Beyond the City: Exploring the Suburban and Rural Landscapes of Racial Residential Integration Across the United States
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Beyond the City: Exploring the Suburban and Rural Landscapes of Racial Residential Integration Across the United States Ankit Rastogi1 · Katherine Curtis2 Received: 24 October 2019 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 / Published online: 26 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In recent decades, racial and ethnic diversity has expanded from the city into the suburbs, the rural–urban interface, and remote rural places across all regions in the United States. This study examines how these population trends shape the possibility of racial residential integration across the American rural–urban continuum and regions. Using the information theory index (H) and racial and ethnic composition thresholds, we identify integrated cities, suburbs, and rural towns and villages that are stably integrated between the 2000 and 2010 censuses. This study shows a substantial number of diverse places where people of different races and ethnicities live near each other. Further, the largest clusters of integration locate in suburbs, followed by rural places, while central cities show the lowest rates of integration. In addition, the West typically hosts larger numbers of integrated communities compared to other regions. Findings suggest that to better understand shifting patterns of American racial inequality, research must look outside the city and toward the West to investigate residential integration as a new form of twenty-first-century race relations. Keywords Diversity · Residential integration · Race and ethnicity · Rural–urban continuum
* Ankit Rastogi [email protected] Katherine Curtis [email protected] 1
Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
2
Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
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A. Rastogi, K. Curtis
Introduction The history of legal segregation, from Jim Crow to discriminatory lending practices, fundamentally shapes American racial settlement patterns (Rothstein 2017). Despite moderate declines in segregation after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, metropolitan areas across the nation display durable patterns of racial segregation (Logan and Stults 2011). However, attention to metropolitan-level segregation neglects the structure of residential patterns at different spatial scales and the possibility of racial integration in more local contexts. Moreover, metropolitan analyses omit how these local communities vary across regions with different histories of racial settlement. Analyzing central cities, suburbs, and nonmetropolitan places separately may offer new insights regarding the geography of race relations and may help inform policy for the maintenance if not promotion of integration. Settlement resulting from the expansion of urban spaces may offer new opportunities for residential integration in suburbs and rural areas (Lee and Sharp 2017; Lichter and Ziliak 2017). In the twenty-first century, the “chocolate city/ vanilla suburbs”
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