American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass

This article argues that racial segregation is crucial to explaining the emergence of the urban underclass during the 1970s. A strong interaction between rising rates of poverty and high levels of residential segregation explains where, why and in which groups the underclass arose. This argument is developed with simulations that replicate the economic conditions observed among blacks and whites in metropolitan areas during the 1970s but assume different conditions of racial and class segregation. These data show how a simple increase in the rate of minority poverty leads to a dramatic rise in the concentration of poverty when it occurs within a racially segregated city. Increases in poverty concentration are, in turn, associated with other changes in the socioeconomic character of neighborhoods, transforming them into physically deteriorated areas of high crime, poor schools, and excessive mortality where welfare-dependent, female-headed families are the norm. Thus, policies to solve the socioeconomic problems of minorities will fail unless they are accompanied by measures for overcoming the disadvantages caused by racial discrimination and prejudice in the housing market.

[1]  The underclass , 1990, The Lancet.

[2]  D. Massey,et al.  The Ecology of Inequality: Minorities and the Concentration of Poverty, 1970-1980 , 1990, American Journal of Sociology.

[3]  K. Clark.  Dark ghetto: dilemmas of social power , 1989 .

[4]  N. Denton,et al.  Racial Identity Among Caribbean Hispanics: The Effect of Double Minority Status on Residential Segregation , 1989 .

[5]  H. Schuman,et al.  Survey-Based Experiments on White Racial Attitudes Toward Residential Integration , 1988, American Journal of Sociology.

[6]  George Galster,et al.  Race, Residence, Discrimination, and Economic Opportunity , 1988 .

[7]  S. M. Miller,et al.  Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution. , 1987 .

[8]  Douglas S. Massey,et al.  The Effect of Residential Segregation on Black Social and Economic Well-Being , 1987 .

[9]  Douglas S. Massey,et al.  Explaining the Paradox of Puerto Rican Segregation , 1985 .

[10]  Charlotte Steeh,et al.  Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations , 1985 .

[11]  Douglas S. Massey,et al.  Ethnic Residential Segregation : A Theoretical Synthesis and Empirical Review , 1985 .

[12]  C. Murray.  Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 , 1984 .

[13]  M. J. Bane,et al.  Slipping into and Out of Poverty: the Dynamics of Spells , 1983 .

[14]  S. Bianchi,et al.  Barriers to the Racial Integration of Neighborhoods: The Detroit Case , 1979 .

[15]  Howard Schuman,et al.  “Chocolate city, vanilla suburbs:” Will the trend toward racially separate communities continue? , 1978 .

[16]  Betty J. Cleckley.  : The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions , 1978 .

[17]  I. Sawhill,et al.  Defining and measuring the underclass , 1988 .

[18]  Douglas S. Massey,et al.  RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION OF BLACKS, HISPANICS, AND ASIANS BY SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND GENERATION , 1988 .

[19]  I. Garfinkel,et al.  Family structure poverty and the underclass. , 1986 .

[20]  G. Gurin,et al.  Myth and reality: The causes and persistence of poverty , 1985 .

[21]  D. Glasgow.  The Black underclass : poverty, unemployment, and entrapment of ghetto youth , 1981 .

[22]  Douglas G. Glasgow,et al.  The Black Underclass , 1980 .

[23]  S. Yeh,et al.  Racial Residential Segregation in the United States , 1966 .