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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 4. Sanctions for Residential Segregation
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Chapter 29. Social Segregation and Discrimination 625
Italians and Jews, have been less prejudiced—and because they are poor and
segregated themselves—foreign colonies also become their neighbors. But
they are isolated from the main body of whites, and mutual ignorance
helps reinforce segregative attitudes and other forms of race prejudice.
Opposed to this hypothesis has been the Southerner’s theory that
minimizing contacts means minimizing conflicts. In this particular respect,
this theory is the less rational in view of the fact that the main distributive
effect of segregation is to keep the few well-educated upper and middle
class Negroes out of white neighborhoods. Segregation has little effect on
the great bulk of poor Negroes except to overcrowd them and increase
housing costs, since their poverty and common needs would separate them
voluntarily from the whites, just as any European immigrant group is
separated. The presence of a small scattering of upper and middle class
Negroes in a white neighborhood would not cause conflict (unless certain
whites were deliberately out to make it a cause of conflict), and might serve
to better race relations. The fact is neglected by the whites that there
exists a Negro upper and middle class who are searching for decent homes
and who, if they were not shunned by the whites, would contribute to prop-
erty values in a neighborhood rather than cause them to deteriorate. The
socially more serious effect of having segregation, however, is not to force
this tiny group of middle and upper class Negroes to live among their
own group, but to lay the Negro masses open to exploitation and to drive
down their housing standard even below what otherwise would be econom-
ically possible.
As pointed out in an earlier chapter,® recent government policies have,
on the whole, served as devices to strengthen and widen rather than to
mitigate residential segregation. The Federal Housing Administration, in
effect, extends credit to Negroes only if they build or buy in Negro neigh-
borhoods and to whites only if they build in white areas which are under
covenant not to rent or sell to Negroes. This policy of the F.H.A. is the
more important since it has been an ambition and accomplishment of this
agency to make housing credit available to low income groups. The effect
has probably been to bring about an extension of such “protection”
to areas and groups of white people as were earlier without it. The
United States Housing Authority and its local affiliates are not so
intentionally restrictive. But they have been forced by public opinion to
build separate housing projects for whites and Negroes, and even where
they have mixed projects, they have been forced, in all but one or two
instances, to keep the Negroes at one end and the whites at the other.
Negroes have, however, had reasons to be grateful to the U.S.H.A. for
the relatively large share of low cost housing this agency has given them
‘See Chapter 15, Section 6.
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