Racially patterned residential preferences reproduce segregation without overt racism

Evidence

At the center of neoliberal commitment is the principle that people should be free to express and exercise their preferences as they see fit. Given that preference expression throughout modernity was to greater or lesser degree fashioned and formulated in racial terms, preference expression and its products continue to carry racial weight. Cultural preferences, for instance, remain to a considerable extent racially predictable, even if internally various and overdetermined. The preference of the overwhelming percentage of whites in the US to live exclusively among themselves, as I indicated in Chapter 3 (and the same could be said about contemporary South Africa, the Netherlands, France, even Britain, not to mention Australia and Canada), exemplifies just this point. At the interfaces, cultural preference expression can be the cause of tension, if not friction. It thus requires some massaging, if not persistent management, at the very least in the interests of extending power. And power, wherever it manifests racially, remains structurally white, as I have been arguing throughout. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1783

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: quotidian ‘preference expression’ as the privatized substitute for explicit segregationism - the racial demography made by a sum of individual housing choices.
• XREF: Central to the reader’s contact/institution gap: whites’ self-segregation preference shows how everyday social life and structural racial outcome diverge. — connects to: Outlawing explicit race measures resegregates schools through residential sorting — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 394; Residential preferences are culturally shaped, not rational givens — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 384; Black segregation rose from white avoidance, not black housing preferences (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Black segregation rose from white avoidance, not black housing preferences #expands (0.92)
• Mild individual in-group preference generates macro segregation spontaneously #corroborates (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 383
• Purported neighborhood preferences are themselves produced by racial discourse #complicates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 384
• Racial architecture shapes neighborhoods and the habitus of their residents #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1846
• Residential segregation deepened even as expressed racial prejudice declined #corroborates (0.82)
• Voluntary Black separation differs fundamentally from discriminatory segregation #qualifies (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 872
• How agents define neighborhood determines whether segregation emerges #expands (0.78) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 824