Left Behind: Rappaport Institute’s Guy Stuart stuck in the mud at a crossroads in the rearview mirror
Harvard University’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston recently released a report called “Boston at the Crossroads” that details the racial and ethnic changes in Greater Boston. As the nominal diversity (i.e. the proportion of non-Whites) increases, so does racial and ethnic consolidation, or segragation, according to the report.
The number of whites in Greater Boston decreased by 2% from 1990 to 2000, while Hispanics increased by 49%, blacks by 33%, and Asians by 87%. The number of whites decreased in both Massachusetts and Greater Boston, and whites’ share of the population plummeted to 81% in 2000 from 87% in 1990. At the same time, residential segragation increased, as whites kept fleeing to areas dominated by whites, while blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Others (hey, that’s what the Census calls them) congregated in their own respective enclaves in and around Boston, and scattered across Greater Boston. Bear in mind that the numbers are for 2000. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that whites now make up less than 80% Greater Boston’s population, as both white flight and immigration continue unabated.
The Rappaport report divides Greater Boston into four different and partly overlapping areas: Boston, Urban Core (Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Lynn, Malden, Somerville, Waltham), Satellite Cities (Attleboro, Brockton, Fall River, Fitchburg, Gloucester, Lawrence, Leominster, Lowell, New Bedford, Worcester), and Suburbs. The share and number of whites have decreased in all areas, except for in the Suburbs, where their numbers increased by about 100,000, while their share fell to 91% from 95%.
People in Massachusetts will probably recognize most of the the Satellite Cities as “troubled” cities. Those cities were 82% white in 1990. Today, they are 70% so. Together, they had 87,000 fewer whites in 2000 than they did in 1990. Brockton went to being 45% non-white from 23% in 1990, Lawrence to 66% from 45%, and Lowell to 37% from 23%. Brockton, Lowell, and Lawrence all have populations exceeding 70,000 people, so we’re not talking about just a couple of families moving in and a couple families moving out.
The somewhat saving grace for Greater Boston is that no one non-white group dominates: Asians, Latinos, and blacks each make up about one third of Grfeater Boston non-whites. The groups themselves are also quite fragmented, and while there are more Chinese than Indians, for example, the Indian cohort is growing faster than the Chinese. 26% of blacks in Greater Boston are foreign born, compared to only 6% of blacks in the US. There are, as of yet, few Mexicans in Massachusetts (though plenty of Central American machete artists). The flip side is of course that public instituitions in the Commnwealth have to wrestle with that many different languages and cultures.
Guy Stuart, the author of the report, believes, as the title suggests, that Greater Boston is at a crossroads; that we can choose between increased or at least continued segragation, or integration. He sees promising signs that integration still has a shot:
The fact that isolation measures for the suburbs did not exceed 20 percent for any non-white or Latino group shows that non-whites and Latino are willing to live on blocks where they are nowhere near the majority, and that suburban integration is possible if whites do not flee.
Perhaps, but why should non-Hispanic whites not flee diversity? What is in it for them? What could compel them to live side-by-side with non-whites? Stuart has the answers:
This hopeful sign suggests the need for concerted effort by local and regional leaders to encourage and sustain integration at this critical crossroads. Such a concerted effort will require: efforts by home buyers and renters to examine their own assumptions about different neighborhoods and towns across the region; greater monitoring of compliance with fair housing laws; and housing and community development efforts that not only seek to integrate people in the suburbs through expanded housing opportunities, but also to redevelop economically struggling city and satellite city neighborhoods.
Litigation and expansion of government. Those are what Stuart sees as diversity’s upside for non-Hispanic whites. At least you can’t accuse him of sugarcoating.
However, I think Stuart, is fundamentally wrong. The crossroads is not ahead of us, it is way behind us. While most people in Massachusetts support assimilationism (demonstrated, for example, by the 68% of voters who voted for an English immersion proposition in 2002), and while our governor Mitt Romney is admirably Americanist and assimilationist, the vast majority of institutions and power brokers in the Commonwealth support multiculturalism and multilingualism. In a world of disassimilation and fragmentation, who can you trust but your own?
Immigrants who actually like America need to support drastically reduced immigration, while there still is an America to save.
