Rethinking Segregation Beyond Black and White

SECTION: Section 4; Page 1; Column 1; Week in Review Desk

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HEADLINE: The World: Adjoining;
Rethinking Segregation Beyond Black and White

BYLINE: By JANNY SCOTT

BODY:
THE waves of immigration to the United States over the last 20 years -- the
largest two-decade influx in the nation's history -- have produced new forms
of segregation and integration that challenge the traditional meaning of
those words. The 2000 census reveals that the issue of black-white
segregation has been complicated by new forms of Latino and Asian
separateness and mixing.

While the census makes clear that the segregation of blacks from whites
remains stubbornly high, Latinos and Asians have integrated places once
largely black or largely white. Yet they have also formed racial and ethnic
enclaves that upend long-held assumptions about segregation's causes and
costs. These enclaves are the result of forces far more complex than those
that produced black-white segregation in the past -- forces that include not
only discrimination but also varying degrees of necessity, personal
preference and the immigration process itself.

Among Asian groups, for example, it is sometimes those with higher incomes
and a greater range of choices who opt to cluster. So the enclave is a
springboard for some, a destination for others. And while some Latinos
assimilate quickly, others become segregated in places that resemble
traditional ghettos.

"The conventional notions of integration and segregation need rethinking,"
said George Galster, a professor of urban affairs at Wayne State University
in Detroit. "We are starting to see many more multiracial and ethnic
neighborhoods. And the dynamics of how and why those neighborhoods change
are relatively unknown to social scientists, compared to the dynamics of the
traditional white-black transitions."

John R. Logan, a sociologist at the State University at Albany who has long
studied black-white segregation, said he shifted after 1990 to include
Asians and Latinos. He has gone from thinking of segregation as "almost
entirely imposed on minorities" to believing there is "more variation and
complexity among different groups, and even different social classes among
groups."

EXTERNAL barriers, like housing discrimination based on race, are still
viewed as the main cause of black-white segregation. But among Asians,
preference plays a larger part. Latinos fall in between. Like blacks, they
face discrimination in the real estate market, though they can also benefit
from the ethnic economies found in Hispanic enclaves. Many, better educated
and better off, move on; others do not. Language ability is a key factor.

Professor Logan said Latino children tend to remain bilingual at home even
in the third generation, particularly when they live in concentrated
enclaves. But most Asian children in the third generation, he said, live in
entirely English-speaking environments.

"The complexity of segregation is brought home to us when we see how
differently it is working out for different groups," he said.

To many, the term segregation connotes black isolation from whites. And
black-white segregation remains the most extreme. As Edward L. Glaeser, a
Harvard economist who studies segregation, puts it, blacks, more than any
group except perhaps Native Americans, have been subjected to an unusually
severe set of external segregating forces -- from violence to restrictive
covenants to racial steering by real estate agents.

"One of the striking things about black-white segregation over the years is
that it has been and remains so much higher than other kinds," said John M.
Yinger, a professor of public administration and economics at Syracuse
University. "It is, in some ways at least, a different phenomenon."

BY contrast, Latino and Asian segregation is often a transitory product of
immigration: a Korean immigrant moves into an Asian neighborhood not because
of housing discrimination but because a Korean friend finds her an
apartment. In that way, researchers say, Latinos and Asians resemble earlier
European immigrants, who faced discrimination but also congregated
voluntarily.

"There's probably some discrimination against Latinos and Asians in the
housing markets," said Reynolds Farley, a sociologist at the University of
Michigan, "but most immigrant groups have, to some degree, clustered when
they arrived. As they move up the economic ladder, their clustering goes
down."

Not everyone, however, moves on. Some Latino groups are isolated in
inner-city areas just as disadvantaged as some African-American ghettos,
Professor Logan said. While Latinos who achieve higher income and
educational levels have assimilated after the first generation, many have
not -- even in the third generation.

"There are many places now where Mexicans or Guatemalans or Dominicans or
Puerto Ricans have greater disadvantage and perhaps not better prospects in
the next 20 years than African-Americans," he said. "There's a social
process in place that makes assimilation possible for them in a way that
African-Americans do not experience. But, particularly among Hispanics, only
a relatively small share get the benefit of that."

Another difference between the segregation of blacks and other groups has
been the intensity of concentration. Philip Kasinitz, a professor of
sociology at Hunter College and a specialist in immigration, said it is
unusual for people who voluntarily cluster to become as highly concentrated
as African-Americans. For Europeans who came in the early 20th century, as
for more recent Latino and Asian arrivals, high concentrations occur only
rarely, in so-called neighborhoods of first settlement.

Second-generation neighborhoods are far more mixed. The dominant ethnic
group in places that used to be called, say, Little Italy rarely topped 50
percent, Professor Kasinitz said. Then middle- and upper-middle-class
members of the immigrant group moved on, leaving the working class behind --
a pattern he suspects is being repeated by Asians and Latinos.

Black segregation is different. Concentrations of 80 or 90 percent occur
almost exclusively in black neighborhoods, Professor Kasinitz said, because
only in the case of blacks do all whites flee. There are neighborhoods in
the Bronx, he said, where the older population is Italian and the younger
population Latino, that will remain integrated for a long time.

Other scholars make the point that "voluntary" segregation is rarely
clear-cut. The last national study of housing discrimination, in 1989, found
discrimination in the sales market was as high on most measures for Latinos
as for blacks. Another national audit, which for the first time included
Asians, was done in 2000; the results are due this year.

"It's very hard when you see a clustering of any type of racial or ethnic
minority group," Professor Galster said, "to know the degree to which their
expressed preferences are a function of positive desires to be with their
own kind as opposed to fears of being with a different group."

The census shows a mixed picture. Nationally, there has been a slight drop
in black-white segregation, measured by indexes sociologists use. Much of
the improvement seems limited to the black middle and upper-middle class;
new and growing metropolitan areas in the South and West; and suburbs. Older
cities remain highly segregated.

Segregation between blacks and Latinos dropped in some areas, as
lower-income Hispanic immigrants moved into black neighborhoods that some
blacks left behind, Professor Logan found. But segregation between whites
and Latinos changed little in cities with the largest Hispanic populations,
where many immigrants have settled in Hispanic neighborhoods; it dropped
more where Latinos had been a small fraction of the population.

The pattern is similar for Asians. Asian-white segregation was unchanged in
metropolitan areas with the largest Asian populations, which also saw heavy
Asian immigration. It dropped where Asians made up 2 to 4 percent of the
population.

"In some ways, we have become a far more mixed, multicultural community,"
Professor Kasinitz said of New York. He pointed out that the number of
places that whites share with Asians and that blacks share with Latinos
increased. "But the old, core segregation problem in the United States, the
distance between blacks and whites, hasn't changed."

Researchers have drawn divergent conclusions. Professor Logan, who
calculated rates of segregation between all four groups, found little
change. Despite the small drop in segregation between blacks and whites, he
said he was struck more by its persistence, and its persistence between
whites and the other groups.

In contrast, Professor Glaeser, who is studying segregation between blacks
and all nonblacks since 1890, concluded that the level had "declined
dramatically" for the third straight decade. He said the drop appeared
greater if one looked at black-nonblack segregation, instead of black-white,
but it was significant either way.

Professor Galster of Wayne State said: "The data are just very complicated.
There are all sorts of trends happening that suggest certain things that are
positive and other things that are not. It becomes just a matter of judgment
and ideological position whether one sees the glass as half empty or half
full at this point."