An Advocacy Group Spins Diversity as Evidence of ‘Segregation’: The press eats up a misleading study issued by the Othering and Belonging Institute

By Judge Glock. He is is a senior policy adviser at the Cicero Institute. 

"Most segregation researchers use the census to create a “dissimilarity index,” which measures how many people of a race would have to move to make every neighborhood contain equal numbers of that race. For instance, if all African-Americans lived in a single neighborhood, almost 100% of them would have to move to create an integrated city, and the index would show about 100% dissimilarity.

The national numbers coming from that index are encouraging. In 1970 almost 80% of African-Americans in a typical city would have to move to create truly integrated neighborhoods across the U.S. By 2010 the share had dropped to 55%.

The same trend holds in particular cities. A recent survey by the Washington Post using the same data showed that “90 percent of U.S. metro areas have seen a decline” in racial segregation since 1990. That is the polar opposite of the story told by the Othering and Belonging Institute. 

So how can the institute claim that segregation is increasing? By creating yet another index, which it calls a “divergence index,” and which adds together the difference between the proportions of all of the races in each neighborhood and their citywide average. Instead of looking at how much of each race in a city would have to move to be spread evenly across a city, the index calculates how different each neighborhood’s racial percentages are from the whole city’s.

The big problem with this measure is that it makes cities that have become more diverse look as if they are getting more segregated. If a city had no Asian or Hispanic residents 30 years ago, but some moved in and didn’t perfectly scatter in every neighborhood, the statistics would show a sudden increase in racial “divergence.”

That more diversity makes cities more segregated under their measure explains the odd integration “successes” the report highlights. According to this study, the cities that have integrated the fastest in the past 30 years include Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Flint, Mich. These are some of the most segregated cities in the country. Their favorable scores on the Berkeley index are a result of black flight and low levels of immigration.

Segregation in America did in fact increase for much of the 20th century, up until 1970. The stories of attempts to integrate are harrowing. The sight of a single African-American family shopping for a home in a Chicago neighborhood could lead to white riots and arson against whoever dared to sell to them. In a 1963 Gallup poll, 78% of whites said they would leave their neighborhood if black families moved in."

"Today, a majority of whites express a preference for diverse neighbors. Thanks to that shift, as a study by Ed Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor points out, “all-white neighborhoods are effectively extinct.” Almost every neighborhood in the country has multiple races living together peacefully."