Justice and Racial Residential Segregation

Racial residential segregation is one of the most important aspects of - and sources of - racial inequality in the United States. By many accounts, it is the crucial nexus of unequal educational opportunities, access to jobs, access to services, and the accumulation of wealth through equity growth in homes owned. And yet racial residential segregation (hereafter residential segregation or simply segregation) has received scant attention from philosophers and political theorists concerned with racial issues. Compared to, for example, the large literature on affirmative action, there is almost nothing on the normative aspects of residential segregation. And this is the case despite the observation that residential segregation is a much greater source of disadvantage to African Americans than the absence of race-based affirmative action is or would be.In contrast to its relative absence in discussions among philosophers and political theorists, residential segregation has been the subject of intense examination by empirical social scientists, especially historians and sociologists. We know a great deal about the origins of, and consequences of, the segregation of African Americans (the focus of this paper), and sociology journals in particular brim with lively debates about how best to measure segregation and the relative weights to be assigned to various explanations of it.Yet few scholars whose interests are primarily normative have explored the empirical literature and its implications for our understanding of what racial justice would require. If residential segregation is a key aspect of racial inequality and racial injustice in American society, what principles and values should guide policy that attempts to address it? What goals should be pursued? What costs may be imposed, and on whom, in the service of ameliorating or eliminating racial segregation and/or its negative consequences for African Americans? This paper attempts to address - or at least begin to address - these complex issues.The discussion that follows is animated, I hope, by a recognition that the issues under consideration are extremely difficult - perhaps intractable. While, as we will see, the historical origins of residential segregation involve clear decisions and policies which, if they had been otherwise, might have done a great deal to avert the consequences that are with us today. Yet once established, racial residential segregation is largely self-perpetuating and resistant to solution by public policy. Indeed, I will argue below that this fact must be kept in mind when making any policy recommendations in this area. In addition, the choice of where to live, and whom to live among, is generally seen as a highly personal one in American society. It is a choice that is, of course, inevitably constrained by a number of factors - such as wealth and income - but within those constraints Americans seems highly resistant to coercive pressure when it comes to their choice of residence. This, too, must be kept in mind when assessing the prospects for, and the practicability of, any policy with respect to residential segregation.The paper proceeds as follows. In the first section I summarize some of the historical and sociological literature on residential segregation. I give particular emphasis to governmental promotion of, or complicity in, the creation of the patterns of segregation that we observe today. I also outline some of the main consequences of residential segregation and its contribution to the perpetuation of racial inequality. All of this establishes, I hope, that residential segregation is not merely an unfortunate phenomenon but an injustice - both with regard to its origins and its consequences - that therefore calls for a remedy. But what should that remedy look like? The balance of the paper addresses this issue. In the second section of the paper I examine the proposal of constitutional scholar Owen Fiss, in his book A Way Out. Fiss proposes that the federal government provide vouchers to allow residents of inner-city ghettos to move out to more affluent urban and suburban neighborhoods. While Fiss presents evidence that such programs have been successful where they have been tried, I argue that the empirical data are inconclusive, and, more importantly, that Fiss's proposal reflects an overall approach to the problem of residential segregation that is highly problematic. The third section focuses on the treatment of residential segregation by Iris Young. Young rejects the integrationist thrust of proposals like Fiss's, and I argue that the main outlines of her conception of differentiated solidarity correctly capture the often-ignored costs of integration and benefits of residential clustering. Young argues that the clustering itself is not the problem; rather, it is the consequences that clustering has under current conditions that are the problem. While I am broadly sympathetic to Young's outlook, it is not clear that her proposals are equal to the task of overcoming the injustices she identifies. More generally, it is not clear that the problems of concentrated urban poverty can be addressed while maintaining racial residential segregation. In the conclusion I offer some tentative suggestions about what a defensible position on this issue might look like.