Abstract
Eric Fong, Kumiko Shibuya, and Brent Berry’s new book is a commanding review of research on residential segregation. The authors adroitly summarize the sprawling empirical literature on residential segregation by race, income, ethnicity, and immigration, both in the United States and in other countries. Segregation will become a useful reference for scholars of segregation, stratification, race, and migration, as well as a valuable teaching tool in undergraduate and graduate courses. An especially useful chapter on the measurement of segregation reviews the evolution of segregation measures alongside work that conceptualizes the multiple dimensions of segregation. The chapter concludes with recent developments in the measurement of segregation, including the introduction of spatial measures that take proximity into account, as well as the development of multi-group measures.
In addition to the book’s clarity and comprehensiveness, several features of Segregation are worthy of specific mention and praise. The first is that the book characterizes current levels of and recent trends in residential segregation across the globe. Work from the United States is inevitably overrepresented, and countries outside the developing world are rarely, if ever, discussed. However, this is the fault of the existing literature, not the book, whose geographic breadth is heroic. For readers interested mainly in the U.S. case, this breadth carries a significant advantage: it puts U.S. levels of segregation in global context. It is one thing to learn that the dissimilarity index of Black–White segregation in the ten largest U.S. cities ranges between 48 and 72 (Table 3.2, p. 34). It is another thing to compare this with the dissimilarity index of indigenous–non-indigenous segregation in the ten largest Canadian cities—indigenous people being the most disadvantaged racial minority in Canada—a figure that ranges from 19 to 36 (Table 3.3, p. 35).
Segregation also frequently excels at integrating research that cuts across multiple dimensions of segregation. This is on display in the authors’ treatment of income segregation by race. Here, the authors start by presenting the sobering statistics on the proportion of Black Americans and poor Black Americans who live in high-poverty areas. They also cover proposed explanations for the concentration of poverty by race, and related debates, ranging from the flight of middle- and working-class Black Americans from inner cities to the intersection of racial segregation and income segregation within as well as across racial groups.
Another notable strength of Segregation is that the chapters on segregation by race, income, ethnicity, and immigration cover research on both the proposed causes and consequences of segregation. Sometimes, this exercise takes the authors deep into the heart of a research literature that implicates residential segregation but whose central focus is not, in fact, segregation. The authors navigate this deftly, presenting relevant arguments while keeping the spotlight on implications for residential segregation. In the chapter on immigration, for example, Fong, Shibuya, and Berry masterfully cover research on immigrant assimilation, starting with classical assimilation theory—its roots in the Chicago School of Sociology—through segmented assimilation theory. Their concise review is a useful primer for students of residential segregation and immigration alike. On the consequences of segregation, the discussion of income segregation’s effects is especially grim, spanning from crib to coffin, low birth weight to reduced life expectancy.
Fong, Shibuya, and Berry’s treatment of the causes of segregation is also the source of a strange and unnecessary misstep: the authors repeatedly draw a distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” segregation. Describing the distinction, they write, “While voluntary segregation is often a group strategy for adaptation or a reflection of preference, involuntary segregation is often a result of constrained choice due to discrimination, prejudice, or other variables” (p. 13). The authors acknowledge that the literature does not—likely cannot—make this distinction clearly: “A group may experience discrimination . . . and thereafter prefer to stay elsewhere” (p. 21). Indeed, the distinction is especially bewildering in light of Krysan and Crowder’s recent and important work (2017), which conceptualizes residential sorting not as the result of conscious preferences—namely, to live among ingroup members and not outgroup members—but rather as the outcome of a costly and risky decision-making process that draws on information from racially segregated social networks. Why, then, do Fong, Shibuya, and Berry insist on using the language of voluntary and involuntary segregation throughout the book? One possibility is that the label “voluntary” cushions their endorsement of the potentially controversial but nonetheless compelling argument that residence within a “segregated” co-ethnic community may be a group’s best bet for securing economic and other opportunities in a broader context characterized by prejudice and discrimination.
A final, smaller issue is that the book divides the discussions of segregation by race, ethnicity, and immigration. From a purely theoretical standpoint, one could argue that the division does not make sense. Indeed, an emerging boundary-making perspective contends that the distinctions between race, ethnicity, and nationality are social rather than academic, contextually and temporally specific, and find no conceptual support in an understanding of race, ethnicity, and nation as cognitive categories that people use to classify themselves and others based on putative descent (Brubaker et al. 2004). More practically, and perhaps as the result of these conceptual issues, Segregation finds the distinctions between segregation by race versus ethnicity versus immigration hard to sustain. For example, discussions of Black Americans’ residential patterns appear in the chapter on race, but also the chapter on ethnic communities (p. 103 on the Black communities in Harlem and the south side of Chicago), as well as the chapter on immigration (p. 132 on the segregation of Black immigrant groups in New York City). It is perhaps unfair to criticize a book, though, for organizing its arguments in some way; and, for a book that aims and will surely succeed at being a reference, a structure that follows the contours of prior work—however arbitrary—makes sense.