by Julia Pierrepont III
LOS ANGELES, July 6 (Xinhua) -- More than 57 years after the United States passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a nominal bid to prohibit racial discrimination, the specter of racism is still haunting the country.
The Roots of Structural Racism Project, researched for years by the University of California, Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute, recently revealed its disturbing findings: 81 percent of U.S. cities with over 200,000 residents were more segregated today than they were 30 years ago.
Of late, the United States has been undergoing what the media refers to as "a national reckoning on race," prompted by Washington's racially-biased policies, a devastating pandemic that disproportionately affected people of color in poorer neighborhoods, and a series of high profile police aggression against African Americans, culminating with the death of George Floyd, a black man murdered by a former Minneapolis police officer.
What's more, a wide section of the American public has awakened to the fact that non-whites in the country have been systematically disadvantaged by the country's socio-economic and political systems since birth.
This growing awareness led to "Black Lives Matter" demonstrations across the country in recent months, raised public attention on the issue of race, as well as a public call for legislative reforms that tackle persistent racial inequities.
But the study published on June 21 showed just how much further the country still had to go and how deeply entrenched racism was in the very socio-economic fabric of the nation.
The study found that the most segregated regions in the nation are the Midwest and mid-Atlantic, followed by the West Coast, while Southern states have lower overall levels of segregation, and the Mountain West and Plains states have the least.
Rustbelt cities of the industrial Midwest and mid-Atlantic disproportionately make up the top 10 most segregated cities list, which includes Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Trenton. At the same time, out of the 113 largest cities examined, only Colorado Springs, Colorado and Florida's Port St. Lucie qualified as "integrated."
Furthermore, neighborhood poverty rates are highest in segregated communities of color (21 percent), which is three times higher than in segregated white neighborhoods (7 percent); household incomes and home values in white neighborhoods are nearly twice as high as those in segregated communities of color; black children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn nearly 1,000 U.S. dollars more as adults per year, and 4,000 U.S. dollars more when raised in white neighborhoods, than those raised in highly segregated communities of color.
The Berkeley study also found that although Los Angeles and other metropolitan areas in the county may have become more racially diverse over the years, neighborhoods and their resident populations were still divided predominantly by race.
In total, "83 percent of neighborhoods that were given poor ratings (or 'redlined') in the 1930s by a federal mortgage policy were as of 2010 highly segregated communities of color," the study noted.
The report's findings were vitally important, said Stephen Menendian, assistant director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and lead author of the study, because residential segregation was the foundation of "basically every expression of structural racism" in the country, from educational and health disparities to mortgage red-lining and over-policing in urban neighborhoods.
"Color of Law," by historian Richard Rothstein, revealed that in the 1950s, the overtly racist federal loan policies prohibited real estate developers who received federal financial assistance from building racially-integrated housing where blacks and whites could live side-by-side as neighbors.
"Redlining," a practice in the real estate and financial sectors which denied financial services and mortgages to buy homes with to residents based on their race started in the 1920s, and, though it was outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act which prohibited discrimination based on race, undocumented discrimination still persists.
"At a time that the White community was being helped to buy their homes and build generational wealth through access to government-sponsored, low interest home loans, blacks were denied these loans and effectively cut off from home ownership. Generational equity was denied to blacks in America and we are still seeing the negative ripple effect of that to this day," George Tunis, a Michigan businessman, told Xinhua Tuesday after reading the study.
That economic disparity led directly to the underfunding of infrastructure and new housing in black neighborhoods, the gutting of entire black-owned neighborhoods when new highways were built through black communities instead of white ones.
It also caused a ripple effect that created massive systemic disparities in entrepreneurship, businesses and labor markets, schools and university enrollments, and vast inconsistencies in policing and the criminal justice system along racial lines.
The Los Angeles Times reported that between 1950 and 1954, less than 3 percent of the 125,000 Federal Housing Authority units built in Los Angeles County were available to people of color, due to overtly racist policies and the skewed perception that having black neighbors would reduce property values.
Today, Los Angeles still ranked as the sixth-most segregated city in America out of the 221 documented in the research study. Many California communities showed even less progress or got worse, such as Santa Barbara, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa Riverside, Vallejo, San Diego, Modesto, Sacramento, Oxnard, Chico, Bakersfield, San Luis Obispo, and San Francisco. Enditem
