Leading the Discussion

In "Introduction to Racial Equity," the first chapter of his book The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Lawrence T. Brown offers a credible proposal as to how to achieve residential racial equity in the U.S. He uses Baltimore as an exemplar of extreme racial hypersegregation and posits that what works here would work everywhere. His main points are that equity cannot come to pass without historical understanding and full, intentional redress nor without "collective self-determination" (4) and "community ownership" in all local interventions (5). Most of the rest of this chapter consists of fruitful definitions of the terms he will use throughout the book as he outlines each aspect of his 5-step proposal.

I liked that Brown named the recent period of antiracist activism ("The Great Rebellion," 2014-2020, the first wave consisting of "urban uprisings from 2014-2017," and the second wave consisting of the protests after George Floyd's murder in 2020, p.10), although I think that it is premature to give an ending date to that right now. Nonetheless, I agree that it feels as though there has been increased activism in this moment, and it is consistent with my own observations in my dissertation research so far (in which I saw an uptick in news coverage of Native American activism in 2013 start to effect changes in cultural norms about racist language and imagery). His term will be useful for me in that work.

This discussion was on the page we are missing from our PDF. If you'd like, read it yourself, along with a useful definition of gentrification, on Google Books at https://books.google.com/books?id=jLQTEAAAQBAJ&

Questions:

• Brown is, as he writes, intentional about effective language use (15). He offers a metaphor of war in the introduction to this chapter, choosing words such as "invasion" and "war" to refer to both the depiction of Black migration by White elites and their response to it (3). Also, on the page that we're missing, Brown writes: "Historian Douglas Egerton called post-Civil War violence the 'Wars of Reconstruction' roughly covering the period between 1866 and 1876" (10). How does that historical contextualization make the epigraph, the Frederick Douglass quote at the beginning, and the Abraham Lincoln quote at the end, applicable to the entire chapter and the issues therein? What could you understand those quotes to mean, in other words, if you took them out of the context of the Civil War and applied them instead to Brown's call for following the required steps toward residential and educational racial equity? What do you think of war as a metaphor for redressing injustice, and, if your response to it is negative, can you find cause to reconsider your own response?

• Likewise, Brown mentions that he "use[s] hurricane categories as an analogy to describe metropolitan areas" in accordance with their level of segregation. How is this metaphor apt but also inapt for the causes and consequences of residential segregation? Why does word choice matter in a book like this one?

Here is a paragraph I found explaining more clearly those five Massey-Tannen dimensions of segregation, for those who are interested:

"Conceptually, hypersegregation occurs when a group has high segregation scores on four or five different dimensions of segregation. The first dimension is evenness: the extent to which all the neighborhoods in a metropolitan area show the same distribution of groups as the total area. Thus, if an area is 20 percent black and 80 percent white, there would be no segregation if each neighborhood had that racial distribution as well. Evenness is measured by the Index of Dissimilarity . . . the most commonly used measure of segregation. The next dimension is isolation: the extent to which a group shares its neighborhoods with only members of its own group. While evenness looks at distributions across all neighborhoods in a city or metropolitan area, isolation provides the view from within neighborhoods. A group may live in only a subset of the neighborhoods in a city, but if those neighborhoods are relatively integrated, the group has contacts outside their group, and their segregation is not as severe as when their neighborhoods are occupied only by their own group. The third dimension, concentration, refers to the relative proportion of the total land area a group occupies relative to the group’s size. This dimension addresses the issues of crowding, population density, and the advantages associated with housing on spacious suburban lots. Centralization, the fourth dimension, measures how close to the central business district a group resides. In the past, the central business district was not a desirable place to live because of the presence of factories, and in more recent years it reflects the disadvantage associated with not living in the suburbs, where many jobs are now located. The last dimension of segregation, clustering, looks at whether the neighborhoods where a group lives are themselves clustered into one large area or are scattered throughout the metropolitan area. It addresses the aspect of whether a group member, regardless of the composition of their neighborhood of residence, interacts with nongroup members if they leave their neighborhood. In hypersegregated metropolitan areas, black neighborhoods tend to form large contiguous ghettos." ("Hypersegregation," Sociology, http://sociology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-of-race/hypersegregation, viewed 15 Feb 2022)

• Do you agree that what works in Baltimore, if also enacted locally elsewhere, would work to achieve spatial equity everywhere in the U.S.?