Segregation past and present

DW: A recent Save the Children report showed that infant mortality in Washington, DC's poor, 90 percent-black Ward 8 is 10 times higher than in rich, 80 percent-white, Ward 3. It was dramatic evidence of the disparities between communities just a few kilometers apart.

Tracey Ross: High-poverty neighborhoods tend to have worse housing, they tend to be located near environmental hazards or highways, so the rates of asthma are higher. So you're talking about putting children in environments that are toxic to their health and then wondering why they don't have the same outcomes as children who grow up in affluent neighborhoods. This segregation means that African-American families disproportionately live in communities that are affordable precisely because they are hazardous to your health. High-poverty communities also tend to have more violence. That means that children are exposed to more violence, and studies have shown that it ruins their cognitive ability when they're in school.

A major contributor to infant mortality specifically is premature birth. What can contribute to that?

We know that women in high-poverty communities have less access to prenatal care, have less access to healthy foods and the sorts of resources that women who are expecting children in higher-income communities have more readily available. All of these constraints contribute to the fact that you will see children with lower birth weights and premature births. Every aspect of your life is impacted by your neighborhood.

You use the term "segregation" when talking about neighborhoods like Ward 8. Why does it still linger?

If we step back a bit and think about how in the 50s and 60s segregation was on the books. We got rid of segregation in this country. I think people might assume that a lot of the problems have gone away since we got rid of these discriminatory laws. But the truth is that 70 percent of the African-Americans who live in our most segregated and poor neighborhoods are the grandchildren and children of the African-Americans who lived in those neighborhoods 40 years ago. So even if we get rid of laws, it doesn't mean that we have re-engineered the country. The country was established on discriminatory practices and laws. That means that there's a loss of wealth that could have been invested in these communities, that these communities are not able to pass wealth on through the generations like white families were. There was a significant investment in affluent neighborhoods throughout the 50s, 60s and beyond that was never extended to African-American communities. And on top of the fact that white communities saw a great investment, there's been a disinvestment in high-poverty and African-American communities. We talked about health a moment ago. Your ZIP code [postal code] has more of an impact on your health than your genetic code. And a lot of this is because of segregation.

What kinds of results do you see today?

You see it in terms of investment even in transportation. Ward 8 is separated from the city geographically and economically. It's often the last part of the city that's invested in, it's often the last part of the city that's plowed during a snowstorm, it gets the short end of the stick when it comes to almost everything you could think of when it comes to services. If you grow up in a high-poverty community, that constrains your access to transportation, to a good education, you have worse housing options. So, for instance, African-American children make up about 16 percent of the public school system, but they mostly go to schools that are 50 percent African-American, and those schools tend to have fewer resources, and so where you grow up matters in every aspect of your life. We believe in this American Dream where anyone can make it, but the truth is that there are lands of opportunity, not just one land of opportunity here.

And these disadvantages are passed down from generation to generation?

Many studies show that the neighborhood that your parents grew up in almost has more of an impact on your life outcomes than where you grow up. That has a legacy, that impact. We know that African-Americans who grow up in middle-class families have greater chances of downward mobility than any other race. So even if you get opportunities, there's a legacy that's compounding itself across generations that makes it a large barrier for African-Americans in this country.

You've argued that the housing market is a big part of the problem.

The housing market was created under a system that promoted segregation. Once we decided that segregation was not the law of the land, that didn't mean that the housing market automatically corrected itself. We still see that there's a "black tax." If you're an African-American family, your house is going to be worth less, even if you live in a nice neighborhood. Also, there are things like exclusionary zoning where a locality can decide "We're not going to have multi-family apartments in this part of the city," and oftentimes what that means is they don't want African-American or Hispanic or other people of color in that city. So there are ways of doing things that seem legal, that are actually correlated with our past discriminatory policies. The average black family making $100,000 a year lives in a more disadvantaged neighborhood than a white family earning $30,000 a year. So even when you're able to achieve somewhat middle-class status in this country, the legacy of discrimination that permeates our housing market and our communities still limits neighborhood choice.

Recent figures from the Pew Research Center found that median household wealth of white families is almost 13 times higher than of African-American households. Is that simply the result of segregation, past and present?

As I stated, the US government invested deeply in the affluence of white communities. They ensured that white households could move to the suburbs, buy homes, while simultaneously making sure that African-American families could not do the same. We saw this great investment in the wealth of white families that has been passed down across generations. I think people are often confused about why there's a disparity in the wealth of white and black families. But if you think about it, if you did not own a house in the 1960s, you're not able to pass the wealth accrued down to your children.

Tracey Ross is a senior policy analyst in the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress.