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Racial Stratification and the Durable Tangle of Neighborhood InequalityDepartment of Sociology at Harvard University This article revisits neglected arguments of the Moynihan Report to yield insights for a contemporary understanding of racial inequality in American cities. The author argues that the logic of Moynihan's reasoning implies three interlinked hypotheses: (1) the tangle of "pathology," or what today we call social dislocations, has a deep neighborhood structure, as does socioeconomic disadvantage; (2) the tangle of neighborhood inequality is durable and generates self-reinforcing properties that, because of racial segregation, are most pronounced in the black community; and (3) neighborhood "poverty traps" can ultimately only be broken with government structural interventions and macro-level policies. Examining longitudinal neighborhood-level data from Chicago and the United States as a whole, the author finds overall support for these hypotheses. Despite urban social transformations in the post-Moynihan era, neighborhoods remained remarkably stable in their relative economic standing. Poverty is also stubbornly persistent in its ecological concentration with other social disadvantages, especially in the black community.
Key Words: Daniel Patrick Moynihan • The Negro Family • Chicago • neighborhoods • durable inequality • "poverty traps" • racial stratification
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 621, No. 1,
260-280 (2009) |
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