This was Levittown, Pennsylvania, shortly
after World War II.
In a suburb that explicitly promised a
white-only neighborhood.
And it wasn't some outlier.
It was the prototypical suburb,
built by the father of suburbia — Bill
Levitt — who created several suburbs around
the US, all named Levittown.
But one reason Levitt wanted a white-only
community was because the US government was
subsidizing it — and that's what they wanted.
They said they didn't want "racially inharmonious
groups" lowering property values.
That's why Levitt didn't just sell cookie-cutter
houses.
He sold a meticulously crafted, affordable,
utopian lifestyle.
So as the courts integrated public spaces,
like schools, more and more white people fled
to these suburbs.
And these patterns are still the defining
characteristic of America's racial geography.
But we now spend most of our time at work.
It gets a lot more complicated.
"More than a million persons each year have
pulled up stakes in the city and turned commuter…"
Shortly after the first Levittown broke ground
in 1947 in Long Island, New York, about 80 percent
of men still commuted the hour to
Manhattan.
And while neighborhoods were getting deeply
segregated, these workplaces were getting
more diverse.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment
discrimination.
More companies explicitly said they were "equal
opportunity employers."
And segregation within our workplaces declined.
This meant the workplace was a crucial environment
for us to interact with people of other races.
Except that's not exactly how it turned out.
A few months ago, researchers at Cornell and
Penn State shared a dataset with me — and
when I mapped it, it kind of blew my mind.
This is a map of where people work in modern-day
Chicago.
The taller an area,
the more people there are.
But now, let's color in each neighborhood
by the percentage of white people.
You can see the city centers are pretty diverse.
But, now, here's what happens when they go
home.
What's even more astounding is what happens
when we map people of color.
Here's where black people work in Chicago.
Again, they're concentrated in diverse city
centers.
But when black workers go home, they go to
very segregated neighborhoods, clustered in
the poorer areas.
And we can see the same patterns in DC.
Detroit.
Philadelphia.
Pretty much everywhere in the US.
These maps shows just how stubborn residential
segregation is.
But they also show what looks like a glimmer of
hope for integration:
cities are remarkably
diverse during the work day.
This got researchers interested in looking
closer at what's at work.
Let's look at how segregation has changed
in recent year.
From 2000 to 2010, residential segregation
between black and white people got slightly better.
For the most part, segregation just mostly plateaued for all racial groups.
But when researchers looked at how segregation
changed during the day, when we're at work,
they found that segregation increased slightly
across all racial groups.
When we zoom in some more to the company level,
we can see a bit more of what's actually happening.
Researchers at Stanford and Harvard found,
within a company, segregation levels have
gone down very little.
In other words, we're exposed to about as
much diversity now... as we were a generation ago.
But there are a lot more people of color now
than there were in 1980.
So what's going on?
Well, they aren't being more represented at
these white-majority companies, which would
look like this.
Rather, they are getting
opportunities at companies that are mostly
non-white, over here.
So this means that, when we look at this from
a company level, segregation has actually
gotten worse than a generation ago.
Of course, some places are pretty diverse.
So researchers looked at what kinds of places
actually have less segregation during the day.
But they found that, if a place is diverse
during the daytime, it's likely not because
people of all races are working alongside
each other.
Rather, it's likely because most of the higher
status workers, like managers, are white.
and the lower-status workers, like janitors,
are people of color.
American policies engineered our segregated
homes.
But work — where we spend most of our time?
Many thought that could be a space where we
form meaningful relationships with people
of other racial backgrounds.
That hasn't quite happened.
And we can see it in the most personal parts
of our lives.
In 2014, the Public Religion Research Institute
asked Americans to list the people with whom
they "discussed important matters" in
the past six months.
In other words, our friends.
Most Hispanic people had friends of other
races.
About one in three black people did, too.
But 75 percent of white people only had
white friends.
In short, we may be exposed to diverse spaces,
but we still live very segregated lives.
"The whole trouble with this integration business is that in the end it probably will end up with mixing, socially."
