But perhaps the greatest evil of racial segregation is how it concentrates the poverty of blacks, as Massey and others have shown. Because of historical—and some continuing—discrimination, blacks are more likely to be poor. When this is combined with segregation, it means blacks are far more likely than any other group to live in concentrated poverty. It's hard to be poor; it's much harder to be poor and surrounded by poverty and all the harmful cultural norms and behavior, such as crime, that accompany it. It's a kind of poverty whites rarely experience, and one tough to escape.
When Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson studied Chicago residents in the most disadvantaged quartile of the city's census tracts a few years ago, he found that no white families, and only a few Hispanic families, were represented. "Residents in not one white community experience what is most typical for those residing in segregated black areas," Sampson wrote in 2009, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. "Trying to estimate the effect of concentrated disadvantage on whites is thus tantamount to estimating a phantom reality."
Sampson has been studying poverty in Chicago for much of the last two decades. He's found that in Chicago, poverty, like segregation, persists: neighborhoods that were poor and black in 1970 were generally poor and black in 2000. (From 1970 to 2000, not a single Chicago neighborhood changed from black to white.) The neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are also high in cynicism and distrust, he's written. In a longitudinal study, Sampson focused on the verbal ability of children growing up in Chicago's poor black neighborhoods and found "detrimental and long-lasting consequences for black children's cognitive ability rivaling in magnitude the effects of missing one year of schooling." Verbal ability, he noted, is a "major predictor of life outcomes."
These kinds of deep, neighborhood-based problems, linked inextricably in Chicago to racial segregation, are why desegregation advocates continue to maintain that segregation itself needs to be confronted.
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Originally Posted by orestes
