In a study released this week, two Manhattan Institute researchers heralded the “end of the segregated century.” Harvard professor Edward Glaeser and Duke professor Jacob Vigdor showed that African American segregation levels have now declined to their lowest point since 1920, just after the beginning of the “Great Migration” of rural sharecroppers from the South to Northern industrial metropolitan regions. From 2010 Census data, professors Glaeser and Vigdor calculate changes in what sociologists term “dissimilarity indices.” They find a national dissimilarity (or segregation) rate of about 55 percent for African Americans—in other words, “only” 55 percent of African Americans would now have to move to neighborhoods with more non-blacks in order to evenly distribute the black population throughout all neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas. This is a substantial decline from the segregation level of about 80 percent in 1970. --- Another recent study of census data published by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies finds that over 20 percent of all African Americans now live in “high poverty” neighborhoods, unchanged from 2000. More than 40 percent of poor African Americans now live in high-poverty neighborhoods, compared to 15 percent of poor whites who live in such neighborhoods. Poor blacks are therefore nearly three times as likely to be “truly disadvantaged” as poor whites. (The Joint Center defines a “high poverty” neighborhood as one where 30 percent or more of the residents have incomes below the poverty line, but this definition can be misleading: The poverty line is very low, and neighborhoods with poverty rates of greater than 30 percent also inevitably house large numbers of residents whose incomes are barely above the poverty line, and whom most would also consider to be severely economically disadvantaged.) Read more at the Economic Policy Institute.
