Residential Segregation In America

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Definition and Measurement of Residential Segregation According to Massey and Denton (1988), residential segregation “is the degree to which two or more groups live separately from one another, in different parts of the urban environment”(282). Now this is a pretty general definition, but it gives basic but good insight as to what residential desegregation is talking about. In this paper, I will mostly be focusing on residential segregation as it relates to the black and white populations in relation to one another, although I will be referencing some other races briefly to create a better understanding of concepts or ideas. At a deeper level, residential segregation has five different dimensions to it that it is measured by, those are: evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering. All of these different dimensions are measure in different ways, but the most common measurement of residential segregation is done with the dissimilarity index, or the DI. The dissimilarity index “is a measure of the evenness with which two groups are distributed across the component geographic areas that make up a larger areas” (Racial Residential Segregation). As I underlined, the dissimilarity index is one way to measure the dimension of evenness for residential segregation. A DI measurement can range from a measurement of zero to one- hundred. Leah Platt Boustan gives and example of how this index works in her article Racial Residential Segregation In American Cities, “consider a city with a population that is half black and half white and that is divided into two neighborhoods. In the least segregated distribution of the population, each neighborhood would itself be half black and half white, reflecting the city aver... ... middle of paper ... ... Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Boustan, Leah Platt. Racial residential segregation in American cities. No. w19045. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013. "Newsroom." 2010 Census Shows Black Population Has Highest Concentration in the South. United States Census Bureau, n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. . "A Portrait of Black America on the Eve of the 2010 Census." The Root. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. . "Racial Residential Segregation." Racial Residential Segregation. University of Michigan Population Studies Center, n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2014. .

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