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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 3. Housing Segregation
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620 An American Dilemma
in the slum sections would soon call forth more active intentions on the
part of the whites to force segregation upon this group. These tendencies
would become strongest in the middle and upper class areas. Generally it
is true both in the South and in the North that segregation as a factor in
concentrating the Negro population is a pattern that is most characteristic
of higher class areas and is much weaker or totally absent in slum areas.
Neither actual concentration nor segregation proper is restricted to Negroes.
All the various national groups of immigrants have, for reasons of economy
and ethnic cohesion, formed “colonies” in the poorer sections of Northern
American cities. As long as they were poor and strange in language and
other cultural traits, this concentration has been strengthened by segrega-
tion on the part of the older Americans. If this factor has not been noticed
so much, the reason is not only that the first two factors were usually
sufficient as causes, but also that the situation did not become permanent.
For when the members of a national group become so “assimilated” that
they no longer regard members of their ancestral group as closer than
persons of the dominant group in the society—^when they feel themselves
to be more American than Italian, Polish, or Czech—they tend to disre-
gard ethnic affiliation in seeking a residence and to pay more attention to
their personal needs and their ability to pay rent. Within two or three
generations, it has usually been the practice for families which stemmed
from a certain section of Europe to forget about their ethnic background
in seeking residences and to have the means of paying higher rents in
almost the same proportion as Old Americans,
Negroes meet greater difficulties in rising economically, educationally and
socially. But even apart from this, they are kept as aliens permanently.
Otherwise Negroes who live in a Southern community and whose
ancestors have been living there for several generations would no longer
be living together, apart from the whites. Northern Negroes would
similarly be expected to be distributed throughout Northern cities, rather
than forced to remain in the Black Belts, if they were treated as members
of ethnic groups from Europe are treated. Negroes who migrated from the
South to the North in the last twenty-five years would be expected to live
together because they are poor and because they feel less out of place among
their own kind. But they would also be beginning to disperse themselves
throughout the white population if it were not for segregation. Only
Orientals and possibly Mexicans among all separate ethnic groups have as
much segregation as Negroes."^
From this point of view residential segregation may be defined as resi-
dential concentration which, even though it were voluntary at the beginning
or caused by “economic necessity,” has been forced upon the group from
outside: the Negro individual is not allowed to move out of a “Negro”
neighborhood. The question whether the average Negro “wants” to IWe
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