The ‘Color Line’ in the 21st Century: Pursuing Social Justice Despite Persistent White Resistance to Integration

• In Event: 2166 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 11: Race & Space

Abstract

Nearly two decades into the Twenty First Century the “color line” continues to shape people’s life chances in the United States (U.S.). Both W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. identified racism as a central organizing force in the American opportunity structure and that racial inequality is fundamentally embedded in U.S. political economy—interconnections between market and government processes. Questions Du Bois and King raised in their lifetimes are at the core of racial justice today: What conditions are necessary for blacks to be incorporated into U.S. society on equitable terms? What economic, political, and other social arrangements would be more just for all people and how do Americans envision, create, and sustain them? Drawing on data from a two-year ethnography I conducted of the local U.S. jurisdiction with the largest concentration of middle class blacks, Prince George’s County (PGC), Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb, I assess the extent to which racial inequality has changed since the modern Civil Rights era. I focus on PGC’s capacity to maintain a high-performing K-12 public school system, finding that PGC encounters four market and government-based challenges because its population is majority black: (1) insufficient school funding from all levels of government, (2) county government and family financial instability due to racial residential segregation, (3) the disproportionate concentration of negative spillover effects of gentrification in Black communities, and (4) predatory and stigmatizing market and government processes targeting blacks. I conclude by proposing policies and political actions to establish more just social processes.

Author

• Angela Marie Simms, Barnard College