What is the difference between segregation and racism

This requires a series of questions. The first question to ask is when did racial segregation begin? The importance of this question helps in gauging the potency and endurance of racism as a feature of American history. If segregation began Students should understand that segregation is embedded deeply in America's past. The evidence points in this direction. Before the Civil War, free Negroes in the North encountered segregation in schools, public accommodations, and the military.

In , the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in Roberts v. City of Boston held that the state could require separate and equal schools for Negroes without violating the right of equality in the Massachusetts Constitution.

Segregation continued to exist after the Civil War and spread to the South once slaves were emancipated. Still, it is one thing to confirm that segregation Students should understand the role the federal government played in establishing and dismantling segregation. What seems unique about race relations from the s to the early s was its porousness: segregation was not as rigid then as it later became. Moreover, blacks still had the right to vote and could wield influence in public affairs.

This changed in the s, and teachers should make clear the decisive role of the federal government in contributing to the establishment of hardcore segregation in the South. Thus, Jim Crow did not come about just through individual acts of prejudice but required government intervention from the North as well as the South.

Without the official Students should understand that Jim Crow was not simply a matter of individual acts of prejudice. It required government sanction. Despite complicity from the North, the harshest and most long-lasting forms of segregation occurred in the South. Why were white southerners so adamant in maintaining segregation? Students should come Segregation was intended to enforce and underscore the subordinate position of blacks in American society.

Southern whites considered this system of vital importance because of the vast majority of African Americans lived in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Separate was never equal nor was it meant to be. Segregation was intended to debase African Americans, strip them of their dignity, reinforce their inequality, and maintain a submissive agricultural labor force. In this way, you can point out to students that the southern United States from the s through the s was similar in many ways to South Africa during its Apartheid Era.

White men established segregation to keep black men from having sexual relations with white women. Viewing miscegenation as the ultimate threat to the perpetuation of their superior racial stock, they often resorted to lynching black men for allegedly raping white women.

In doing so, white men not only reinforced their control over blacks but also white women. They sought to maintain the virtue and chastity of their wives and daughters, reinforcing their patriarchal roles as husband, father, and ultimately guardian of their communities. However, it can be debated whether the real issue was sexual purity or power, for many white southern men both during slavery and Jim Crow actively pursued clandestine sexual relations with black women,.

Segregation grew out of fear and a desire to control. Nevertheless, this fear of miscegenation, whether real or imagined, reinforced Jim Crow. White southerners were adamant about maintaining school segregation, particularly in the early grades, because they did not want little white girls to socialize with black boys, which might lead to more intimate relations as they turned into teenagers and young adults.

Woolworth store, Greensboro, North Carolina, site of lunch counter sit-in. This fear of sexual contact also applied to other areas, and the most interesting one that students should consider relates to department store lunch counters. Ask your students what they see as the difference between the two and you will probably find, as I have, that they discern that sitting down to eat was seen as a social activity that in the racialized South had sexual connotations, whereas walking around a store or standing in line did not have the same meaning.

How did African Americans respond to Jim Crow and did they view separation and segregation in the same way? Today, the typical white household has 10 times more wealth than the typical Black household. For much of the 20th century households of color were systematically excluded from federal homeownership programs, and government officials largely stood by as predatory lenders stripped them of wealth and stability. In the decades preceding the Fair Housing Act, government policies led many white Americans to believe that residents of color were a threat to local property values.

People of color continue to endure rampant discrimination in the housing market: 17 percent of Native Americans, 25 percent of Asian Americans, 31 percent of Latinos, and 45 percent of African Americans report experiencing discrimination when trying to rent or buy housing. Racial bias not only undermines access to housing but can also affect property values.

Racial segregation has contributed to persistent disparities in access to public goods—such as parks, hospitals, streetlights, and well-maintained roads—and has undermined wealth building in communities of color nationwide. Perhaps the clearest—but least recognized—example of government-backed segregation was the creation of Chinatowns across the continental United States. More than years ago, thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived in the American West to construct the first transcontinental railroad and participate in the California gold rush.

During this period, lawmakers also enacted policies to separate African Americans from white Americans. Long before redlining offered an economic incentive to segregate communities, local governments relied on, among other policies, zoning ordinances to keep races apart. Over time, single-family zoning emerged and replaced race-based zoning as one of the most popular local governing tools for segregating American communities.

This policy prevented the construction of apartment buildings and multifamily units in certain neighborhoods, ensuring that only those who could afford single-family homes could live there. With a greater tax base and support from federal programs, these areas could afford public goods that others could not and, as a result, experienced greater real estate appreciation.

This all but ensured that property values in these communities would appreciate at much slower rates. The harmful effects of government-backed segregation also produced racial inequities in access to public spaces, public goods, and increased exposure to environmental hazards. Across the country, historic and ongoing displacement, exclusion, and segregation prevent people of color from obtaining and retaining homeownership, as well as accessing safe, affordable housing.

They are also more likely to experience foreclosure, often due to predatory lending practices. While homeownership and affordable rental housing are not panaceas for addressing entrenched structural inequality, it is clear that lawmakers must make amends for past and present harms inflicted on communities of color in the U.

CAP has previously called on lawmakers to significantly expand the supply of affordable units and dismantle existing exclusionary zoning practices. Moreover, lawmakers should support robust civil rights enforcement in the housing market by fully implementing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, applying disparate impact assessments to housing discrimination cases, and modifying the mortgage appraisal process. These policies will not make amends for centuries of injustice in the housing market; however, they would represent affirmative steps toward racial equity in the U.

It's a separate community. In the white community, the white man controls the economy, his own economy, his own politics, his own everything. That's his community. But at the same time while the Negro lives in a separate community, it's a segregated community. Which means it's regulated from the outside by outsiders. The white man has all of the businesses in the Negro community. He runs the politics of the Negro community.

He controls all the civic organizations in the Negro community. This is a segregated community. We don't go for segregation. Ambler , finding that zoning ordinances were reasonable extensions of police power and potentially beneficial to public welfare.

In order to continue to exclude middle- and upper-class blacks from white neighborhoods, public and private interests conspired to establish a web of racist policies and practices surrounding housing and homeownership. One practice for many white homeowners was to band together and adopt racially restrictive covenants in their neighborhoods, which forbade any buyer from reselling a home to black buyers. Initially upheld in Corrigan v.

Buckley , the U. Supreme Court reasoned that covenants were private contracts not subject to the Constitution. In city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants.

Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Of all of the homeownership loans approved by the government between and , whites received 98 percent of them.

Supreme Court ultimately struck down racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer , but even then, many black families faced grave risks when attempting to move into white neighborhoods. Extralegal violence became an all-too-common method of maintaining segregation through intimidation and fear.

Shortly after, several whites rented a unit next door to the family, hoisting up a Confederate flag and blaring music throughout the night. Law enforcement largely declined to intervene, with one sergeant suffering a demotion to patrolman after objecting to his orders not to interfere with the rioters.

When the black family arrived, a mob of gathered outside of their home, threw bricks at the house, and burned a cross in the front yard. As in Pennsylvania, the police refused to step in for several days, only intervening after the NAACP pressed the governor to do so.

Still, no arrests were made. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that, in —86, only one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted. To this day, forms of discrimination stymie racial integration and housing opportunities for black Americans. Attorneys and academics alike identify realtor bias and racial steering as factors that continue to disadvantage black people in the housing market. African Americans frequently encounter discrimination when searching for housing at all stages: they are more likely to receive subpar service when interacting with realtors, and are shown fewer homes for sale or rent than are whites.

A study found that realtor steering of residents away from neighborhoods due to their racial composition is shockingly persistent, even if illegal. The practice showed up in up to 15 percent of tests that made their determination based on clear and explicit indications by the realtor. In the case of houses with visible problems, agents refuse to accept the initial request that whites want such a house, but have no trouble making this inference for blacks.

In March , the U. Department of Housing and Urban Development HUD announced a lawsuit against social media giant Facebook , alleging that the platform allowed advertisers to use data in order to exclude certain racial groups from seeing home or apartment advertisements. Relatedly, black homebuyers are also more likely to be steered toward high-interest and high-risk loans when seeking to purchase a home, regardless of income or creditworthiness.

This pattern remains even after controlling for borrower characteristics income, credit score and the amount of the loan, though the gaps do become less stark.

Interestingly, these disparities actually worsened at higher income levels. One study indicated that, since , more than half of all borrowers who were issued subprime loans could have qualified for lower-cost loans with more favorable terms. In the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis, federal regulators failed in their obligation to recognize the targeting of African Americans and enforce the laws against bad actors who participated in this predatory behavior.

Current public policy choices hardly indicate that government will readily act as a reliable partner in seeking housing desegregation. To this day, public policy choices by state and local officials tend to steer public housing units, which are disproportionately occupied by black and brown residents, into high-poverty areas with fewer resources and opportunities. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, which allocates a certain number of tax credits for states to distribute to developers according to housing needs, allows consideration of several factors that help determine where new housing will be located.

Because housing agencies can consider community support levels when determining housing locations, and more affluent areas are more likely to organize in opposition to such developments, this housing is more likely to be steered into already-low-income communities. Moreover, some states actually allow landlords to reject Section 8 housing vouchers , as income unlike race is not a protected class.

Government is the laboratory in which many of the schemes for black—white segregation were and still are concocted; it is also, therefore, where much of the effort must be placed in order for racial segregation to be undone.

Members of government who want to reverse segregation must work to remove policies that promote and protect white supremacy, and replace them instead with ones that actively fight segregation.

The rest of this report outlines a four-part strategy to address the following four key facets of black—white segregation: 1 the legacy of generations of racial discrimination in housing; 2 contemporary residential racial discrimination; 3 contemporary residential economic discrimination that disproportionately hurts African Americans; and 4 the re-segregating effects of displacement that can come with gentrification.

The failure to implement the AFFH requirements for nearly a half century after passage of the Fair Housing Act allowed segregation to remain the norm—particularly in predominantly black areas. Furthermore, although the portion of neighborhoods that have only a tiny share of black residents has declined, the proportion of black people living in racially integrated neighborhoods in certain communities has also declined.

In New York City, for example, the proportion has actually decreased from 41 percent in to 21 percent in HUD also removed, without public comment, the Assessment of Fair Housing AFH tool, which aided communities in determining housing needs and segregation patterns. Housing justice and the fulfillment of the Fair Housing Act should not be held hostage to the political whims of an administration led by a man who was himself investigated for racial discrimination in his own real estate holdings.

In addition, government should undertake efforts to address the legacy of discrimination in the financing of homes. Senator Elizabeth Warren D-MA , for example, has appropriately proposed providing new mortgage assistance to buy homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods. Attacking contemporary racial discrimination will require additional tools specifically aimed at both racial bias in the sale and rental of properties and in the financing of residential purchases.

Fair housing testing is an effective means to uncovering evidence of discrimination in renting or purchasing homes. Typically responding to tips from prospective homebuyers belonging to a protected group, individual testers with no true intent to purchase or rent a home pose as potential buyers or renters for the purpose of gathering information on possible FHA violations.

In accordance with the Fair Housing Act, testers are looking to uncover discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status. When testing is conducted, results can be eye opening. Of the tests conducted, thirty revealed one or both forms of discrimination. HUD funds many of these exercises through the Fair Housing Initiatives Program FHIP , and should increase the resources allotted to the program to match the prevalence and gravity of the problem.