Tag: segregation

Segregation in France

The mix of race, poverty, and urban space has created intractable social issues in many American cities in the past sixty years. Residential segregation creates a terrible fabric of self-reproducing inequalities between the segregated group and the larger society — inequalities of education, health, employment, and culture. As intractable as this social system of segregation appears to be in the cities of the United States, it may be that the situation in France is even worse. Sociologist Didier Lapeyronnie is interviewed in a recent issue of the Nouvel Obs on the key findings of his recent book, Ghetto urbain: Segregation, violence, pauvrete en France aujourd’hui. The interview makes for absorbing reading.

Lapeyronnie is an expert on urban sociology, poverty, and immigration in France and a frequent observer of the rising urban crisis in France. (I’m deliberately evoking here the title of Tom Sugrue’s book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.) Lapeyronnie’s view is grim: the isolation and despair characteristic of French ghetto and banlieue communities are worsening year after year, and the French state’s promises after the disturbances of 2005 have not been fulfilled. Unemployment, limited educational opportunities, and poverty create an environment in which young people have neither the resources nor the opportunities to improve their social position, and they are largely excluded from the larger French society.

Lapeyronnie offers several important observations. These ghettos are largely populated by immigrant communities — first, second, or third-generation immigrants from North Africa and former French colonies. Racism is a crucial element in the development and evolution of these segregated spaces. As he puts it:

The ghetto is the product of two mechanisms: social and racial segregation and poverty, which enclose people in their neighborhoods, leading to the formation of a veritable counter-society with its own norms, its economy (what one calls the black economy), and even its own political system. … Poor and segregated, feeling ostracized by the Republic and plunged into a veritable political vacuum, they have organized a counter-society which protects them even as they are disadvantaged in relation to the exterior world.

Lapeyronnie makes the point that the development of segregated ghettos is more advanced and more harmful in the smaller cities of France. He describes the situation in these smaller cities as creating an almost total barrier between the ghetto and the surrounding city — an environment where the possibility of economic or social interaction has all but disappeared.

Lapeyronnie notes the role that gender plays in the segregation system. Women of the ghetto can move back and forth — if they accept the “dominant norms” of dress and behavior. And this means the head scarf, in particular. In order to pass across the boundary of ghetto and city, women must adopt the dress of non-Muslim French society. But, as Lapeyronnie points out, this creates a deeply ambiguous position for women, because modest dress and head scarf are all but mandatory within the space of the ghetto. “The veil is interpreted as a sexual symbol, affirmation of a sexual solidarity with Muslim men. It often engenders hostility outside the ghetto while providing protection within the ghetto.” “Here one finds one of the central explanations of the formation of the ghetto … which is organized around the articulation of the race of the men and the sex of the women.”

Another interesting sociological observation concerns the nature of the social networks within and without the ghetto. Lapeyronnie distinguishes between “strong network ties” (liens forts) and weak network ties (liens faibles), and he asserts that social relationships in the ghetto fall in the first category: everyone knows everyone. As a network diagram, this would result in a dense network in which every node is connected to every other node. But Lapeyronnie makes the point that weak networks are a source of strength and innovation in the larger society that is lacking in the ghetto; people can “network” to strangers through a series of connections. So opportunities are widely available — finding a job by passing one’s CV through a series of people, for example. “Strong networks protect people, they are like a cocoon … But they are also a handicap and a weight on each person. Not only is the individual deprived of resources, but many people don’t know a single person outside the neighborhood.” Moreover, this strong network characteristic is very effective at enforcing a group morality (along the lines of Durkheim): “There is a morality and set of norms in the strong network: don’t betray, be faithful to one’s friends, stay together.”

Lapeyronnie concludes the interview with these words:

When a population is placed in a situation of poverty and lives within racial segregation, it returns to very traditional definitions of social roles, notably the roles of family, and on a rigid and often bigoted morality. This is what permits building the strong network.

This is a pretty powerful analysis of the social transformations that are created by segregation, racism, isolation, and poverty — and it doesn’t bode well for social peace in France. Lapeyronnie is describing the development of an extensive “counter-society” that may be more and more important in coming years. The social networks and social relationships that Lapeyronnie describes are a potent basis for social mobilization and new social movements, and there don’t seem to be many pathways towards social progress to which such movements might be directed.

Persistent urban inequality

Race, segregation, and inequality — these are the major issues that metropolitan America needs to address, and hasn’t so far. But there is some good analytical work being done to allow us to better understand these processes — and therefore, possibly to alter the course we are on. 

I heard an excellent talk a week or so ago by Myron Orfield of the University of Minnesota and the Metropolitan Area Research Corporation (MARC). Orfield is a national expert on the governmental and social processes affecting poverty, segregation, and schooling in the major metropolitan areas of the United States.  At his talk at the University of Michigan he provided a series of map overlays for Minneapolis-St. Paul that demonstrated the coincidence of neighborhoods with high incidence of poverty, failing schools, high crime rates, and poor health performance.  And, importantly, he highlighted some of the political processes through which school and district boundaries have been drawn in Minneapolis-St. Paul communities that have the fairly direct effect of sharpening the segregation of individual schools.  

The same set of issues is addressed in this month’s issue of the Boston Review in a forum on “ending urban poverty.” Each of the contributions is very good, and especially interesting is an article by Patrick Sharkey with the title “The Inherited Ghetto.” Sharkey begins with a crucial and familiar point: that racial inequality has changed only very slightly since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968.  The concentration of black poverty in central cities has not substantially improved over that period of time, and the inequalities associated with this segregation have continued.  And the association between neighborhood, degree of segregation, and income and quality of life is very strong: children born into a poor and segregated neighborhood are likely to live as adults — in a poor and segregated neighborhood. Sharkey documents this statement on the basis of his analysis of the data provided the University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the first major statistical study of several generations of families in terms of residence, income, occupation, health, and other important variables.  Using a computer simulation based on the two-generation data provided by the Panel Study, Sharkey indicates that it would take five generations for the descendants of a family from a poor, black neighborhood to have a normal expectation of living in a typical American neighborhood. (That’s one hundred years in round numbers.)  In other words: the progress towards racial equality in urban America is so slow as to be virtually undetectable. 

What are the reasons for this?  That is Sharkey’s main question.  One point that he makes is an important one for explaining the continuation of segregation in the forty years since the passage of the Fair Housing Act.  This is the fact that the policy choices that have been made by federal and local authorities concerning housing patterns have more or less deliberately favored segregation by race.  Beginning with the initial Fair Housing legislation — which was enacted without giving the Federal agencies the power of enforcement — both federal and state policies have reinforced segregation.  As Sharkey notes, federal housing programs have subsidized the growth of largely white suburbs, while redlining and other credit-related restrictions have impeded the ability of black families to follow into these new suburban communities.  The continuation of informal discrimination in the housing market (as evidenced by “testers” from fair housing agencies) further reinforces continuing segregation between inner-city black population and the suburban, mostly white population. Sharkey makes another very important point: the forms of disadvantage — economic, health, income, educational — that currently exist between black and white, poor and rich — are the result of at least fifty years of social accumulation.  So we should be resolute in designing policies that will move the dial in the right direction — and then stick with those policies for a couple of generations.  We should not expect that this accumulation of disadvantage will be reversed in a short time.

One other important part of Sharkey’s piece is his review of the results of several experiments in relocation: what happens when individual families are relocated into less segregated, less poor neighborhoods (the “Moving to Opportunity” program and the Gautreaux program in Chicago)?  Stefanie DeLuca picks this topic up in her equally interesting article in the same issue, “Neighborhood Matters.”This topic is one of the most important issues of social justice that we face, and this forum is a great contribution  to better thinking about the subject.