American Apartheid and Wealth in America

The three texts from this week deal with the intersections of race, class, wealth, and housing in America, particularly in the context of the discriminatory attitudes and institutionalized practices that maintain inequalities. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton point out the ways that the ghetto has been constructed and the ways that it is perpetuated today. They specifically focus on the black (non-Latino) community/ies in the U.S., stating that this is because "no other group in the contemporary United States comes close to this level of isolation within urban society" (77). While I strongly agree with and am impressed by their analysis of this situation of urban isolation in general, I kept expecting them to mention Native Americans. The fact that Native Americans are completely marginalized from their discourse performs a work very similar to what they are trying to counter. Their omitance erases a history that is not dead, but continues today. Their argument about hypersegregation as a combination of at least four of the five dimensions of segregation undoubtedly could be applied as a lens for reading the reservations in America.

Back on the note of economic inequality between black and white people in America, Thomas Shapiro's article "Race, Homeownership and Wealth" supplements the point of American Apartheid by pointing out ways that wealth inequalities are maintained in the United States. His idea that homeownership should be viewed as a continuum with homeownership as the goal is a great new perspective to understand homeownership and sustainable wealth. The second article that he co-wrote with Melvin Oliver zooms in on how the sub-prime crisis was a crisis for Black Americans. This article highlights the specific ways that structural discrimination comes to fruition and maintains what Massey and Denton call "American Apartheid." I especially think that this idea of homeownership as a continuum is useful, because homeownership in itself does not signal wealth, as we see in the article by Oliver and Shapiro. Homeownership is a tenuous, not necessarily stable thing, especially when you factor in appreciation rates (or lack thereof). Thus, it is essentially addressing a fruit and not a root of the problem of wealth distribution if we pay attention to homeownership rates independently of these other ongoing societal issues.