Searching for the Sweet Spots
With the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education this year, and the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, there has been a reinvigorated conversation about race, segregation and inequality in America. Some highlights included: @nhannahjones’s great piece in ProPublica entitled “Segregation Now,” @djolder on gentrification’s violence and @tanehisicoates got the whole country talking in “The Case for Reparations.”
Then Ferguson happened.
For me, 2014 is the year the country has most openly discussed race since the OJ Simpson trial in 1995.
If that’s true and this is year is destined to go down as a notable one in history, like ‘54,‘64, and ‘94(-95), then I hope it is a tipping point, where we start to see more tangible gains in the fight against inequality and segregation.
But it will be an uphill battle as detailed in Richard “Rothstein’s, “The Making of Ferguson”
Every policy and practice segregating St. Louis was duplicated in almost every metropolis nationwide. Yet this story of racial isolation and disadvantage, enforced by federal, state, and local policies, many of which are no longer practiced, is central to an appreciation of what occurred in Ferguson this past summer, many decades later. Policies that are no longer in effect and seemingly have been reformed still cast a long shadow.
Segregation by geography or in schools increases inequality, so any fight against inequality should also include ending segregation. But I wondered:
Are the areas in America that have been consistently integrated? Might they have something to teach us?
It does not seem likely according to Rothstein.
Neighborhoods that appear to be integrated are almost always those in transition, either from white to mostly black (like Ferguson), or from black to increasingly white (like St. Louis’s gentrifying neighborhoods).
Daniel Jose Older, in his salon.com piece on gentrification, goes further:
(Justin) Davidson talks of a “sweet spot”: some mythical moment of racial, economic harmony where the neighborhood stays perfectly diverse and balanced. There is no “sweet spot,” as Andrew Padilla at El Barrio Tours points out in his excellent point-by-point takedown, just fleeting moments of harmony in the midst of an ongoing legacy of forced displacement.
But what if there are sweet spots . . . towns that aren’t really in transition, towns that have stayed more or less racially integrated consistently over the decades? Do they offer more opportunities to residents? Is inequality lower there? Is the achievement gap in schools less drastic?
I think I grew up in an area that might qualify, in what I would call one of the more successfully integrated towns in America: Ewing Township, New Jersey.
But before I can talk about Ewing, before I can try to examine these possible “sweet spots,” I need to know:
How do we define a town in transition?
Aren’t neighborhoods constantly changing? Do the demographics have to be consistent for 2, 3, 4, 5 decades before any neighborhood is considered NOT in transition?
So I’ll leave these two graphs and table here for discussion:
Upon first look, the above shows that the public school district in Ewing is more racially balanced than the township itself and has changed demographically more so. This could be due to a lot of factors that I won’t get into now.
Regardless, based on these graphs and table, would you define Ewing as a town in transition? Or is it a “stable” racially diverse town? Is it even diverse enough? A proper definition is needed in order to search for towns and schools that meet certain demographic criteria.
