Читать книгу Segregation - Eric Fong - Страница 15

Opportunity and inequality are organized across space and territory. Galster and Sharkey (2017) showed that opportunities vary by geography and scale, from neighborhood to city to region. These opportunities include economic benefits, social networks, and social support. In addition to shaping economic and social opportunities, segregation affects the physical and psychological well-being of individuals. This is because each neighborhood has risks and protections related to the quality of the physical and social environment, which in turn are often based on the socioeconomic profile of the community. Physical amenities are determined by the investments of residents and the services provided by the local government. The social environment is defined by the behavior of the residents of the neighborhood. The quality of these neighborhood factors is related to the physical and psychological well-being of residents.

The extent of ethno-racial segregation varies by society. Some societies, such as Japan, maintain ethno-racial and cultural homogeneity, making it difficult for other ethnic members to be integrated (Takenaka, Nakamuro, and Ishida 2016). Western multicultural societies such as the United States and Canada have relied on many distinct ethno-racial groups immigrating or being forcibly brought into the country, as happened with the slave trade. The potential for social instability in these societies is high if groups cannot achieve meaningful social integration over time. In hope of reducing segregation, multicultural societies discourage homophily and encourage social integration between groups in hope of reducing segregation. Segregation in these societies has widely come to be seen as undesirable, especially the long-term segregation of disadvantaged minorities. However, efforts to reduce segregation have been slow and achieved mixed success, which is a topic that will be discussed in the following chapters.

Changing views about segregation as well as lessons learned about the ill effects of concentrated disadvantage from black–white “hypersegregation” in the United States have led to efforts to reduce racial segregation (a topic we will be discussing in Chapter 4). For example, urban planning and public housing practices that exacerbated racial segregation in the mid-twentieth-century projects have been replaced with newer models that explicitly encourage mixed-race and mixed-income communities. The 1950s–60s Civil Rights Movement in the United States also shifted public thinking away from false “separate but equal” framing for black and white accommodation, and toward new ideas that challenged homophily.