“Urban Opportunity Structure and Racial/Ethnic Polarization”

In his seminal, if controversial, work published in 1978, The Declining Significance of Race, William Julius Wilson argued that individuals’ minority status per se was becoming a relatively less important barrier to their socioeconomic advancement than their lower-income status (Wilson 1978). In this chapter I offer a different conceptual perspective on the issue of race, class and opportunity. I argue that, for people of color who also happen to have low incomes, space is increasingly becoming the primary barrier to their socioeconomic advancement and the central means for perpetuating racial/ethnic polarization. The key dimensions of space in this essay are segregation of neighborhoods and schools by race/ethnicity and by class and, secondarily, the location of economic activity. These spatial dimensions form the key links in a model of cumulative causation in which race-class prejudice, discrimination, segregation and socioeconomic disparities interact in a mutually reinforcing fashion to constrain severely the opportunities of low-income minorities residing in the cores of American cities. A visual portrayal of the subject of this chapter is presented in figure 1. The opportunities of individuals can be thought of as being limited by two sets of personal characteristics—minority racial/ethnic status and socioeconomic status—and two sets of spatial characteristics—segregation of neighborhoods and schools by race and class and the location of economic activity. The more limits to which one is subjected, the less her opportunities. Here I will explore the nature of the constraint occurring when one is at the intersection of all four sets of limitations (shown by the shaded area in figure 1). [FIGURE 1 to be inserted here] The chapter presents little new empirical evidence. Rather, its contribution is a new conceptual framework within which extant evidence can be organized and, hopefully, new insights gained. It is organized as follows. The first section presents a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals achieve a certain degree of socioeconomic status through the various choices they make within the spatially and racially contextualized constraints they perceive. The second section applies this framework to the issue of race, poverty, and urban polarization and brings to bear relevant evidence. The third section expands the notion of opportunity structure beyond the individual to the society-wide construct of cumulative causation, in which race-class segregation of neighborhoods and schools forms the key link in a process perpetuating urban polarization.