This story begins with white flight, which is well known—as blacks moved up to cities in the North from farms in the South at an astonishing rate in the 1950s and ’60s, they moved into inner-city neighborhoods, and the whites moved out. But then, in the 1980s, blacks, along with Hispanics and Asians, started moving out into the ’burbs, too. Affirmative action and public-sector unionization (say what you will about them!) lifted millions of African Americas into the middle class, and they could now afford a car and a garage to put it in.
The good news here: America became a little less segregated. This study by Brown University finds that segregation peaked between 1960 and 1970 and has fallen off, steadily but only gradually, ever since. The “typical white” today lives in a neighborhood that is 75 percent white (that figure was 88 percent 30 years ago). The “typical black” lives in a neighborhood that’s 45 percent black, 35 percent white, 15 percent Hispanic, and 4 percent Asian. But segregation scores in many big cities remain high. On a scale where any score above 60 is considered to indicate deep segregation, Detroit and Milwaukee are tied for worst, at 79.6 percent; then comes New York, Newark, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Cleveland, and, in ninth position, at 70.6 percent, we find St. Louis.
So even as black people pushed their way out into the suburbs, they typically haven’t done so in large enough numbers to gain real political power. This means that while the political power in many cities is in black hands today, whites still tend to run things in the counties within which those cities rest. Thus, one sub-story of the last 20 or so years in America has been a quiet but constant power struggle between municipal and county governments over who has what authority.
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