The Atlantic: Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever?

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/segregation-tomorrow/459942/

Some of the most striking studies done on present-day segregation have to do with how it’s connected to the ways families share money and other resources among themselves. The sociologist Thomas Shapiro, for instance, argues that the greater wealth that white parents are likely to have allows them to help out their children with down payments, college tuition, and other significant expenses that would otherwise create debt. As a result, white families often use these “transformative assets” to purchase homes in predominantly white neighborhoods, based on the belief that sending their children to mostly white schools in these areas will offer them a competitive advantage. (These schools are usually evaluated in racial and economic terms, not by class size, teacher quality, or other measures shown to have an impact on student success.) Shapiro’s research shows that while whites no longer explicitly say that they will not live around blacks, existing wealth disparities enable them to make well-meaning decisions that, unfortunately, still serve to reproduce racial segregation in residential and educational settings.

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In fact, for black people, the transmission of wealth often goes in the opposite direction. In contrast to whites, who are more likely to pass wealth down to the next generation, blacks are more likely to provide some form of financial support to their parents, grandparents, and extended family. This flow of money leaves black families—even those in the middle class—without the extra help that many of their white peers grow up taking for granted.

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This understanding of how racial stratification is perpetuated indicates that America’s policy makers have yet to catch up with what’s happening on the ground. In 2014, then-House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan lamented a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In Ryan’s telling, men in the inner city are poor because they do not work, think about working, or know the value and culture of work.

This argument ignores reams of research suggesting that the number of skilled jobs has diminished, access to high-quality education is undermined by the existence of predominantly white neighborhoods, and the connections that help secure steady employment often stay within racially-exclusive social networks. Influential politicians who do not incorporate these findings into their legislative decision-making won’t be enacting policies that reflect—or, more importantly, attempt to challenge—the ways modern-day segregation keeps reproducing.