The
Business Insider compiled a list of the most segregated cities in America. Memphis made the list with a description stating,
“Black people live in the inner city and other segregated neighborhoods”
(Business Insider). A statistic
described that the black-white dissimilarity score is 60.6 (2010 Census). Previously, I was aware that Memphis was very
segregated, however I was shocked by the visual depiction in the map.
The map can be
seen here: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-segregated-cities-census-maps-2013-4#memphis-tenn--black-people-live-in-the-inner-city-and-other-segregated-neighborhoods-3. Red dots symbolize white citizens, blue dots
symbolize black citizens, and orange dots symbolize Hispanic citizens.
Troy
Hassel entered a blog on The Twenty One Theme section of Word Press and
categorized it into the Memphis section on May 10, 2013. The blog was titled Memphis: A Segregated 21st Century City. The blog discusses the Business Insider’s map
of the segregation in Memphis. Hassel
describes that Mud Island, Downtown, Midtown, East Memphis, and the majority of
suburbs are white, while North and South Memphis are largely comprised of
African Americans. The general population
of race that makes up the city severely contributes to stereotypes. People often associate certain areas with
crime or danger. Hassel explored an
article posted on The Atlantic: Cities described an interesting study in Urban Studies by authors Huiping Li,
Harrison Campbell, and Steven Fernandez.
The article investigates and describes the problems that coincide with
segregation. The article presented
reasons as to why segregation is negative for everyone. The authors clearly stated,
“Segregation…may inhibit the new ideas and innovations that
arise when people who are unlike interact with each other. And, quite simply,
when poor people have better access to opportunity, society as a whole has to
spend fewer resources addressing poverty and its consequences” (Li, Campbell,
& Fernandez).
The
authors identify a detrimental factor that is underappreciated in terms of its
negative effect on the entire population.
The prevention of new ideas and innovation also prevents progress in
terms of ideologies. Segregation creates
a never-ending cycle that contributes increasing difficulty of escaping the
institutional boundaries.
In class we discussed the boundaries of segregation; the cycle
consists of low performing schools producing students with sub-par education,
then those students are generally only able to earn low paying jobs, which
causes them to live in low socio-economic status housing with low performing
schools. Escaping the cycle is extremely
hard and will only be successful if schools and cities are desegregated. Furthermore, the article identifies that
there are often job opportunities located beyond the routes of public
transportation, thus limiting the opportunities. When there are opportunities within the
public transportation routes, the workers have to spend a portion of their
income on transportation, making it all the more difficult to gain progress.
Obviously there are no quick and easy solutions to segregation,
but an important key is spreading the knowledge that desegregating the city
will provide positive results for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and all other
races. Desegregation will allow the city
to fuse and develop culturally, educationally, economically, and socially. The change is crucial and needs the
involvement, effort, and support of all the Memphians.
Blog
Source: http://memphishistoryblog.wordpress.com/tag/residential-segregation/
This map is incredible. I always like images that reflect just how segregated our neighborhoods continue to be. It is no surprise that white people are concentrated more in the suburbs (white flight is a very real thing with detrimental effects to the inner city.) You are so right that we associate crime, violence, poverty with neighborhoods that are predominately African American. In Memphis in particular, the majority of the housing projects which were majority black are undergoing "revitalization" through the HOPE VI project, because of these assumptions. (though the housing projects here were in an unimaginable state of disrepair.) The idea behind this is to basically "clean up" downtown where most of these neighborhoods were located, but it is also to bring working class and middle class people together, which would in theory mean some amount of desegregation. Most of the people who used to live in these housing projects however, have been completely displaced, generally in what are not racially segregated neighborhoods in the suburbs, and were not able to return to the new housing they built in place of the public housing. I am unsure about what the new residents look like demographically, but there has been a lot of attention put on fixing up downtown areas in major cities, so it would not surprise me if they now have, and will in the future for those neighborhoods that are still under construction, be majority white despite the idea behind HOPE VI being mixed income (and to an extent racially diverse.) I will be interested in seeing how this map of the city changes in the future as downtown continues to be the "place to be" and as residents from the previous public housing units get pushed further into the suburbs.
ReplyDeleteChelsea's comment about the Hope IV project touches on a Brown Bag Lecture that we had earlier this semester. During the presentation a professor spoke of how hundreds if not more African Americans are displaced when the old projects are demolished. And how those who do return to the new housing feel unwanted in a neighborhood that was once their home. This feeling of being undesirable stems from the rules that accompany living in the new housings. For example, one neighborhood does not allow hair braiding on the porch. Braiding hair is associated with black culture; so the black people in that housing project cannot help but to feel as though they are being targeted, especially considering many women make hairstyling a profession.
ReplyDeleteThe cycle of poverty that Alex mentions can only be a tool for segregation when the schools are organized by geographic boundaries. I was shocked when Professor McKinney explained how N. Carolina first used school districts to segregate schools. Knowing that black and white people each lived in separate areas, N. Carolina was able to justify segregation. Memphis follows the same housing by assigning children to schools based on their address. Luckily you can try to have your child transferred to another school (otherwise I would not have had the education to get me into Rhodes). But the child's grades and behavior may be taken into consideration and the spaces at the "better" schools are limited. By assigning kids to a home school, the city is ensuring that the cycle of poverty and segregation continue.