Contested Places: Construction of Racial Segregation Flashcards
Define race, and explain why race is a social invention rather than biological fact.
Race = A controversial marker of human difference, based on biological or physical distinctions (ex. hair, skin color)
- Race is a social invention made by white Europeans on what it means to be white, and what it means to not be white.
- Markers of human difference reflects unproven belief that these categories have some sort of meaning, or that ALL these people can be put into one race or another.
- Race is NOT a biological fact.
What are the 2 levels of biological base that race falls under? How does this further prove that race from a biological standpoint is meaningless?
2 Levels:
- Phenotypes = physical characteristics that differentiate how people look.
- Genotypes = genetic variation WITHIN a group defined as a “race”.
- Variation > Average difference BETWEEN populations.
- Trying to group people into races based on very fine details of physical and genetic characteristics makes no sense. Rather used as a way to easily class people as different from others.
What did Samuel Morton attempt to do to further prove claim for race as a biological fact?
- Tried to divide humanity into 22 separate races based on cranial capacity.
- Results were manipulated and showed more about racial ideology rather than science (people in power want to prove they are smarter than others).
What questions does race impose when looking at it as a power towards social classification?
- Who determines its meaning?
- How are these claims made, solidified, and enforced?
- Who do these claims benefit? Who do they harm?
- In what way are they contested in both everyday practices and demonstrations of oppression?
How are race and power interrelated?
Racial definitions are almost always defined and imposed by powerful social groups.
- Those that have the greatest access to power can define race.
- Power does not have to be numerical, more so economic, political, and social institutions.
Where does race potentially originate from and why?
Race originates from Western consciousness and colonialization:
- Colonial powers (Ex. Britain) had to justify to other countries that they could dominate/control territory beyond their borders. Argued they were bringing civilization to parts of the world.
- Economic and labor demands = slavery justification.
- Imperialism = justify domination of other groups.
What are the two definitions of racism, and how are they problematic?
- Racism = Ideology that attributes social, economic, and behavioral characteristics of individuals to a racial classification system.
- Racism = Practices of giving particular attributes to racial groups who are believed to be biologically distinct.
- Social and psychological markers being corelated to physiological markers.
- Judgement of worth are linked to presumed biological markers.
What is segregation, and how does it differ from hyper segregation?
Segregation = the degree to which two groups live separately from one another in different parts of a city.
Hyper segregation = when a neighborhoods is dominated by a minority, ethnic, or racial group, and is surrounded by another predominantly minority neighborhood and all of these neighborhoods are concentrated in relatively small portions of the central city.
Define Institutional Racism
Society creates institutions (and institutional relationships) that maintain pre-existing differential treatment towards specific groups.
- No longer rests on just people holding racist beliefs, now also institutions that use it as an ideology.
- Racism becomes a form of Doxa (everyday, normal occurrence).
What is a ghetto? How does it differ from an enclave?
Ghetto = involuntary segregation of racial, ethnic or other minorities.
- What lies at heart of ghetto is INVOLUNTARY segregation.
- Requires analysis of who is discriminated and ghettoized, and the separation of income groups.
Enclave = specific concentration of an ethnic group.
- IS voluntary and it has a diverse population living there in terms of ethic origin.
- Also has a sharing of services.
- Ex. Chinese is the primary group in Chinatown, Ottawa, but it is not the COMPLETE population in the area.
How do ghettos differ from other neighborhoods in cities?
- Homogeneous of same race, and heterogeneous of the same economic state.
- Diverse in land use.
- Services (stores, health places, transportation) are found in ghetto neighborhoods. Most likely not as good as in urban city. More diverse than found in an enclave.
- Excluded from using goods and services in the city. - Quality of services (goods, housing, education (especially)) is inferior than the city.
- Will see higher cost for housing, and because of that also crowding to live in the neighborhoods.
- Sanitation sites and bus depots are in ghettos, but wouldn’t see them in cities. - Reflects forms of marginalization, injustice, and stigma.
- School performance not strong, higher dropout rates.
- Underground economy just to survive.
- Police use force that would be considered unacceptable in the city as well.
What originally got black people moving from the South to the North?
- After the end of the civil war (1865), most cities were small, heterogenous (culturally/socially), not much segregation.
- Discrimination mainly shown through the labor market, not housing market.
1900-1940: The Great Migration
- One of the largest movements of people in US history, around 6 million black people moved from the south to north-western states.
- Labor demand in industrial cities grew, work conditions met by immigrants and AA’s.
Reason for shift in people from the South:
- Can make more money in the north.
- Flooding destroyed crops.
- Mexican Bollweavel attacked cotton plants, can’t harvest cotton now. Resulted in a collapse in labor for the south, north is now more attractive.
- Tension INC between immigrants and AA’s, caused racial violence and fear, AA’s wanted to live in neighborhoods where other AA’s lived.
Describe what happened during the Tulsa Massacre in 1921.
Two neighborhoods in tensions with each other, Greenwood and Tulsa.
- Greenwood known as “Black Wall St”, very prosperous area. Was not allowing for the expansion of Tulsa (essentially blocking it off).
- Allegedly a black man SA a white woman in an elevator, was going to be lynched in prison but was protected by other AA’s, a fight broke out and the started the massacre.
- Also a matter of creating spatial segregation, Zoning laws (white people didn’t want black people to live there, so they made Tulsa too expensive to live in for black people by burning it down, rebuilding it, and increasing price of living there).
What are the 2 things people from Tulsa wanted after the massacre?
- Compensation for the lost property and businesses.
- To have a firm count on how many people died in the fires.
What was the main reason for segregation? How was this enforced by the New Deal policy and the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)?
Main reason for segregation = public policy.
New Deal policy = wanted to increase housing construction across the US in order to fix the high unemployment rate.
- Needed a way to encourage investing in a house, thus created the HOLC.
HOLC = Gave loans out to white families to pay for the 50% deposit on a new home in the suburb.
- Helped encourage people to buy new homes in the suburbs, showed developers there was a market for that area and thus new houses were being built.
- Also made it very irrational to buy housing outside the suburbs.
- People went out into every area in the US to classify good risk and bad risk areas to create development (Only defined based on WHO LIVED THERE).
- Then went block by block to categorize the people living on each block. if AA’s lived on that block, then they could not get loans OR had a very high interest on them.
- Both examples of redlining.
- Areas considered high risk would drop in value, people looking for homes in those areas would not be given loans. AA’s would buy these homes and a bunch of AA’s would start living in high risk areas. Segregation.
- Real estate agents would also find white prominent blocks, move a white family into the suburb from one home and have an AA family move into that house. White families would then move out of fear that their housing value would decrease.
- With lower housing values, real estate agents would buy these houses at a discounted value and sell them to AA families at a HIGHER price.
- Block Busting practice.
- Finally, urban renewal looked to rebuild neighborhoods in suburbs where there was poorer (AA families), but urban neighborhoods refused.
- All public housing after WW2 was focused on central city, outside suburbs would be poverty areas.
How is racism considered ‘structural’?
Racism is structural as it fundamentally places people to live in certain places.
- Not just an outcome of individual actions or actions of institutions.
- People are placed in webs of power relationships and inequality, AA’s are placed in lower webs of power and particular neighborhoods, while whites are placed in higher webs of power and the inner city.
What are the 2 reasons that explains the persistence of segregation?
- Spatial Assimilation = individuals convert socioeconomic gain into high-quality housing to leave ethnic neighborhoods for white neighborhoods. Argument challenged by:
- Persistence of segregation: ROE and ROIncome for AA’s and houses below that of other groups.
- Middle class AA’s live in neighborhoods that are 15-20% less wealthy than groups with comparable status. - Place Stratification = Racial/ethnic groups are sorted by place according to their relative standing in society.
- Limits ability of minorities to live in areas dominated by a major group.
- Used by whites to maintain social distance (ex. New Deal policy and HOLC).
- Challenged by In-group preference hypothesis (very questionable except for whites, whites avoid blacks due to negative stereotypes).
What are the consequences of segregation? (5)
Geographically Concentrated Inequality
Shift of Urban Economy from Manufacturing to Services
Differential access to services
Social Cohesion/Social Mobility
Discrimination via ZIP code
