This article review will highlight the main points of Camille Z. Charles' article, "The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation", published in the 2003 Annual Review of Sociology. Charles clearly points out that prejudice and discrimination play large roles in maintaining the racial residential segregation that exists in the United States, especially when it comes to African-Americans and phenotypically black Hispanics.
Charles also provides a significant amount of evidence which serves to disprove the spatial assimilation theory that objective differences in socioeconomic status and acculturation across racial/ethnic groups are primarily responsible for residential segregation.
Homeownership Among African-Americans
For instance, Charles points out that African-American homeowners reside in neighborhoods that are more segregated and less affluent than their renting counterparts, and that African-Americans make up the only group that is consistently penalized for owning a home. Charles argues that this runs completely counter to the spatial assimilation argument which proposes that individuals convert socioeconomic gains into higher-quality housing, often by leaving ethnic neighborhoods for areas with more whites.
An individual who can afford to own her own home will generally be of a higher socioeconomic status than an individual who has to rent her home, yet black homeowners do not typically leave ethnic neighborhoods for areas with more whites. Quite the contrary, they reside in more segregated neighborhoods.
Suburban Inequality Between African-Americans and Whites
This point is reinforced by the fact that most middle-class black families living in the suburbs live in majority black suburbs. On top of that, Charles argues that these black suburbs tend to be less affluent, have poorer quality public services and schools, and experience more crime and social disorganization compared to the suburbs that comparable whites reside in.
Even though blacks are moving up the socioeconomic status ladder, this does not seem to significantly increase their residential mobility into racially integrated neighborhoods.
The Role of Prejudice and Discrimination
However, two of the most convincing pieces of evidence that prejudice and discrimination play a role in the residential mobility of African-Americans and black Hispanics are the results of the Farley experiment in 1993 and the Charles experiment in 2000.
Charles points out that the Farley experiment showed that whites feel most comfortable living by Asians and least comfortable by African-Americans. The experiment did this by measuring which neighborhoods respondents would choose to move in or out of, depending on the compositions of in-group and out-group race neighbors.
The Farley experiment also found that African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians all appear to want both meaningful integration and a substantial coethnic presence. The Charles experiment in 2000, which allowed respondents to draft the racial composition of their ideal neighborhood, found that 25% of whites want no African-Americans at all in their ideal neighborhood.
Camille Z. Charles' Contribution to Urban Sociology
Charles presents clear signs of a still-existing prejudice against African-Americans in the United States, evidence of continued segregation of African-American homeowners despite climbing the ladder socioeconomically, and descriptions of housing market discrimination which ensure that this segregation persists.
Charles painstakingly and analytically debunks the theory of spatial assimilation cited within "The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation" in an effort to put forward a new explanation for the unfortunate reality of continued racial inequality in the United States.
It is sad that over 100 years have passed since W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1899 that “in the case of the Negroes the segregation is more conspicuous, more patent to the eye, and so intertwined with a long historic evolution, with peculiarly pressing social problems of poverty, ignorance, crime and labor, that the Negro problem far surpasses in scientific interest and social gravity most of the other race or class questions” pertaining to African-Americans living in Philadelphia in 1899, and yet relatively little has changed since then as far as segregation goes.
References:
- Charles, Camille Z. "The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation." Annual Review of Sociology 29.1, 2003: 167-207. Online.
- DuBois, W.E.B. The Philadelphia Negro. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899. Print.
Additional Information:
- Camille Z. Charles: Faculty Profile at the University of Pennsylvania
- Camille Z. Charles Carries on the Sociological Legacy of W.E.B. DuBois
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