Abstract
Most research about race has been influenced by values of one sort or another. This started with the inception of race as a biological category. Cognitive values about race were concerned with the worth of distinctive taxonomic divisions, and political values about it were concerned with the moral, aesthetic, and political meanings of these human distinctions. The presence of cognitive and non‐cognitive values in contemporary social science concerning race is no less present or important. The role of racial politics is exposed in the debate over the nature of contemporary residential housing patterns, as well as in examinations of the methods and measures of segregation research. Such examinations uncover not only a sociology of the segregation studies, but also certain values about race and segregation. This leads us to richer explanations, given our public political desires, than we would have without those values.
Notes
Robert Nozick, Anarchy State, And Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 20. Nozick draws on Thomas Schelling's research on this matter, and presents this practice as an example of the invisible‐hand in residential patterns. Nozick fails to mention that part of Schelling's model is the different relative desires of blacks and whites for integrated housing. Blacks, in Schelling's research, wanted integrated housing far more than whites (remember, this report was published in 1969). Whites, in contrast, would only tolerate a small percentage of any minority group. So when blacks move to a neighborhood, other blacks, seeing a process of integration taking place, would follow. That process increased the levels of blacks in neighborhoods beyond the toleration threshold of whites. The “hand” in this process, rather than invisible, has a color. Nozick's cites Thomas Schelling's “Models of Segregation,” American Economic Review, 59, no. 2 (1969): 488–93. Also, see Schelling's “Dynamic Models of Segregation,” Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1 (1971): 143–86.
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Millwood: Kraus‐Thompson, 1973); and William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 21–22.
Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 82.
Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 52.
Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 57.
Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 53.
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation,” Social Forces, 67, no. 2 (1988): 281; Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 315.
Douglass S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 18–19.
The conclusions of this essay may be directly applied to this problem. The lack of consideration for the Native Americans' experience in the history of segregation studies is directly related to the anti‐segregation values of those studies. The social scientists involved in those studies were wholly taken with the dominant black and white paradigm of race relations and problems.
Massey and Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation.”
Julius Jahn, Calvin F. Schmid, and Clarence Schrag, “The Measurement of Ecological Segregation,” American Sociological Review, 12, no. 3 (1947): 292–303.
Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 20.
Otis D. Duncan and Beverly Duncan, “A Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indexes,” American Sociological Review, 20, no. 2 (1955): 210–17.
Charles F. Cortese, R. Frank Falk, and Jack K. Cohen, “Further Considerations on the Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indices,” American Sociological Review, 41, no. 4 (1976): 630–37.
Cortese, Falk and Cohen, “Further Considerations,” 631.
Massey and Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation.”
Wendell Bell, “A Probability Model for the Measurement of Ecological Segregation,” Social Forces, 32 (1954): 357–64.
Massey and Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation,” 287.
Massey and Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation.”
Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 23.
The value of inter‐racial exposure is simply assumed in the literature that I have cited. There is little attempt in the studies that developed the segregation indices to substantially connect that work and its underlying values with the social or intellectual history of race. For example, the value of inter‐racial exposure sounds similar to the common‐sense conceptions of racial integration or assimilation (and those concepts are not coextensive), yet conclusions arrived at through this index are not thought through the contentious history of assimilation or integration in late‐nineteenth or twentieth century African American political theory and social history.
Otis D. Duncan, Ray P. Cuzzort, and Beverly Duncan, Statistical Geography: Problems in Analyzing Area Data (New York: Free Press, 1961); and Edgar M. Hoover, “Interstate Redistribution of Population, 1850–1940,” Journal of Economic History, 1 (1941): 199–205.
Massey and Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation,” 289.
Massey and Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation,” 291.
Michael J. White, “The Measurement of Spatial Segregation,” American Journal of Sociology, 88, no. 5 (1983): 1008–18.
White, “The Measurement of Spatial Segregation,” 1011.
White, “The Measurement of Spatial Segregation”; Massey and Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation.”
Massey and Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation,” 283.
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, “Hypersegregation in US Metropolitan Areas: Black and Hispanic Segregation Along Five Dimensions,” Demography, 26, no. 3 (1989): 373–91.
Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 53.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969).
Wittgenstein, On Certainty.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough,” in Philosophical Occasions, eds James Klagge and Alfred Nordman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).
Massey and Denton 1989, 389.
W. A. V. Clark, “Understanding Residential Segregation,” Environment & Planning A, 22, no. 2 (1990): 145–47. Clark's work is related to Thomas Schelling's invisible‐hand explanations of residential segregation (see footnote 1). I concentrate on Clark's work because his position that racism does not explain segregation is indicative of the conservative or libertarian objections to governmental desegregation policies.
Clark, “Understanding Residential Segregation,” 145.
Clark, “Understanding Residential Segregation,” 145.
Clark, “Understanding Residential Segregation,” 146.
Clark, “Understanding Residential Segregation,” 146.
Clark, “Understanding Residential Segregation,” 146.
Clark, “Understanding Residential Segregation,” 147.
David R. James, “City Limits On Racial Equality: The Effects Of City‐Suburb Boundaries On Public‐School Desegregation, 1968–1976,” American Sociological Review, 54 (1989): 963–85; and Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).
Brown v. Board of Education 349 US 294 (1955), 133.
Reynolds Farley, The New American Reality: Who We Are, How We Got Here, Where We Are Going (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996); Paul Jargowsky, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996); Winthrop Jordon, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward The Negro 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); and C. Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).
Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 114. For an important discussion of the manner in which race and class interact in generations of hypersegregation, see William J. Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race, and his The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987). See also Manuel Pator, Jr.'s “Geography and Opportunity,” in America Becoming, Vol. 1, eds N. J. Smelser, W. J., and Wilson, F. Mitchell (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 2001), 435–67.
Craig St. John and Nancy A. Bates, “Racial Composition and Neighborhood Evaluation,” Social Science Research, 19 (1990): 47–61.
St. John and Bates, “Racial Composition and Neighborhood Evaluation,” 47, italics mine.
Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; and St. John and Bates, “Racial Composition and Neighborhood Evaluation.”
Ronald Sundstrom, “Race and Place: Social Space in the Production of Human Kinds,” Philosophy and Geography, 6, no. 1 (2003): 83–95.
Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1955); and Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, Chapter 2.
Clark, “Understanding Residential Segregation,” 146.
Übersichtlichen Darstellung has been translated as “perspicuous representation.” Übersichtlichen is the plural form of übersichtlich, which roughly means survey‐able or oversee‐able. Übersichtlichen contains normative connotations that are not captured by “perspicuous,” an adjective denoting clarity. A clear representation is different from a “super” or “over” representation of our point of view in relation to some problem or object. See Wittgenstein's use of the phrase in “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough,” 133, and “Philosophy,” in Philosophical Occasions, 86–93, and in Philosophical Investigations (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice‐Hall, 1953), §122.
Frederick Douglass, “The Nation's Problem,” in African‐American Social & Political Thought: 1850–1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: Transaction Publishers, [1889] 1995), 311–28. For an extended discussion of Douglass and Du Bois, see my essay “Douglass & Du Bois's der Schwarze Volksgeist,” in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. R. Bernasconi (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 32–52.
Douglass, “The Nation's Problem,” 318–19.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in African‐American Social & Political Thought: 1850–1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: Transaction Publishers, [1897] 1995), 483–92.
Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 488–89.
Two studies, for example, that do not take the value of assimilation or integration for granted are Mitchell Duneier's Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), and Elijah Anderson's Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See Orlando Patterson's The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's “Racial” Crisis (New York: Counterpoint Press, 1997), and the collection edited by Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, The New African American Urban History (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996), for numerous essays that question the value of integration or assimilation for African American communities.