The Enduring Significance of Residential Segregation: Race, Immigration, and Structural Drivers of Black Mobility

The pervasiveness of segregation in American cities and metropolitan areas has been and continues to be a topic of significant interest to sociologists and segregation scholars, particularly in terms of how to define and measure segregation. This essay traces the historical roots of segregation in the U.S. and illustrates how the causes and consequences of contemporary segregation must be situated within the broader context of the structure of American society. I then discuss the definitional and methodological approaches to residential settlement analysis to parse out how scholars of segregation identify the essential features of residential settlement worth examining. After the definition and measurement overview, I discuss two practical areas that may contribute to ongoing scholarship on (i) the residential outcomes of post-1965 Black immigrants and how racial prejudice and discrimination structure Black immigrants’ experiences and (ii) “The New Great Migration” coupled with the secondary migration of Black immigrants to the American South, which raises questions regarding how these patterns of migration challenge the prevalence of segregation in American society or further exacerbate them. Overall, the essay underscores the need for the literature on segregation to pay closer attention to the residential settlement outcomes of Black immigrants, given that the Black immigrant experience is reflective of the African American experience.