(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON, DC, July 28, 2015 -- Recent research has shown that racial segregation in the U.S. is declining between neighborhoods, but a new study indicates that segregation is manifesting itself in other ways -- not disappearing.
"We just can't get too excited by recent declines in neighborhood segregation," said lead author Daniel Lichter, the Ferris Family Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management and a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. "The truth is neighborhood segregation still remains high in America, and our study also shows that segregation is increasingly occurring at different scales of geography."
While segregation from neighborhood to neighborhood is decreasing (micro-segregation) within metropolitan areas, segregation from suburban communities (e.g., towns, villages, and cities) to other suburban communities within the same metropolitan areas and from major metropolitan cities to their suburban communities is increasing (macro-segregation). In other words, instead of people of different races living in distinct neighborhoods in the same major metropolitan cities and suburban communities, these major cities and suburban communities are becoming increasingly racially homogenous.
"Let's look at the community of Ferguson, Missouri, for example," said Lichter, who is also the director of the Cornell Population Center. "Whites have left Ferguson, mostly for white suburban communities even farther from the urban core that is St. Louis. The racial composition of Ferguson went from about 25 percent black to 67 percent black in a 20 year period. Though one would be correct in saying that segregation decreased between neighborhoods in Ferguson, the change simply reflects massive white depopulation."
Titled, "Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs," the study appears in the August issue of the American Sociological Review. Lichter and his co-authors, Domenico Parisi, a professor of sociology and director of the National Strategic Planning & Analysis Research Center (nSPARC) at Mississippi State University, and Michael C. Taquino, an associate research professor and the deputy director of nSPARC, analyzed U.S. Census data from 1990-2010 and examined micro, macro, and total racial segregation across 222 metropolitan areas.
"One of our major findings is that suburban communities are becoming more segregated from each other," Lichter said. "Cities and communities -- not just neighborhoods -- matter. Over the past decade or so, some suburban communities have become more racially diverse, even as whites have moved out to other growing suburbs farther from the city or have moved back to the city as part of the gentrification process. In the late 1970s, there was a famous study titled, 'Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs,' which highlighted that blacks generally lived in large cities while whites lived in suburban communities. Our study shows that minority population growth in the suburbs has fundamentally shifted historic patterns of residential segregation in this country."
Consistent with previous studies, Lichter found that the highest level of macro-segregation is between blacks and whites, the lowest is between Asians and whites, and the level between Hispanics and whites occupies an intermediate position.
"If segregation is our measure, we have a long way to go before we are truly a post-racial society," said Lichter, who noted that suburban communities use housing, taxation, and zoning laws to include or exclude racial and ethnic minorities.
INFORMATION:
About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review
The American Sociological Association, founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is the ASA's flagship journal.
The research article described above is available by request for members of the media. For a copy of the full study, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA Media Relations Manager, at (202) 527-7885 or pubinfo@asanet.org.
This press release was written by Catherine Turvey, ASA Public Information Office.
Contact: Daniel Fowler, American Sociological Association, (202) 527-7885, pubinfo@asanet.org
This news release is available in French. By blocking the expression of a certain gene in patients, University of Montreal researchers have contributed to the demonstration of great decreases in the concentration of triglycerides in their blood, even in various severe forms of hypertriglyceridemia and regardless of the base values or the treatment the patient usually receives. The gene in question codes for the apoC-III protein. "Our study suggests that the proteine apoC-III plays a key role in the management of triglycerides. Triglycerides, like cholesterol, are lipids. ...
URBANA, Ill. - With many types of cancers, early detection offers the best hope for survival. However, research into new early-detection screenings, as well as possible interventional radiology and surgical treatments, has been hindered by the lack of a large animal model that would accurately reflect the types of cancers seen in human cells.
For the last several years, researchers at the University of Illinois interested in improving screening programs for cancer have studied gene expression in mice, humans, and pigs in an effort to create a large-animal model that ...
Support for eliminating existing exemptions, except for medical reasons, from immunization laws was among the policy recommendations adopted last weekend at the summer meeting of the Board of Regents of the American College of Physicians (ACP).
"Allowing exemptions based on non-medical reasons poses a risk both to the unvaccinated person and to public health," said Wayne J. Riley, MD, MPH, MBA, MACP, president of ACP,
"Intentionally unvaccinated individuals can pose a danger to the public, especially to individuals who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons."
The ...
A targeted therapy already used to treat advanced skin cancer is also effective against the most common subtype of the brain tumor medulloblastoma in adults and should be considered for treatment of newly diagnosed patients, according to research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
The drug, called vismodegib, is designed to block a key protein in the sonic hedgehog (SHH) signaling pathway. The pathway is normally active during fetal development and is inappropriately switched on in about 30 percent of medulloblastoma tumors, including about 60 percent of tumors ...
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University have engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the authentic cellular component, or organelle, that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell. The engineered ribosome may enable the production of new drugs and next-generation biomaterials and lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes function.
The artificial ribosome, called Ribo-T, was created in the laboratories of Alexander Mankin, director of the UIC College of Pharmacy's Center for Biomolecular Sciences, ...
It's one thing to grow bacteria in a test tube, perform a screen in the lab, and find a mutation in the pathogen's genes. It's a whole other thing, and much rarer, to find the exact same mutation in nature--in this case, in E. coli in urine samples from some 500 patients suffering from relapsing urinary tract infections.
The confluent discovery, by University Distinguished Professor Kim Lewis and his colleagues, was published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. It could put people with relapsing UTIs on the fast track for a new therapeutic regimen that Lewis described ...
RICHLAND, Wash. -- Using a climate model that can tag sources of soot from different global regions and can track where it lands on the Tibetan Plateau, researchers have determined which areas around the plateau contribute the most soot -- and where. The model can also suggest the most effective way to reduce soot on the plateau, easing the amount of warming the region undergoes.
The work, which appeared in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics in June, shows that soot pollution on and above the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau area warms the region enough to contribute to earlier ...
Following several years of research and collaboration, physicians and engineers at Johns Hopkins and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center say they have developed a computer platform that provides rapid, real-time feedback before and during facial transplant surgery, which may someday improve face-jaw-teeth alignment between donor and recipient.
Surgeons performed the first successful transplant of facial features, including the jaw and teeth, in 2008, mainly relying on visual judgment. Since then, approximately 30 facial transplants have been done worldwide, ...
Brown dwarfs are relatively cool, dim objects that are difficult to detect and hard to classify. They are too massive to be planets, yet possess some planetlike characteristics; they are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions at their cores, a defining characteristic of stars, yet they have starlike attributes.
By observing a brown dwarf 20 light-years away using both radio and optical telescopes, a team led by Gregg Hallinan, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, has found another feature that makes these so-called failed stars more like supersized planets--they ...
CHAPEL HILL, NC - The stem cells in our gut divide so fast that they create a completely new population of epithelial cells every week. But this quick division is also why radiation and chemotherapy wreak havoc on the gastrointestinal systems of cancer patients - such therapies target rapidly dividing cells. Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center found that a rare type of stem cell is immune to radiation damage thanks to high levels of a gene called Sox9.
The discovery, which was made in mice and published in the journal ...
