Racial Segregation

Although racial segregation is inherently a geographic phenomenon, social scientists from numerous disciplines continue to contribute to the research literature. Today, racial residential segregation researchers make their homes in numerous disciplines such as geography, sociology, demography, political science, and urban studies. Research on racial residential segregation shares a history with the examinations of immigrant settlement and assimilation, which began with the Chicago School of Sociology in the early 20th century. Historically, spatial integration of foreign-born groups with the white majority population has long been viewed as reflective of a broader structural assimilation. However, numerous critiques have been leveled at many of the assumptions underlying the now multiple variants of immigrant assimilation models, many of which trace the geographic trajectories of residential settlement over time.

The vast majority of racial segregation research in North America since World War II has focused on the degree to which African Americans and whites share (or do not share) residential space in contemporary urban contexts. Most studies have used U.S. Census data to examine residential patterns within and across large metropolitan areas, frequently tracing identifiable segregation patterns over time. Over the past few decades, segregation researchers have employed multiple segregation indices developed to assist in measuring the degree of spatial separation between racial groups. The most common of these indices undoubtedly remains the Dissimilarity Index, which measures the degree of spatial evenness in the residential distribution of one racial/ethnic group across sub-units of a geographic area. Thus, the Dissimilarity Index is interpreted as the percentage of members of a given racial/ethnic group that would have to move to a different neighborhood for the percentage of each neighborhood to equal the percentage of that group across the larger geographic area (typically an entire metropolitan area). As measured by the Dissimilarity Index, segregation between African Americans and whites in U.S. metropolitan areas reached its height in the 1960s and 1970s and was exacerbated by increased suburbanization and “white flight.”

In a seminal paper, Massey and Denton (1988) outline four other indices that measure different forms of segregation: exposure/isolation, centralization, clustering, and concentration. Massey and Denton propose that when groups are segregated along four of the five aforementioned dimensions, [Page 2345]they are “hypersegregated.” Analyzing the 1980 U.S. Census data, Massey and Denton found that such “hypersegregation” was characteristic of the experiences of African Americans in 16 metropolitan areas (when measuring African American/white segregation patterns). A follow-up study by Kaplan and Holloway (1998) using the 1990 Census data showed little change, as African Americans remained hypersegregated from white residents in 14 of those 16 metropolitan areas, while several additional metropolises joined the hypersegregated list. Wilkes and Iceland (2004) concluded that by 2000, there was an overall decrease in the number of black-white hypersegregated metropolitan areas in the United States (which had decreased from 29 to 23), yet new hypersegregated cities had emerged when examining the degree to which Hispanics/Latinos share urban space with white residents. Because of the broader demographic shifts that have occurred over the past three decades across the United States, racial segregation researchers have begun to widen their foci to examine the contemporary spatial residential relations of Hispanic and Asian residents in many metropolitan areas.

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