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Ceri Peach-New Segregation8 Ceri Peach E pluribus Duo: Contrasts in US and British Segregation Patterns:1 Abstract Recent attempts have been made to argue that Britain is sleepwalking into American- style ghettoisation. The paper argues that such claims misunderstand both the US and British situations. In particular they fail to recognise the unique intensity of the African-American ghetto. Nothing like the concentration of the African American population exists in Britain and attempts to label Indian, Pakistani or Caribbean areas as ghettos misrepresents the British minority position and underestimates the African American situation. The ghetto is a phenomenon, almost unique in western urban societies, to the African American population. Although Black segregation levels are now decreasing, the ghetto remains. British ethnic segregation is generally moderate and decreasing and seems to be following the American assimilation, Rather than the African American ghetto model. However, ghettos do exist in Northern Ireland albeit with different causation processes from those in the US. Ironically, the truly ghettoised groups in the US and UK are their oldest minorities, the African Americans and the Northern Irish Catholics. Space, however, doe not allow me to cover this latter important topic. The paper compares segregation levels for minority populations in the US and UK. It finds that the decreasing levels of segregation, over time, for foreign immigrants groups and their descendants, predicted by the assimilation model of the melting pot, has been an accurate predictor for the formation of the American nation. The exception has been the African Americans. The extreme rejection of Blacks has been the means by which newer arrivals have been able to ‘become’ White. Black segregation levels remain high, although slow signs of decrease have appeared since 1980. The paper argues that the failure to distinguish between the ghetto and the ethnic enclave has allowed a misinterpretation of the Black present, a falsification of 1 Acknowledgement This is an updated version of a paper presented at the Association of American Geographers, annual conference in Boston.in April 2008, on the occasion of my nomination as the AAG’s Distinguished Ethnic Geography Scholar of the year. The rapporteurs for the paper were David Ley of the Department of Geography, UBC and Robert Putnam of the Department of Sociology, Harvard University. Material from this paper has been drawn on in Tom Clark, Robert Putnam and Ed Fieldhouse’s book (2010) The Age of Obama. I gratefully acknowledge a Small Social Sciences grant from the Nuffield Foundation towards the cost of my sabbatical in Princeton University, when I started work on this research. Doug Massey was an inspiration to me during my stay there. I was also lucky to have Alexandro Portes in the office across from mine. My Manchester colleague Yaojun Li was an eagle eyed and acute reader of the later drafts of this paper. Finally thanks to GindoTampubolon who oversaw the final production of the Working Paper. Ceri Peach is professor at the Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester and emeritus Professor of Social Geography, Oxford University. 1 its predicted future and the misrepresentation of the history of the European ethnics’ past. INTRODUCTION The British literature and the press (Johnston et al 2002; Phillips, 2005; Poulsen, 2005) has, in recent years, been alive with allegations that Britain is sleepwalking into American style segregation and literature. The assertion stems from a profound misunderstanding of the difference between the ghetto and the ethnic enclave. The sharpest explanation of this point was made by Thomas Philpott (1978) using Chicago 1930s data. He demonstrated that there was a fundamental difference between the European ethnic enclaves and the Black ghetto. These differences are clear from table 1. The first column of Table 1 gives the population o major ethnic groups. The second gives the number of each group living in their so-called ‘ghettos’. The third gives the total population of those ‘ghettos’. The fourth shows the proportion of each group ‘ghettoised’. The fifth column shows the proportion the named group’s population formed of the total of the so-called ghetto. Table 1 'Ghettoisation ' of Ethnic Groups, Chicago, 1930 Group's Group's Total Percentage Group's Group City 'Ghetto' 'Ghetto' of group percentage Population Population Population 'Ghettoized' 'Ghetto' Population Irish 169,568 4,993 14,595 2.9 34.2 German 377,975 53,821 169,649 14.2 31.7 Swedish 140,013 21,581 88,749 15.3 24.3 Russian 169,736 63,416 149,208 37.4 42.5 Czech 122,089 53,301 169,550 43.7 31.4 Italian 181,161 90,407 195,736 49.7 46.2 Polish 401,306 248,024 457,146 61.0 54.3 African American 233,903 216,846 266,051 92.7 81.5 Source: Philpott,1978, 141 For all the European minorities, apart from the Poles, only a minority of their populations lived in their supposed ‘ghettos’: 3 per cent of the Irish, 14 per cent of the Germans, 15 per cent of Swedes, just under 50 per cent of Italians and 61 per cent of Poles. However, almost all of the Black population, 93 per cent, lived in the Black ghetto. Secondly, European ethnic groups rarely formed a majority of their supposed ghettos. Just over a third of the Irish’ ‘ghetto’ was Irish, 32 percent of the German ‘ghetto’ was German, a quarter of the Swedish ‘ghetto’ 31 per cent of the Czech 2 ‘ghetto’, 46 per cent of the Italian ‘ghetto’ was Italian and just over half of the Polish ‘ghetto’ was Polish. However, for the Black population 82 per cent of the Black ghetto was Black. The European enclaves in other words were dually dilute. Less than half of their respective groups lived in their supposed ethnic areas and generally less than half of the population of their supposed ghettos was composed of the named group. The Black ghetto, on the other hand, was dually concentrated. Nearly all Blacks lived in it. Nearly everyone in it was Black. The European enclaves were voluntary, the Black ghettos were enforced. The European enclaves were positive (Ward, 1982) the Black ghettos were negative. The European enclaves were springboards or decompression chambers, the Black ghettos were prisons. THE IMPORTANCE OF SEGREGATION Spatial segregation is important because the level of segregation between groups in a city has been an effective index of social trust. High segregation means low social trust. Low segregation means high interaction (Duncan and Lieberson, 1959). In his Johan Skytte Prize Lecture, Robert Putnam (2007) suggested that ethnic diversity tends to reduce social solidarity and social capital. His evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhood’s residents of all races tend to `hunker down' and that trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. If we apply this analysis to the US and the UK, the lowest trust seems to exist between the African American and White populations in the US and between Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants in the UK. Segregation and Assimilation The dominant story of American segregation has been one of immigrants settling in dense city-centre ethnic enclaves and gradually dispersing outwards. There has been the gradual inclusion and assimilation of European, Latino and Asian populations albeit with considerable discrimination and competition between those already accepted and those (the Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Italians, Poles and others) considered temporarily beyond the pale: E pluribus unum . However, although this is the dominant story, there are two other narratives. The dominant other story has been one of continued and enforced segregation of the African American population. The minor story has been one of continued voluntary concentrations of some minority groups (Li, 2008). The true story of Black segregation, as late as 1958, was obscured by attempts to ‘normalise’ the African American population as if it were just another foreign immigrant group. This implicitly views the struggle for African-American assimilation, as on a par with the European immigrant struggles. The true story, however, is one of African American exceptionalism. It was, indeed, this Black exceptionalism which allowed the success of the assimilation of nearly all other groups, into the White American core, no matter how racially or culturally different they appeared at first. So what happened, in Nathan Glazer’s (1999) words was that ‘the sharpest divides are between African Americans and all others, regardless of race ’ (see also Alba, 2005). Putt more bluntly, the history of African American experience is not ‘ E pluribus unum ’ it is E pluribus duo . In Britain, on the other hand, the sharpest distinction has been between the Whites and the rest 3 The Macro picture: Black/White Ethnic and Racial Competition The starting point for this brief history of Black American competition with White immigrants is Walter Willcox’s (1931) map of the distribution of the African American and the foreign White population USA in 1920, at the end of the era of mass European migration to the USA. The map shows two macro regions with an intervening shatter belt. Over 10 per cent of the population of the Southern in the states marked black) from Texas to Maryland ) are black (the upper figure in each state) and less than 10 per cent foreign-born white. The block of ‘northern’ states marked grey, from California to Maine, manifest the inverse combination- all over 10 per cent foreign white and less than 10 per cent Black. Between them runs a belt of states from New Mexico to West Virginia in which neither foreign whites nor African Americans formed 10 per cent of the population. (Figure 2: map of USA in 1920 Black 10 per cent and foreign White 10 per cent).
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