Bogus report claiming that SJ is racially segregated demolished by policy expert

Local media and progressive housing advocates mistakenly magnified a recent inaccurate report by the Othering and Belonging Institute in Berkeley which suggested--contrary to everyone's lived experience--that cities like San Jose are more segregated today than they were 30 years ago. And that (surprise!) government interventions are necessary to correct this fabricated example of "systemic racism." Judge Glock of the Cicero Institute reveals the sad spin, the sloppy scholarship, and the bald-faced bias in the report, and points out that, in fact, the study's numbers show America is becoming more integrated.  First published in the Wall Street Journal. 

The Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, which sponsored the study, is clear about its advocacy. The institute says its aim is to “raise awareness of the extent and persistence of racial residential segregation.” It also claims that “racial residential segregation remains the ‘lynchpin’—the deep root cause—that sustains systemic racial inequality.”

The study offers no new evidence but applies a different filter to available census data on where people live. Most segregation researchers use the census to create a “dissimilarity index,” which measures how many people of a race would have to move to make every neighborhood contain equal numbers of that race. For instance, if all African-Americans lived in a single neighborhood, almost 100% of them would have to move to create an integrated city, and the index would show about 100% dissimilarity.

The national numbers coming from that index are encouraging. In 1970 almost 80% of African-Americans in a typical city would have to move to create truly integrated neighborhoods across the U.S. By 2010 the share had dropped to 55%.

The same trend holds in particular cities. A recent survey by the Washington Post using the same data showed that “90 percent of U.S. metro areas have seen a decline” in racial segregation since 1990. That is the polar opposite of the story told by the Othering and Belonging Institute.

So how can the institute claim that segregation is increasing? By creating yet another index, which it calls a “divergence index,” and which adds together the difference between the proportions of all of the races in each neighborhood and their citywide average. Instead of looking at how much of each race in a city would have to move to be spread evenly across a city, the index calculates how different each neighborhood’s racial percentages are from the whole city’s.

The big problem with this measure is that it makes cities that have become more diverse look as if they are getting more segregated. If a city had no Asian or Hispanic residents 30 years ago, but some moved in and didn’t perfectly scatter in every neighborhood, the statistics would show a sudden increase in racial “divergence.”

That more diversity makes cities more segregated under their measure explains the odd integration “successes” the report highlights. According to this study, the cities that have integrated the fastest in the past 30 years include Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Flint, Mich. These are some of the most segregated cities in the country. Their favorable scores on the Berkeley index are a result of black flight and low levels of immigration.

The 1968 Kerner Commission Report on urban riots argued that America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report came out just as America was making unprecedented advances in civil rights and integration. Today, a majority of whites express a preference for diverse neighbors. Thanks to that shift, as a study by Ed Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor points out, “all-white neighborhoods are effectively extinct.” Almost every neighborhood in the country has multiple races living together peacefully.

Read the whole thing here.

Mr. Glock is a senior policy adviser at the Cicero Institute and author of “The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913-1939.”

For an illustrative example of how local media embraced the debunked Othering and Belonging Institute report without scrutiny, consider the Merc's "Study: Bay Area segregation rising" story on 6.21.21. The story accepts all the inaccurate results of the study at face value, and accents its analysis with a false narrative that suggests "systemic" disparities in health and education stem from the non-existent increase in residential segregation. Read the whole Merc story here.

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