Rethinking Contemporary Social Theory by Roberta Garner Black Hawk Hancock Grace Budrys

Author:Roberta Garner, Black Hawk Hancock, Grace Budrys [Roberta Garner, Black Hawk Hancock, Grace Budrys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317252832
Google: eno2DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 17871416
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Theorists of Segregation and Exclusion

Urban sociologists have long been interested in the characteristics and experiences of the excluded, segregated, and marginalized, beginning with Engels’s observations of the conditions of Irish immigrants living in filthy, flood-prone cellars along the Irk River. The intertwined stratification systems of class and ethnoracial status were already clearly visible in the spatial distribution and experiences of the residents of England’s new industrial capitalist cities. Studies of Chicago’s Black Belt also emphasized segregation and racial isolation.

As movements of national liberation stirred in European colonies after World War II, Frantz Fanon (1965) pointed to the segregated character of the new cities of these regions. Patterns of segregation justified by ideologies of racism appeared in colonial areas where the open, clean, spacious city of the settlers contrasted with the cities of the natives—ancient, mazelike cities in Asia and North Africa and shantytowns and townships throughout the colonized world, characterized as “teeming” or “warren-like.” In apartheid South Africa displacement of nonwhites from central locations was an assiduously implemented state policy, like the destruction and rebuilding of Jewish neighborhoods during the Nazi period, most notably in Berlin (Jaskot 2000).

Ultimately colonialism triggered a flow of immigrants from the colonies, ex-colonies, and regions of dependent development to the “motherland” in search of better wages and opportunities for their children. They streamed from the Maghreb and West Africa into Paris, from South Asia and the Caribbean into London and other English cities, and from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Central America into US cities. In the 1950s and 1960s, at the outset of this immigration flow, there were still many opportunities in industry for immigrants. As the economies of the developed nations deindustrialized and shifted to a new economic base, these jobs in manufacturing declined as a proportion of the labor force and were replaced in smaller numbers by two diverging types of employment: high-end jobs that required postsecondary education and poorly paid jobs in personal services and small-scale factories. Immigrants were able to obtain high-end jobs, but many ended up in the precarious low-wage tier so that both the immigrant and native populations were split into an hourglass class structure, further complicating both class and identity politics.

These changing occupational, class, and ethnoracial systems of inequality were reflected in the spatial distribution of people in metropolitan areas in part because the lower incomes of minorities allowed them fewer options in housing markets and in part because racism hemmed them into ethnic neighborhoods. The patterns differed somewhat in the United States and Europe. In the United States, immigrants generally fared better than African Americans, who were still subjected to hypersegregation, so clearly documented by Douglas Massey and Mary Denton (1993) in the 1980s and 1990s, reconfirmed by John Iceland and Rima Wilkes (2006) in 2004 and 2005, and cited by Janet Abu-Lughod (2000) as a major barrier to Chicago’s potential as a global city (also see Garner, Hancock, and Kim 2007; Sampson 2011). In Europe, it was primarily the immigrants and their children who found themselves excluded from jobs, good schools, and housing opportunities.

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