American Apartheid

The book American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass was coauthored by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton and published in 1993 by Harvard University Press. It was written at the height of the debate on the “urban underclass,” which focused on whether U.S. cities had come to house a large population of poor families detached from labor markets, alienated from social institutions, and prone to crime. During the 1970s and 1980s, poverty became more concentrated within minority neighborhoods and rates of violence accelerated in a wave of drug abuse that stemmed from the invention of crack, a cheap but very addictive form of cocaine.

Prior to American Apartheid, explanations of urban poverty focused on two competing theories. Conservatives such as Charles Murray blamed the U.S. welfare system. He argued that by providing generous open-ended benefits to poor mothers, welfare discouraged marriage, promoted unwed childbearing, and discouraged work. Liberals such as William Julius Wilson argued that the transformation of the urban economy created the underclass. By replacing high-paying jobs in manufacturing with a two-tiered service economy, the transformation created new employment opportunities for middle-class minorities but reduced them for poor and working-class men, lowering the number of “marriageable males” and fomenting unwed childbearing, welfare use, and a growing concentration of poverty.

Neither explanation took account of the fact that, despite the passage of civil rights legislation during the 1960s, the United States remained highly segregated on the basis of race. In American Apartheid,[Page 56]Massey and Denton drew on a decade's worth of research to document the continued reality of racial segregation in U.S. cities and to demonstrate its negative effects on groups such as African Americans and Caribbean-origin Hispanics. To conduct their study, they assembled detailed data on the racial/ethnic composition of neighborhoods in the nation's fifty largest metropolitan areas plus ten other areas with large Hispanic concentrations. They also developed a new measurement model that assessed segregation simultaneously across five geographic dimensions and carefully surveyed prior research to document the social construction of the ghetto historically.

Public housing in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. The neighborhood name is an extension of the name of the Village of Bedford, expanded to include the area of Stuyvesant Heights. The Bedford community contained one of the oldest free African American communities in the United States. Many people consider the area to be the focus of African American life in Brooklyn, similar to what Harlem is to Manhattan. Throughout the urban United States, one ethnic or racial group typically dominates a neighborhood as described here, and this pattern has been largely unchanged for decades.

Source: iStockphoto.

Their analysis showed that Blacks and Whites were not always highly segregated from one another in U.S. cities and that before 1870 racial segregation was no more severe than that between Germans, Irish, Poles, Italians, and native Whites. During the late 19th century, however, urban Black populations began to grow through rural-urban migration. As the number of Blacks in cities rose, higher levels of segregation were deliberately imposed on them by Whites using a variety of formal and informal mechanisms that shifted over time. The legal designation of White and Black neighborhoods through legislation gave way after 1917 to a period when segregation was enforced through racial violence, which during the 1920s gave way to new forms of institutionalized discrimination based on deed restrictions, covenants, and prohibitions on renting or selling to “unwanted population groups.” During the 1950s, the federal government itself became directly involved in promoting segregation through its Federal Housing Administration lending policies, urban renewal programs, and public housing construction subsidies.

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