WITHDRAWN: Residential Segregation As Structural Violence: 1940 to 2010

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

Highly visible, individual, family, and community violence regularly gets attention. Typically addressed separately, the three types of violence may be more fully understood under the single rubric of “structural violence”-- a term common in human rights discourse. A product of social, economic, political, religious but also gendered and racialized power arrangements, SV highlights the social machinery that generates violence in the first place. Frequently invisible SV, operating within our communities, is normalized by existing societal institutions. The structures are deemed “violent” because they yield avoidable harms and can spark “counter-violence” (crime to social protest) by those deprived of dignity, resources, and human rights.

We analyze residential segregation by race as “structural violence.” Given the legacy of slavery and decades of racialized federal housing policies we focus on black persons as no other group in American history has sustained such high levels of residential segregation. The over-representation of black and female-headed households harmed by housing policy connects structural violence and patriarchal power relations.

METHODS

The data includes descriptive statistics, the author’s calculations of the isolation index (a standard segregation measure that identifies the chance that a person of a given race will have same race neighbors), and a historical analysis of federal housing policy during two distinct historical periods: the post-war expansion of the welfare state (1940-1970) and its contraction in the Neoliberal Era (1970-2010).

The top 20 Great Migration Cites were selected to study based the size of Southern-born Black population in 1920. Using census tracks nested in counties, we compared the isolation index’s average and change by decade and by city during the above two social welfare periods. Combining segregation data with an historical comparison of the impact of FHA mortgage. urban renewal, and public housing policies in each period yielded a plausible argument about the relationship between housing policy and residential segregation by race.

RESULTS

The average isolation index per decade rose steadily from 48 points (1940) to 67 points (1970 --a 40% increase over 30 years. As the welfare state contracted the average isolation index per decade plateaued or held steady in the high sixties. It measured 67 points in 1970 and 60 points in 2010, dropping only 10% over 40 years due to demographic shifts rather than effective housing policy. Segregation was higher in 2010 (60 points) than in 1940 (48 points), before the Great Society programs and the civil rights movement. In 19 of the 20 cities, the isolation index was higher in 1970 than in 1940. In 15 cities it was higher in 2010 than 1940!

CONCLUSION/IMPLICATIONS

The expansion of the post-war welfare state improved many conditions. However our hypothesis that residential segregation would decrease during this period but increase after 1970 as the welfare state contracted was not upheld. Instead, “structural violence” took its toll in the Migration Cities for over 70 years. Historic analysis reveals that segregationist legislators, real estate/banking industries but also institutional racism contributed to policies that produced the well-known avoidable harms of segregation.