Multiracial Neighborhoods Research Articles

Shared Satisfaction among Residents Living in Multiracial Neighborhoods

Abstract Multiracial neighborhood integration has become more common in U.S. metropolitan areas over the past three decades. This article takes up the question: are residents satisfied living in multiracial neighborhoods? Traditional theories of racial change predict low levels of satisfaction in these neighborhoods, while newer studies question that prediction. The article uses data representing all residents of multiracial neighborhoods in the Washington, DC, area to study neighborhood satisfaction in multiracial neighborhoods. The analysis finds evidence of shared satisfaction among residents regardless of race: large and equal shares of each racial group were satisfied. White residents were less satisfied than white residents of neighborhoods elsewhere in the metropolitan region, but were unlikely to perceive neighborhood decline. The shared satisfaction among residents of all races and the lack of racial antipathy to change among white residents suggests that multiracial neighborhoods offer sites to promote racial equity.

“I Hate That Food Lion”: Grocery Shopping, Racial Capitalism, and Everyday Disinvestment

Using interview data from three mixed-income neighborhoods—one predominantly white and two multiracial neighborhoods—we find that an overwhelming majority of white, middle-class respondents did not shop in their local grocery store ( n = 68). To explain this phenomenon, we propose a concept of everyday disinvestment to capture the interplay between individual-level decision-making and structural-level disinvestment under racial capitalism. We identify three practices of everyday disinvestment—avoidance, distancing, and selective engagement—as well as the rationalizations residents present for their behaviors. We argue racial capitalist ideologies of antiblackness and consumption as freedom are foundational to residents’ justifications of disinvestment from grocery stores in mixed-income communities. Everyday disinvestment not only expands our understanding of disinvestment as a mechanism of racial capitalism, but it deepens our understanding of food apartheid as a relational process.

¿Dónde Viven Los Latinos? The Types of Neighborhoods Older Latinos Live in and Their Implications for Diabetes

The spatial distribution of Latinos in U.S. neighborhoods is highly patterned due to a complex set of social, cultural, and economic forces, which leads to the differential distribution of and exposure of resources and opportunities across space. However, less is known about the types of neighborhoods older Latinos live in and how it impacts their health. Using census tracts from the year 2000, we employed a latent class analysis to explore how social and socioeconomic characteristics cluster together to create distinct neighborhood typologies. These typologies were then combined with data from the 2006-2016 Health and Retirement Study (n=3,047). We found that Latinos were more likely to live in predominantly Latino neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status (SES) (40%), multiracial neighborhoods with moderate SES (27%), and predominantly white neighborhoods with moderate SES (15%). Latinos living in predominantly Latino neighborhoods with low SES were more likely to have diabetes than other neighborhood typologies.

“Diversity Is Important to Me”: White Parents and Exposure-to-Diversity Parenting Practices

Drawing upon interviews with 40 parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, the author explores how “exposure to diversity,” an implicit racial socialization practice, has become a defining feature of how some middle-class white parents teach their children about race and reflect on what it means to be a good white parent. Exposure to diversity involves white parents’ active efforts to expose their children to people of color via trips to multiracial parks, enrollment in multiracial schools, or residence in multiracial neighborhoods. The author argues that white parents’ efforts are informed by their adherence to both a “diversity ideology” wherein racial diversity is frequently, but not always, framed as a positive social dynamic that enriches their family’s white life, and a middle-class desire to craft a high-status white child via distinction-oriented parenting practices. Taken together, white middle-class parents pursue an exposure-to-diversity strategy because they believe, whether consciously or not, that diversity provides them and their children with the means to facilitate small-scale social change and to craft a comfortable, open-minded white child who possesses racial and class distinction.

Whose Best Friend? Dogs and Racial Boundary Maintenance in a Multiracial Neighborhood

In human–animal studies, dogs are often framed as promoters of interactions among strangers. Yet very few of these studies discuss how racial structure shapes human‐to‐human engagement. Similarly, race scholarship and urban studies have failed to incorporate human–animal studies fully to better understand racial dynamics and inequality in U.S. cities. I use in‐depth interview data from an 18‐month study of Creekridge Park, an urban, multiracial, and mixed‐income neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina, to explore the role of dogs for white residents. I focus on identifying if dogs helped bridge social differences between white residents and their Black and Latinx neighbors in a racially and economically diverse neighborhood. I find that while my white respondents shared many examples of dogs facilitating neighborly relationships and friendship, these relationships were largely between same‐race individuals. By reinforcing a white, urban, middle‐class habitus, white residents used dogs to maintain interracial boundaries and feelings of safety, as well as navigate racial‐ethnic differences between themselves and their Black and Latinx neighbors. These findings point to the necessity of more research that addresses racial structure and human–animal studies to better understand contemporary urban spaces.

The Breaking News by Sarah Lynne Reul

Reviewed by: The Breaking News by Sarah Lynne Reul Deborah Stevenson Reul, Sarah LynneThe Breaking News; written and illus. by Sarah Lynne Reul. Roaring Brook, 2018 40p ISBN 978-1-250-15356-2 $18.99 R* 5-8 yrs We all have experienced it: the news reports a terrible event that affects many people deeply and leaves grief and worry in its wake. This picture book explores the child experience of such an event through our young protagonist, tracking it through parental response ("Suddenly Mom is glued to the television. Dad can't stop checking his phone") and household disruption ("Dad is too tired for bedtime stories"). At school, her teacher echoes the Mr. Rogers line of "Look for the helpers," and the girl wants to help too, but how? This take on post-tragedy response delicately blends respect for sadness and the magnitude of tragedy with an actionable focus on the value of "one small thing" as a response. The book wisely keeps the news itself nonspecific and the realistic approach to what one person can do ("Small things don't solve everything. The bad news is still there, after all") avoids Pollyanna-ism and unrealistic expectations while still providing reassurance. The digital illustrations, thickly lined with slightly naïve draftsmanship, especially in the figures, focuses on kid-accessible realms of home, city neighborhood, and school, and limits its palette to a harmonious and respectful earthtoned colorway. The family, in varying shades of skin tone, and the multiracial neighborhood and school could map easily onto that of most audiences, and even the family's wienerish dog is credibly subdued. The situational need for this kind of reassurance isn't going away, so this will be a useful classroom and parental tool in tough times. DS Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Race and Reciprocity: Inter‐household Exchanges in a Multiracial Neighborhood

This study investigates the degree to which African‐American households are socially integrated into a multiracial, middle‐class suburban neighborhood near Dallas, Texas. Although U.S. neighborhoods are becoming increasingly heterogeneous in composition, little is known about black households' participation in social and informational networks within multiracial middle‐class neighborhoods. Drawing on theories of the gift and social capital, we view neighborhoods in terms of complex patterns of inter‐household exchanges of material and symbolic goods. We predict that black‐led households will exchange at a lower rate with their neighbors than will other households and test this prediction using survey data collected from 119 households and from follow‐up interviews with eight black heads of household. Our main finding from the survey is that black households exchanged at a significantly lower rate than did other households, ceteris paribus. The follow‐up interviews found little evidence of black racial homophily in neighboring or of racism within the neighborhood. However, the low rate of black inter‐household exchanges may be partly explained by black head of households' personal experiences of racism outside the neighborhood and by a racially constituted disposition against borrowing from neighbors. We discuss implications of our findings for research on racial integration and segregation.

Structures of Urban Poverty in Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue

Greg Sarris’s 1994 Grand Avenue offers tough urban stories about a longfought, still-continuing struggle for survival and self-determination.1 Following the Native population shift from reservations to cities, Sarris (Coast Miwok/ Pomo), like many Native writers, has engaged urban Indian experiences.2 In surveying this fiction, Carol Miller (Cherokee) explains that it provides “a significant illustrative resource about the pragmatic business of ‘going along’ in the world, just as the old stories always have done.”3 Sarris’s stories fulfill this role by presenting the day-to-day lives of a contemporary, fictional Pomo community living in a multiracial neighborhood not far from their traditional homeland. Although displaced, they are still intact on “an in-town reservation: blacks, Mexicans, Indians” (198). The stories depict poverty, high unemployment, destructive sexuality, and parenting that provides little protection for children.4 Conditions on Grand Avenue are the culmination of two centuries of exploitation. Recognizing this, Sarris has created a collection of complexly interrelated stories that are neither victim-blaming indictments nor voyeuristic accounts of dysfunctional families. He states, “My books are chronicles of survival, how a people survive for better and for worse. They light the dark places so we can all—all of us, Indian and non-Indian—see where we have been, where we are, and where we might go.”5 To understand better the devastating conditions and the possibilities for hope that these stories depict, we need to consider how historically developed socioeconomic structures shape the characters’ present choices. Forced onto the margins of economic production, Pomo individuals and communities face the profound cultural consequences of their position in US society. Without a historical perspective, readers can easily see the characters in Grand Avenue as hopelessly trapped in a world of their own making. Thus, this article

Asian Immigrant Settlements in New York City: Defining "Communities of Interest"

Since data on Asian immigrant neighborhoods is limited, the implications of these findings extend beyond the immediate task of political redistricting and may be useful to community studies. This paper concludes with a discussion of two potentially fruitful research directions. The first pertains to the socioeconomic potential of enclaves, especially since survey findings underscore concerns about employment opportunities and conditions, public safety, and overcrowded educational facilities (Zhou 1992). The second observation points to the need to broaden the typology of Asian neighborhoods and immigrant settlements to include multiethnic and multiracial neighborhoods. Future research should examine the ethnic specificity of neighborhood concerns and elaborate on those issues that link the fates of all immigrant neighborhood residents.

Giving Back to the Community

My argument is that the assimilationist approach will become increasingly problematic as new types of neighborhoods such as ethnoburbs and multiracial neighborhoods emerge in major U.S. cities like Los Angeles and the personal and political experiences of Asian Americans become increasingly diverse within these shifting contexts. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to identify the eventual fate of Asians in the U.S., the article aims to explicate some of the processes through which these groups may create and maintain political ties to the ethnic community. With specific focus on the Korean American community in Los Angeles, the purpose of the study is to understand why some 1.5 and second generations return to the political institutions of the ethnic community despite residential and socioeconomic mobility into middle-class, suburban neighborhoods outside the ethnic enclave of Koreatown. In other words, what are the psychological, political, and structural advantages of maintaining ethnic tie...

Color‐Full before Color Blind: The Emergence of Multiracial Neighborhood Politics in Queens, New York City

The United States is undergoing a “majority minority” transition, with the historic European‐ancestry white majority projected to fall beneath 50% of the population in the second half of the current century. Elmhurst‐Corona, a neighborhood in Queens, New York City, was 98% white in 1960 but by 1990 had become intensely multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual, with neither African Americans, Asians, Latin Americans, nor the remaining whites constituting a majority of the local population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 1983 and 1996, in this article I trace the growth of cross‐racial political interaction in Elmhurst‐Corona, highlighting initial resistance by white residents, entry of newcomers into civic politics, innovation by female civic activists, and acceptance of shared local “quality of life” concerns as representation at the central political arena, the neighborhood's appointed community board, became more inclusive, [political anthropology, race, immigration, New York City, United States]

“Crown Heights is the Center of the World”: Reterritorializing a Jewish Diaspora

A story is sometimes told about a disciple of the Baal Shem ??? (the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidic Judaism) who yearned to see the Holy Land—or at least the story was told to me, one night in 1997, by a Lubavitch Hasidic rabbi in Crown Heights, the multiracial neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where many Lubavitch Hasidim make their homes.

A Settlement House Approach to Community Mental Health

A PSYCHIATRIC clinic, known as the Hudson Guild Counseling Service, offering diagnostic and treatment service to, children, adolescents, and their parents, individually and in groups, is operated by the Hudson Guild, a settlement house in New York City. This psychiatric clinic is not part of a hospital. It is a special division of the Hudson Guild's community service, which carries, also, a daycare and nursery program (ages 3 to 6), and a group work program for school-age children (both preteens and teenagers) and adults. It is a community service established with the objective of meeting the mental health needs of a neighborhood composed primarily of residents of a low-income housing project. Sixtysix percent of the tenants are Negroes or Puerto Ricans. The following factors led to the establishment of the Hudson Guild Counseling Service: 1. The growing complexity of mental health needs in a rapidly changing, multiracial neighborhood and the resulting increases in demands on the settlement house staff. 2. The special demands for help with mental health problems of children, stressed by the 608 families of young veterans who moved into the newly opened John Elliott Housing Project in 1947. 3. The strategic position of the settlement house, making the service readily accessible and usable by the community. Ordinarily psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are accessible mainly to middle-class or high-income families. In facing the need of members of our families for psychotherapy, we were also faced with the need for seeking new ways and means of providing it. A concerted effort of various agencies in and around the settlement under the guidance of the counseling service seemed to be the logical approach.