norms, and behavior of the rest of American society and few social contacts with members of other racial groups...

...Nathan Glazer, in a New Republic review of this book, noted that Massey and Denton want government to do more to enforce antihousingdiscrimination laws...

...And clearly the political leaders of white communities continue to hear the less guarded fears and racial prejudices of their white constituents...

...Nor has the situation changed appreciably...

...But the authors wish to shock us into recognizing that racial segregation in neighborhoods and communities continues to give the lie to our ideals of integration in any sphere of our society...

...Audit surveys send in black couples to real estate offices, followed by white couples with the same housing needs...

...The authors remind us that the "problem with the Fair Housing Act lay not in the coverage or in the kinds of discrimination that it specifically banned but in its enforcement provisions...

...Harvard University Press, 1993...

...It follows them into the suburbs...

...African Americans could be found in most neighborhoods of northern cities...

...The idea that we should link arms to strengthen the Fair Housing Act is viewed, I think, more as a tepid white response than a call that can motivate a new round of black activism...

...It is a myth that all urban newcomers experienced roughly equal degrees of segregation and hostility...

...Residential segregation blocks the open search for jobs and better education...

...Massey and Denton show that in the sixteen most highly segregated metropolitan areas of the nation, segregation is so intense that black residents are unlikely to see a white person in their immediate residential neighborhood or in adjacent neighborhoods...

...Massey and Denton include a valuable review of the way housing policies since World War II have contributed to the persistence of racial segregation...

...Racial attitudes measured by surveys are far milder than what one hears in private conversation among many whites...

...Ironically, within a large, diverse, and highly mobile postindustrial society, such as the United States, blacks living in the heart of the ghetto are among the most isolated people on earth...

...Whenever I've discussed this tough-minded and well-documented book with AfricanAmerican scholars or activists I have heard roughly the same response: that segregation persists, encouraged by public policy, is not news but needs to be said over and again...

...African Americans may move out of the poorest ghetto neighborhoods as they achieve educational and economic mobility, but the authors show that rates of segregation are not essentially different for blacks in the poorest and highest income categories...

...They suggest, however, that if white Americans are upset by the charge that they are living in an apartheid society, they would best take up the anti-segregationist banner and wave it where the problems of racism reside...

...The need to rescue a generation of young people growing up in danger, whose families have slim chances to escape the inner city, outweighs for now any reveries of an integrated future...

...Over and over again such studies show that blacks are steered away from all-white neighborhoods and told that advertised houses or apartments have already been rented...

...racial segregation, Massey and Denton largely reject theories about the "natural" or voluntary dimensions of racial segregation in residential neighborhoods...

...The Fair Housing Act of 1968 remains, it would seem to most white lawmakers' satisfaction, largely ineffective in bringing about major improvements in housing segregation...

...Some readers may be put off by the bold assertion, explicit in the book's title, that race relations in the United States bear comparison to South African apartheid...

...The action for African Americans at this moment in their endless travail is in the ghettos...

...Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's masterful study of residential segregation in the United States will help explain why these hopes are still frustrated...

...They also use their findings with regard to persistent racial segregation to make statements about the rise of the ghetto "underclass...

...Polls show that blacks do not necessarily wish to live in white neighborhoods, but they desire the same freedom of choice about where to live that other Americans (and many new immigrants) enjoy...

...In sum, nothing in the more current data fundamentally contradicts the basic findings or policy recommendations of American Apartheid...

...Integration: the interval in a neighborhood between the moment the first black family moves in and the last white family moves out...

...And, so obvious we often forget it, unpopular policies like school busing to achieve racial integration are but feeble efforts to circumvent the divisive consequences of residential segregation...

...urban history, the authors argue, was more a result of discrimination in employment than in housing...

...In the 1920s over 800,000 rural African Americans crowded into industrial cities of the North and a parallel mass migration was taking place in Southern industrial cities like Birmingham...

...And although this book should be regarded as an essential source and policy guide on racial segregation in the United States, its emphasis on the contribution of racial segregation to the formation of an urban underclass is its least successful feature...

...They consistently show a reluctance—based no doubt on collective memory of cruel experience and the present reality of increasing "hate crimes" —to be pioneers, to move themselves and their children into all-white neighborhoods...

...Massey and Denton advocate enforcement of a toughened Fair Housing Act and far greater investment in federal monitoring and auditing of discrimination in local housing markets...

...But the authors never call for "massive dispersal...

...The probability that the races live in segregated neighborhoods remains extremely high for the major deindustrialized urban centers but is far lower in younger, rapidly growing cities of the West and Southwest...

...Segregation in our living places, they argue, is the root cause of our failure to achieve racial justice and equality of opportunity over the forty years since Brown v. Board of Education...

...The knot of conceptual and ideological problems posed by the term underclass remains tangled after even the best discussion of segregation...

...As the Great Migration gained momentum in the period around World War I and thereafter, over half a million rural blacks moved northward each decade, as opposed to the far smaller stream of 70,000 per decade or less during the late nineteenth century...

...But Glazer cautions that "a successful program for massive dispersal would require government action on a scale that is simply not possible in a democracy...

...Deplorable as the conditions for white immigrant groups were at the time, passage from neighborhoods of first settlement into the larger society was far easier for them than for African Americans...

...In fact, the polls indicate that blacks tend to desire to live in neighborhoods where there is a rough parity between themselves and members of other races...

...Can it be that such measures to ensure a fair housing market would threaten our democracy...

...Although 88 percent of whites . . . agreed that blacks have a right to live wherever they want to, only 40 percent . . . were willing to vote for a communitywide law stating that 'a homeowner cannot refuse to sell to someone because of their race or skin color.' " Less than a third of whites, as opposed to over two-thirds of blacks, are willing to live in a community which is roughly split fifty-fifty white and black...

...It takes many such audit surveys to target specific areas where discrimination exists, and it will take higher fines and stiffer penalties than the existing law provides to ever make fair housing a reality...

...Less familiar, perhaps, are the trends in how whites and blacks feel about living together and the influence of white prejudice and fears on residential segregation...