Prowler wrote:Btw, I keep hearing/reading that USA is a very segregated nation even nowadays. How so? OK I figure it's mostly black people who live in ghettos but what about the tons of black people who are of middle and upper middle class? Don't they live in the same neighbourhoods as white people?
Sometimes, but sometimes they live in their own neighbourhoods. For instance, View Park–Windsor Hills in LA County has a median income of $160,000. It's also 85% African-American in its demographics.
In big cities[*], segregation is often block-by-block or even building-by-building rather than by neighbourhood. So the South Side neighbourhood where I used to live, Hyde Park, is nominally well-integrated, with a population that is almost half White, 30% African American, and 12% Asian-American. But in fact the African-Americans are heavily concentrated along the northwestern and southern edges where it borders neighbourhoods that are overwhelmingly African-American. I even lived in the northwestern part of Hyde Park at one time and I don't think there was a single African-American in our building.
Moreover, there' are more dimensions to segregation than just housing. Now I live in another neighbourhood (Rogers Park) that's nominally well-integrated (about 40% White, 25% Black, and 25% Latinx of any race), but, once again, I live in one of the whitest parts of it. Even though there are Black families (mostly of Black African origin) on my block, we practically never interact. Outside of my own building, the only neighbours I socialise with regularly are a White gay couple living across the street. I am friendly with an African-American guy who lives across the alley but only when we run into each other, which is maybe once a month at most. He's complained to me that he's had little success getting to know the (mainly White) people who live in his building and he plans to move out.
And since most people get their jobs through being recommended by someone they know, social segregation gets replicated at work. My workplace is better-integrated than most, but the only POCs in my department of about 20 people are two Asian women and a Hispanic man. However, where it's really glaring is education. People tend to send their kids to schools near them, so schools reflect residential segregation, but the effect is magnified by the fact that White and Asian parents disproportionately choose private schools. So even though my neighbourhood is 40% non-Hispanic White, only 4% of the students at the local public high school are. And again, even when a school is nominally integrated, that doesn't mean that friendships form easily across racial boundaries.
[*] And not only do the majority of African-Americans--like the majority of Americans generally--live in big cities, but they cluster in
specific big cities. Nearly one in ten African-Americans lives in either NYC or Chicago; only 1 in 40 non-Hispanic Whites does.
Prowler wrote:And yes I know there's also Asian Americans(encompass way too many countries) and mixed raced latin Americans, but I have no idea where those fit in.
Hispanics tend to be highly segregated as well, though not quite to the same degree as African-Americans. Since they tend to be poorer than non-Hispanic Whites, they're more likely to live in neighbourhoods with significant African-American populations (but, again, living near others and interacting with them are two different things). Asian-Americans, on the other hand, tend to have higher incomes than non-Hispanic Whites, so they're far more likely to live in neighbourhoods which are overwhelmingly White (with the caveat that there are significant differences between Asian-American groups, with those of Southeast Asian origin in particular being more likely to pattern like Hispanics).
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons