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How low can it go? declining black-white segregation in A multiethnic context

  • Racial and ethnic inequality
  • Published:
Demography

Abstract

We extend research on whites’ neighborhood contact with blacks, population composition, and prospects for desegregation by developing a new measure of the floor of racial residential segregation under conditions of low black-white contact. The measure incorporates the way in which multi ethnic contexts further constrain levels of black-white segregation. The results show that black-white desegregation is likely when the black population is small, but is unlikely otherwise. Yet, when multiple ethnic groups are sufficiently large, a moderate level of black-white segregation is necessary for whites to maintain low neighborhood contact with blacks, even when the proportion of African Americans is small.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Ohio State University, 43210, Columbus, Ohio

    Lauren J. Krivo & Robert L. Kaufman

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  1. Lauren J. Krivo
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  2. Robert L. Kaufman
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Additional information

The order of authors is arbitrary and reflects equal coauthorship. We would like to thank Douglas S. Massey for his feedback and encouragement on an early draft of the ideas in this paper, and Roderick Harrison for making available a disk file with data on residential segregation for MSAs. The research reported in this paper was partially completed while both authors were on research leave at the Social Welfare Research Institute, Boston College. An early version of this paper was presented at the 1994 annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Miami.

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Krivo, L.J., Kaufman, R.L. How low can it go? declining black-white segregation in A multiethnic context. Demography 36, 93–109 (1999). https://doi.org/10.2307/2648136

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