Skip to content

Segregation

America Has Desegregated In Name Only

December 3, 2018 Paul Street, Truthdig.com , ,
It’s a little-acknowledged reality that housing markets distribute more than mere dwellings. That’s because people’s place in the social order is intimately related to their geographic location generally, and where they live specifically. Housing quality functions both as a reflection and driver of inequality. Beyond that, however, better homes come with better neighborhoods that afford other opportunity-expanding advantages: good, well-funded schools; high-quality and readily available health care; agreeable recreational facilities and parks; full-service grocery stores with healthy foods; excellent retail outlets; nice sit-down restaurants; well-kept roads and other infrastructure; safe distance from pollutants, major transport and cargo routes...

Fracking Boom Takes Toll On Pennsylvania’s Communities Of Color And Lower-Income Areas

June 23, 2018 Mark Hand, Thinkprogress.org , , , ,
The construction of new natural gas-fired power plants in Pennsylvania is disproportionately harming lower-income populations in rural parts of the state, while communities of color are substantially more likely to live near existing gas-powered plants in the state, according to a new report. Released Wednesday by Food & Water Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental advocacy group, the report paints an alarming picture of what the dramatic growth in natural gas production in Pennsylvania means for disadvantaged communities, both urban and rural, that are more likely than ever to host the industry’s rapid expansion of drilling and power plants in the state. People of color make up 30 percent or more of the population in nearly 25 percent of Pennsylvania census tracts but make up nearly half of the census tracts within a three-mile footprint of an existing fossil fuel power plant.

If This Happened In Alabama There Would Be Uproar: In Israel, It’s The Norm

April 9, 2018 By Jonathan Cook, Blackagendareport.com , , ,
How would you describe a white town in a southern state in the United States that froze the tender for plots of land in a new neighborhood because it risked allowing blacks to move in? As racist? What would you think of the town’s mayor for claiming the decision was taken in the interests of preserving the “white character” of his community? That he was a bigot? And how would you characterize the policy of the state in which this town was located if it enforced almost complete segregation between whites and blacks, ghettoizing the black population? As apartheid, or maybe Jim Crow? And yet, replace the word “white” with “Jewish” and this describes what has just happened in Kfar Vradim, a small town of 6,000 residents in the Galilee, in Israel’s north. More disturbing still, Vradim’s policy cannot be judged in isolation. It is a reflection of how Israeli society has been intentionally structured for decades.

US Education Segregation Is Highly Profitable Business For Some

December 5, 2017 Mark Karlin, truth-out.org , ,
By Mark Karlin for Truthout - However, as I completed the research and writing for the book, I found that in this country we have had and continue to have a stubborn insistence on educating children who are economically vulnerable in completely different ways than we do the children who are wealthy. We try to convince students who are not wealthy that certain forms of education (such as those that are vocational in nature, or that include art, music and support for different learning styles) would work best for them. In this way, educational apartheid has remained constant. At the same time, children of color, or poor children who are somehow able to live in school districts and neighborhoods that have high performing schools can actually attend them. So, that's a definite change. The late poet, Amiri Baraka, referred to [the US] as a "changing same." I think in many ways that construct aptly describes our nation's educational system relative to students who are poor and of color. Educational apartheid is a changing same. How is capitalism related to the "segrenomics" of education in the US? Segrenomics is a term I came up with to describe what I saw in so many discrete educational periods in [the US] where there was a consistent cycle for plundering funds supposedly for our nation's most vulnerable students and then hoarding those same funds to educate students who were either wealthy, or white and often times ... both.

Want To See How School Choice Leads To Segregation? Visit Betsy DeVos’ Hometown

May 29, 2017 Jennifer Berkshire, www.alternet.org , , ,
By Jennifer Berkshire for Alternet - Here, two decades of the policies that the Trump/DeVos education budget now wants to take national, have resulted in white flight and school closures, leaving Holland’s poor and minority students segregated in the few schools that remain open. I traveled to Holland last week for the annual Tulip Time festival, a celebration of the city’s Dutch heritage. But along with Dutch shoes and swagger, the legacy of Michigan’s now two-decade experiment with school choice was on vivid display as well, and it wasn’t pretty. First, some background. During the endless runup to DeVos’ confirmation hearing last year, it was the Wild West-style school choice she’d pushed in Detroit that garnered most of the attention. But DeVos was also behind Michigan’s inter-district choice policies that, starting in 2000, disrupted neighborhood attendance zones, just as the Trump administration’s proposed budget seeks to do. In Michigan, school choice has become the new white flight as white families have fled their resident districts for schools that are less diverse. The most dramatic example of this may be in DeVos’ own hometown of Holland.

School Choice Is A Scam In Segregated Neighborhoods

May 25, 2017 Jitu Brown, www.chicagoreporter.com , ,
By Jitu Brown for The Chicago Reporter - Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos seems not to hear the fierce protests of parents, teachers and school officials over school closings and charter expansion in New York, Chicago, Oakland, Detroit and other American cities. How else to explain her continuing tone-deaf comments praising the glories of school choice? In truth, school choice does not exist in most black and brown communities in the United States. That is why her words ring false and her promises sound empty to the people living in those communities. Whatever hope existed that DeVos would learn on the job and inform her boss, President Donald Trump, of the need to respect that history and build on the effectiveness of American public schools while improving them, has been dashed. During her confirmation hearings, DeVos was criticized for her lack of experience with and knowledge of the public education system. Her later words at the Brookings Institution exemplified someone in a position of great power, who just does not get it: “How many of you got here today in an Uber, or Lyft, or another ridesharing service? Did you choose that because it was more convenient than hoping a taxi would drive by?

Racial Segregation Still At Heart Of Chicago’s Ills…And America’s Too

January 13, 2017 Natalie Y Moore, www.theguardian.com/ , ,
By Natalie Y Moore for The Guardian - In a couple of days, President Barack Obama will give a farewell speech in his adopted hometown of Chicago. This is the city to which he moved as a young man in the 1980s, to work asacommunityorganiser, inspired by Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor. Chicago is also where Obama met his wife, Michelle, a native of the city, had two daughters and launched a dazzling political career. Obama’s swan song will take place a touch north of Bronzeville, the South Side neighbourhood historically known as the “Black Belt”. When African Americans left the south in droves a century ago as part of the great migration, this is where they landed if Chicago was the final destination.

At 15 She Desegregated A High School, At 73 She Is Doing It Again

March 17, 2016 Rebecca Klein, www.huffingtonpost.com , , ,
By Rebecca Klein for The Huffington Post - When Dorothy Counts-Scoggins showed up for her first day of high school almost 60 years ago, she didn't even make it into the building before she was spat on, targeted with thrown trash and told to "go back to Africa." She was 15 years old that day in 1957 and the first black student to attend Harding High, a previously all-white school in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Suburban Sprawl Causes Segregation & Isolates The Poor

August 16, 2015 Ben Adler, www.grist.org , , , ,
By Ben Adler for Grist - Forty-seven years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, you might think that these problems are gradually disappearing. You would be wrong. “Architecture of Segregation,” a new study from the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, finds that concentrated poverty, especially among African-Americans and Latinos, is actually getting worse. Among the key findings: “The number of people living in high-poverty ghettos, barrios, and slums has nearly doubled since 2000, rising from 7.2 million to 13.8 million.” “Poverty became more concentrated [since 2000] — more than one in four of the black poor and nearly one in six of the Hispanic poor lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, compared to one in thirteen of the white poor.” But the culprit isn’t simply racial discrimination — it’s also suburban sprawl.

Banks & Racist Policies Shaped Segregation, Police Brutality

June 19, 2015 Richard Rothstein, www.salon.com , , , , ,
By Richard Rothstein in Salon - Housing equity is Americans’ most important source of wealth. Average black family income is now about 60 percent of white family income, but black household wealth is only about 5 percent of white household wealth. This disparity is almost entirely attributable to federal policy that prohibited black families from accumulating equity during the suburban boom and thus from bequeathing that wealth to children, as whites have done. We don’t have what is commonly termed “de facto” segregation—primarily resulting from private prejudice, income differences, preferences to live separately, or demographic trends. Our segregation is “de jure,” resulting mostly from racially explicit public policies designed to create residential patterns we too easily accept as natural or accidental.
«12»