The United States—and Americans—has long been divided along racial lines, divisions that date back to the legacy of slavery, the bloody Civil War, the horrors of the Jim Crow South, and now to the persistent poverty of so many black urban neighborhoods.
But how has segregation really evolved in this country? We like to believe that our evolution away from slavery and to a modern, industrial nation has made us a less segregated, more racially integrated society.
An important new study suggests that is not the case. The work, by economists Trevon Logan of The Ohio State University and John Parman of the College of William and Mary, and released as a working paper this month from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), takes a detailed look at the experience of racial segregation in the United States and finds that there are many flaws in our conventional understanding of racial segregation.
Their painstaking research goes back to the detailed manuscript files of the 1880 and 1940 U.S. Censuses to determine how and why racial segregation changed during that period, and if it got better or worse.
The researchers use these original census documents to develop an intriguing new measure of segregation. For a long time, census takers collected detailed and sequenced information about who lived next door to whom. Using these papers, the authors are able to zoom in on those who lived next door to neighbors of different races. By tracking segregation this way—on a household-by-household level, rather than by neighborhood—they are able to identify segregation in any kind of community, rural or urban, large or small, without having to worry about the way neighborhood boundaries or definitions have changed over time.
[For more of this story, written by Richard Florida, go to http://www.citylab.com/housing...-segregation/386171/]
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