Response to Gary Orfield.

• Author: Glazer, Nathan
• Position: Article in this issue, p. 1397 - Symposium - Shaping American Communities: Segregation, Housing & the Urban Poor

Gary Orfield is to be commended for his indefatigability, indeed his relentlessness, in continuing to pursue an issue of enormous importance on which most of us--analysts, governments, federal, state, and local officials, lawyers, bureaucrats, scholars, and even many erstwhile civil rights activists--have given up.(1) That issue is the desegregation of the American public school and the American neighborhood. No one need argue the importance of this end. Blacks are by far the most segregated of ethnic and racial groups, as Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton demonstrated in their important book American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.(2)

I feel a special responsibility for bearing with this issue because many years ago I took the position that black separation from whites would in time be mitigated just the way the concentration of first-generation immigrants in urban ghettoes was diluted, that indeed the degree of separation of blacks from whites in northern multiethnic cities was not much greater than that of European ethnic groups from native whites of longer antecedents.(3) I believed--and still in measure do--that black concentration and segregation was based not only on discrimination, public and private, but on the same factors that had created first-generation and maintained second- and third-generation concentrations of European ethnic groups in northern cities. It could be argued in the 1960s and 1970s that blacks in northern cities were roughly in the same position as European ethnic groups thirty or forty years earlier.(4) After all, although there had been blacks in northern cities from their founding, the mass migration of blacks into northern cities did not take place until the 1920s, as mass European immigration was coming to an end. It was not unreasonable to believe in the 1960s, with black migration still going on and with long-established discriminatory patterns being broken by law and social change, that black concentration was a reflection of the recency of their migration. From the northern urban point of view, blacks were still a first- and second-generation ethnic group.(5)

History has shown that this point of view was wrong. In fact, the degree of residential separation of African-Americans is quite out of the ballpark when we compare it with the more modest and temporary concentrations of European ethnic groups.(6) Perhaps I can defend the error: no one of good will could have predicted in 1965, in the wake of the passage of a major civil rights bill, that thirty years later blacks would be so fully separated from whites. Certainly this situation, responsible for so many ills--the creation in poor black areas of a distinctive and dysgenic culture, even of a separation in language--demands our most intense concern. I agree with Gary Orfield that we have no more serious domestic problem.

I agree, too, with his argument that residential concentration and school concentration are closely related. One leads to the other, and both lead to the same disturbing results. If a school goes mostly black, whites will not be willing to move into the neighborhood, and the school is on the road to becoming all black. If a neighborhood goes mostly black, whites will not be as interested in sending their children to a school in that neighborhood.

There are, nevertheless, a number of points on which I take issue with Orfield. The first is on responsibility, public and private, for segregation. (Decades ago, I tried to reserve the term "segregation" for direct state- or community-ordered or imposed segregation and to use "concentration" or some other word for those concentrations, often reaching 100%, which were not ordered by any public authority.(7)...