Residential segregation is the linchpin of racial division and separation. By segregation, I mean the separation of groups into neighborhoods dominated by members of a single racial or ethnic group. In most Michigan metropolitan areas, as in the nation, the degree of black-white racial separation in residence remains high, despite evidence of shifting white attitudes about race, despite successful court challenges to programs that perpetuated racial segregation, such as Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which ruled that racially restrictive covenants were unenforceable, and Hills v. Gautreaux (1976), which ruled against racially isolated public housing projects, and despite
the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and litigation against discrimination in rental and real estate practices in the last three decades. 13 The degree of black-white segregation has tended to lessen in communities with small black populations, areas around military bases (reflecting the racial heterogeneity of the armed services), and university towns. 14
While patterns of black-white segregation are deeply entrenched throughout the country, racial segregation rates are particularly high in large metropolitan areas in the northeast and midwest, and particularly in Michigan. Table 4, based on data from the 1990 U.S. Census, lists the metropolitan areas in the United States with the highest degrees of black/white segregation. The metropolitan areas are ranked by their Index of Dissimilarity, a measure of the percentage of blacks who would have to move for the distribution of blacks and whites in every neighborhood to be the same as their representation in the overall population of the metropolitan area.
Three of the ten most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States are in Michigan: Detroit, Saginaw/Bay City/Midland, and Flint. Only the Gary/Hammond, Indiana area is more racially segregated than metropolitan Detroit. Two other Michigan urban areas rank in the nation's top twenty-five most segregated metropolitan areas--Muskegon and Benton Harbor. Two other areas, not in the top twenty-five -- Grand Rapids (with an index of dissimilarity of 72.3) and Jackson (69.9)-- have rates of black/white segregation higher than the mean index of black/white dissimilarity for metropolitan areas in the United States as a whole. Michigan's four metropolitan areas with moderate rates of segregation, Ann Arbor (49.5), Battle Creek (62.9), Kalamazoo (53.1), and Lansing/East Lansing (56.8), follow national trends. Three are home to major universities, and all have small black populations. Altogether, only 7.6 percent of all Michigan blacks live in these four areas. 15
Metropolitan Detroit, home to about half of all Michigan residents, offers a particularly stark example of the persistence of black-white segregation. In the metropolitan Detroit area, the pattern of black-white segregation has fluctuated only slightly since 1940 (Table 5). In fact, rates of residential segregation in Detroit were higher in 1990 than they were in 1960, despite the liberalization of attitudes toward race and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In the 1980s, black-white segregation rates grew more pronounced in metropolitan Detroit, at a time when the degree of racial segregation fell slightly in many other major metropolitan areas in the nation. 16
Hispanics experience a relatively high degree of segregation from whites, though not nearly as severe as that of blacks. Table 6 lists the twenty-five metropolitan areas with the highest rates of Hispanic/white segregation nationwide. Several patterns emerge from these data. Cities in the northeast and midwest experience the highest rates of Hispanic/white segregation. It is likely that in these metropolitan areas, the black-white color line influences Hispanic/white segregation patterns, for most northeastern cities have sizeable Hispanic populations of Afro-Caribbean origin, such as Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Hispanics of African descent experience rates of racial segregation comparable to that of non-Hispanic blacks. Urban areas with large numbers of Hispanics (such as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles) also tend to experience higher degrees of segregation than places with relatively few Hispanics, just as urban areas with large numbers of blacks tend to experience higher degrees of segregation than places with relatively few blacks. 17
Michigan's Hispanic population is very small. Hence the degree of Hispanic/white in
Michigan is significantly lower than that of blacks (Table 7). In addition, Michigan has few Hispanics of African descent, who tend to experience high rates of segregation. In only three Michigan metropolitan areas, Saginaw/Bay City/Midland, Grand Rapids, and Lansing/East Lansing, is the Hispanic population over three percent. It is in those areas, and Detroit, where the degree of Hispanic segregation is the highest.
In the wake of Shelley v. Kraemer, the FHA excised references to the racial character of neighborhoods from its underwriting manual, but its actuarial standards continued to prevent the financing of older, rundown homes and forbade the introduction of "incompatible" groups into a neighborhood. Realtors likewise adhered to a code of ethics that forbade the sale of a home in a homogeneously white neighborhood to a non-white. The lack of equal access to the mortgage market thus prevented most Detroit blacks from purchasing homes eligible for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) loans. The only black developments to receive federally backed loans and mortgages until the late 1960s were a few segregated communities newly constructed on open land near predominantly black neighborhoods, and the occasional infill home, constructed on vacant land in an already black neighborhood. Although federal laws since the 1960s have forbidden discrimination in mortgages and insurance, recent studies indicate that minorities still do not have equal access to home financing.
Not only did federal policies encourage racial separation in housing, but so too did organized resistance on the part of whites. In Detroit, more than 200 homeowners' associations existed in the mid-twentieth century, most of them created to resist black movement. Often white homeowners used violent means to prevent black movement into their neighborhoods. In northeast Detroit, in 1942, whites attacked black families moving into the Sojourner Truth Housing project. 19 Between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s, blacks who were among the first to move into formerly all-white neighborhoods were targeted in more than two hundred violent incidents and protests, including stone throwing, vandalism, arson, and physical attacks. In the 1960s and afterward, similar incidents sometimes accompanied black movement into Detroit suburbs. Whites, acting from a potent combination of fear and racism, made it clear to blacks that challenges to the color line would exact a high price. Recent studies show that many blacks are still reluctant to move into predominantly white communities because of their memories and fears of white opposition to their presence. Even if they do not expect violence, they still expect hostility. 20
As Detroit's white population suburbanized, opposition to racial diversity extended to suburban communities. In Dearborn, a middle-class suburb that was home to Ford's international headquarters, city officials collaborated with real estate firms to preserve the racial homogeneity of their community. In the 1940s, Dearborn's mayor promised that Dearborn would remain an all-white community. To that end, throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Dearborn officials vigorously fought against mixed-income housing in their city on the grounds that it would become a "dumping ground" for blacks and other minorities. Despite the fact that Dearborn and Detroit are contiguous, today the Detroit side of the border is almost entirely African American, while the Dearborn side has hardly any blacks. 21 Other suburban communities resisted black movement and policies to diversify the local housing market. On the borders of Detroit are many communities, among them Warren, Redford, Hazel Park, and Harper Woods, which have remained almost completely white despite their proximity to minority-dominated city neighborhoods and their affordable housing stock. 22 Other suburbs devised elaborate techniques to keep minorities and other "undesirable" groups out. In the Grosse Pointes through 1960, realtors favored home buyers of northwestern European descent. Blacks, Asians and Latinos were excluded altogether, and Poles, Southern Europeans, Jews, and other "swarthy" groups needed to meet stringent qualifications if they were to be allowed to purchase a home in the exclusive suburban community. Although the Grosse Pointes are now home to some Jews, Italians, Poles, and other groups of European descent, they remain bastions of whiteness today. 23 As a consequence of the exclusion of blacks from many suburban areas, the Detroit metropolitan area is divided by many invisible lines of race, including long stretches of Eight Mile Road on Detroit's north and Mack Avenue on the east, to offer two examples.
Black and white attitudes also play a role in determining a neighborhood's racial composition. Detailed data from two University of Michigan-conducted Detroit Area Studies (1976 and 1992) show that blacks prefer racially mixed neighborhoods. Only a small number prefer to be "pioneers" in all-white neighborhoods; relatively few prefer all-black enclaves; but roughly nine out of ten blacks would be willing to move into neighborhoods inhabited by whites. 27 White views differ. Over the last two decades, whites have become more accepting, at least in principle, of the idea of having black neighbors. 28 But there remains a huge gap between principle and practice, between attitude (as measured by survey research) and behavior (as measured by actual patterns of racial mixing). Both Detroit area studies showed that "[w]hite demand for housing in an area is clearly affected by its racial composition." The more blacks a neighborhood has, the lower white demand for homes will be. 29 Also, in neighborhoods undergoing racial change, less prejudiced whites usually follow their more prejudiced predecessors in leaving neighborhoods as more blacks move in. There are virtually no neighborhoods in metropolitan Detroit that are one-third black, despite the fact that a majority of whites have told researchers that they would not feel uncomfortable living in such a neighborhood.
The lack of racial diversity in Detroit's neighborhoods can be explained in large part by the persistence of negative racial stereotypes. Metropolitan Detroit whites stated beliefs that blacks lack a work ethic, are prone to criminal activity, and are less intelligent than whites. A majority of Detroit area whites ranked whites more intelligent than blacks (56 percent); stated that blacks were more likely to "prefer to live off welfare" (71 percent); and spoke English less well than whites (77 percent). 30 The greater the extent to which whites endorsed these stereotypes, the less willing they were to accept blacks as neighbors. The authors of the Detroit study concluded that "whites who endorse negative stereotypes were more likely to say they would flee integrated neighborhoods and were less likely to consider moving into them." Similar studies conducted in other major metropolitan areas have also found that patterns of residential segregation by race are deeply rooted in racial stereotyping. 31
It is important to note that residential segregation by race is not a natural consequence of disparities in income between blacks and whites. Middle-class and wealthy blacks are no more likely to live near whites than poor blacks. In an examination of the thirty metropolitan areas with the largest black populations in the United States, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton found no significant difference in the segregation rates of poor, middle-class, and well-to-do African Americans. "Even if black incomes continued to rise," write Massey and Denton,
"segregation would not have declined: no matter how much blacks earned, they remained racially separated from whites." 32 In metropolitan Detroit in 1990, the degree of residential segregation was uniformly high for blacks across the economic spectrum. The Index of Dissimilarity for black households with incomes below $5,000 was three points lower than that of black households with incomes of greater than $100,000. Rates of segregation among blacks and whites of equal incomes, ranging between $5,000 and $75,000 were even higher. 33 In addition, large sections of Detroit's predominantly white suburbs have housing that most blacks can afford. 34
Disparities in black and white economic status do not explain the high rates of residential racial segregation.
In sum, residential division by race remains a jarring anachronism in an increasingly racially diverse society. Residents of American cities like Detroit have created a cognitive map of the city based on racial classifications. Those classifications exact a high price. The high degree of segregation by race reinforces and hardens perceptions of racial difference. It has profound effects on racial attitudes and opportunities. And it creates a domino effect, seriously limiting interracial contact in many other arenas of American life.