Racial Discrimination In Housing Research Articles

Black Boarding Academies as a Prudential Reparation

With billions of dollars pledged and trillions of dollars demanded to redress slavery and Jim Crow (“Black Reparations”) the question of how best to use these funds has moved into the forefront of the ongoing campaign for racial justice in our post-civil rights society. Reparatory strategies typically target the norms and structures that sustain racial disadvantage wrought by slavery and Jim Crow. The goal of such transitional reparations is to extinguish the menace of white supremacy and systemic racism across the board. Restructuring in housing, education, employment, voting, law enforcement, health care, and the environment—social transformation—is absolutely needed in the United States if the race problem is ever to be resolved. That much is clear beyond peradventure. The hard question, however, is whether Black Reparations can take us there. Are Black Reparations (or reparations in general) powerful enough to engineer social transformation, or what in this case would be “transitional racial justice”? Unfortunately, I do not believe they can. The American race problem is simply too big for reparations to fix. It would take decades of massive amounts of government spending and the sustained moral commitment of the American people to achieve transitional racial justice in this country. The inflationary impact of the requisite spending (estimated at $6.4 trillion to $59.2 trillion) would give opponents of reparations an easy target. Moreover, transitional reparations have rarely been attempted in other countries and when tried it has never succeeded to my knowledge. South Africa attempted to use reparations for social transformation. While there has been a transformation of political power, giving Black South Africans a strong voice in the government, economic power remains in the hands of White South Africans and racial discrimination in housing and education continues. Although at one time I was among scholars who had hoped Black Reparations could deliver a much-needed Third Reconstruction, I would be remiss as a passionate supporter of Black Reparations for many decades to ignore the cold facts—reparations have never successfully reconstructed a society.
 But the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. While Black Reparations may not be sufficient for transitional racial justice, they can still play an important role in moving toward that goal. This Article attempts to show one way of doing so. It argues that the initial payment of Black Reparations should take the shape of an education reparation. Education can, as it has in the past with Brown v. Board of Education, provide a foundation for significant racial progress. The type of education reparation broached in this Article gives African American (or Black American) parents or guardians a unique choice for educating their children—Black Boarding Academies (BBAs). Kick started with public reparations, BBAs would begin with PK-3 low-income Black children, giving special attention to those at risk of falling into the dreadful foster care system, and would expand to accommodate other classes of Black students once financially stable with post-reparations funding. Like most public boarding schools, BBAs will have to be sustained with both public and private funds. Fortunately, there is a wide range of available sources. Historically, boarding schools have a poor reputation in educating children of color, especially Indigenous Americans. The few primary and secondary schools that board Black students have not experienced such problems. Neither have Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) at the postsecondary education level. Following in this rich tradition, BBAs will provide a safe and nurturing environment for Black students. Pedagogically, BBAs will prepare students not just to survive but to thrive. Students will be prepared to assume positions of leadership in our society whether they go directly into the job market or matriculate at HBCUs or predominantly white institutions. One of the most effective instructional models in the country for leadership-oriented teaching can be found in elite New England Prep Schools. They have been doing this for centuries. Using a modified version of their pedagogy—one self-consciously infused with a racial sensibility—BBAs will be able to extend the pipeline to leadership, normally available to upper-income and even middle-income African American students, to low-income African American students. Indeed, the latter are the most vulnerable descendants of the enslaved.

Algorithm Transparency through the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)

Racial discrimination in housing has long fueled disparities in homeownership and wealth in the United States. Now, automated algorithms play a dominant role in rental and lending decisions. Advocates of these technologies argue that mortgage lending algorithms reduce discrimination. However, “errors in background check reports persist and remain pervasive,” and algorithms are at risk for inheriting prejudices from society and reflect pre-existing patterns of inequality. Additionally, algorithmic discrimination is often challenging to identify and difficult to explain or prosecute in court. While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is responsible for prosecuting this type of discrimination under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), their enforcement regime “has inadequately regulated industry at the federal and state level and failed to provide consumers access to justice at an individual level,” as evidenced by its mere eighty-seven enforcement actions in the past forty years. In comparison, 4,531 lawsuits have been brought under the FCRA by other groups in 2018 alone. Therefore, the FTC must update its policies to ensure it can identify, prosecute, and facilitate third-party lawsuits against a primary driver of housing discrimination in the 21st century: discrimination within algorithmic decision making. We recommend that the FTC issue a rule requiring companies to publish a data plan with all consumer reporting products. Currently, the FTC recommends that companies make an internal assessment of the components of the proposed data plan to ensure that they are not in violation of the FCRA. Therefore, requiring that these plans be published publicly does not place undue burden on companies and empowers consumers to advocate for themselves and report unfair practices to the FTC. Coupled together, these will reduce the costs of investigation and enforcement by the FTC and decrease the discriminatory impact of automated decision systems on marginalized communities.

Racial Discrimination in Housing: How Landlords Use Algorithms and Home Visits to Screen Tenants

An extensive literature documents racial discrimination in housing, focusing on its prevalence and effect on non-White populations. This article studies how such discrimination operates, and the intermediaries who engage in it: landlords. A fundamental assumption of racial discrimination research is that gatekeepers such as landlords are confronted with a racially heterogeneous applicant pool. The reality of urban housing markets, however, is that historical patterns of residential segregation intersect with other structural barriers to drive selection into the applicant pool, such that landlords are more often selecting between same-race applicants. Using interviews and observations with 157 landlords in four cities, we ask: how do landlords construct their tenants’ race within racially segmented housing markets, and how does this factor into their screening processes? We find that landlords distinguish between tenants based on the degree to which their behavior conforms to insidious cultural narratives at the intersection of race, gender, and class. Landlords with large portfolios rely on screening algorithms, whereas mom-and-pop landlords make decisions based on informal mechanisms such as “gut feelings,” home visits, and the presentation of children. Landlords may put aside certain racial prejudices when they have the right financial incentives, but only when the tenant also defies stereotypes. In this way, landlords’ intersectional construction of race—even within a predominantly Black or Latino tenant pool—limits residential options for low-income, subsidized tenants of color, burdening their search process. These findings have implications for how we understand racial discrimination within racially homogenous social spheres. Examining landlords’ screening practices offers insight into the role housing plays in how racism continues to shape life outcomes—both explicitly through overt racial bias, and increasingly more covertly, through algorithmic automation and digital technologies.

Books: White Fragility. Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism Natives. Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire: Learning Following the Toppling of Colston's Statue.

Robin Diangelo Penguin Books, 2018, PB, 168pp, £8.99, 978-0141990569 Akala Two Roads, 2019, PB, 343pp, £8.99, 978-1473661233 On Sunday 7th June 2020 the eyes of the world were on Bristol when the statue of Edward Colston was toppled and pushed into the harbour during protests in support of Black Lives Matter. Although he was a philanthropist, Colston was involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Bristol has a dark history of involvement in the slave trade, which has been an issue for this historic maritime city for many years. The Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 arose from the refusal of the Bristol Omnibus Company to employ black or Asian bus crews in the city. At the time, there was widespread racial discrimination in housing and employment against so-called ‘coloureds’. A boycott of the company’s buses by Bristolians lasted for 4 months until the company backed down and overturned their discriminative colour bar policy. This boycott is considered to have been influential in the passing of the Race Relations Act 1965 …

Protecting the Right to Discriminate: The Second Great Migration and Racial Threat in the American West

Taking advantage of a unique event in American history, the Second Great Migration, we explore whether the rapid entry of African Americans into nearly exclusively White contexts triggered “racial threat” in White voting behavior in the state of California. Utilizing historical administrative data, we find that increasing proximity to previously White areas experiencing drastic Black population growth between 1940 to 1960 is associated with significant increases in aggregate White voter support for a highly racially-charged ballot measure, Proposition 14, which legally protected racial discrimination in housing. Importantly, we find that this result holds when restricting the analysis to all-White areas with high rates of residential tenure and low rates of White population growth. These latter findings indicate that this relationship materializes in contexts where a larger share of White voters were present during the treatment and exercised residential-choice before the treatment commenced, which is suggestive of a causal effect.

The History of Residential Segregation in the United States, Title VIII, and the Homeownership Remedy

AbstractResidential segregation was practiced by federal, state, and local governments as an instrument of racial domination in the United States throughout much of the 20th century. Systematic racial discrimination in housing was unconstitutionally developed and implemented by state and federal agencies. Laws, regulations, and private practices in the real estate industry were used to promote legally enforced residential segregation in the United States. Zoning, redlining, and blockbusting created the division of our urban landscape along the color line: black and white. Residential segregation has had debilitating impacts on African Americans in cities in terms of lost opportunities for economic prosperity and the denial of homeownership and the wealth‐building potential that comes from it. Oakland, California is at the center of this research, where urban renewal and an interstate highway destroyed whole neighborhoods in West Oakland. The Acorn Housing Project was built in the aftermath of the urban renewal program. Title VIII of the Fair Housing Act remains the most promising basis for developing strategies for African Americans to fully engage in American’s legacy of wealth building through homeownership—the American Dream. Historically, that dream was designed only for white America. The task now is to realize it for everyone.

The Anti-Apartheid Principle in American Property Law

Recently, many federal courts have been interpreting civil rights laws to allow racially discriminatory treatment of customers in retail stores and racial and religious harassment of tenants and home owners by their neighbors. These courts are misinterpreting federal law and ignoring the will of Congress embodied in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 which clarified that market participants have the right to enjoy property and contract rights on equal terms. More important, these courts are wrongly assuming a background norm of negative liberty; they presume that we are free to engage in racial discrimination in market transactions unless statutes clearly and unambiguously limit our freedom. But this is a mistake. Since the 1960s, the background norm has become a presumption that market participants are not allowed to treat people unequally because of race, religion, sex, or disability. Both federal and state statutes embody this norm and many statutes contain it explicitly. Even the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was amended in 1991 to provide that private persons are entitled to equal contract terms. We aspire to be a free and democratic society that treats each person with equal concern and respect. We now understand that this commitment not only entails the repudiation of feudalism and slavery but the abolition of apartheid, whether imposed by law or enacted by private persons exercising their property rights. Liberty does not mean the absence of restraint on action; it means the creation of a legal infrastructure of a free and democratic society. Equal access to the marketplace without regard to race is now as fundamental a norm as is the abolition of feudal tenures. For this reason, the common law should be interpreted to include a background assumption that prohibits racial discrimination in housing or public accommodations. Unless statutes affirmatively grant stores the right to treat their customers differently on account of race, courts should presume that they have no such right. Unless statutes affirmatively grant individuals the right to harass their neighbors on account of race or religion, courts should presume that housing rights include the right to be free from such discriminatory harassment. Rand Paul was wrong to suggest that liberty demands freedom to reject customers because of their race; the very opposite is true. American property law now contains a fundamental anti-apartheid principle that ensures access to the marketplace without regard to racial discrimination and the federal courts should start acting on that foundational commitment.

Intent and Empirics: Race to the Subprime

The United States’ history of racially discriminatory banking, housing, and property policies created a community of black Americans accustomed to exploitative financial services and vulnerable to victimization by subprime lenders. My thesis is that black borrowers are experiencing a new iteration of intentional housing discrimination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; lenders identified a vulnerable 'emerging market' of black homeowners and borrowers and knowingly targeted them to receive subprime or predatory loan products when equally situated white borrowers were given superior, prime mortgage products. This Article explores how disparate lending practices coupled with banking deregulation undermined the Congressional push for increased minority homeownership and widened the already burgeoning wealth divide. Millions of borrowers who accepted subprime loans between 1998 and 2006 already have or will lose their homes to foreclosure, resulting in a net loss in homeownership for nearly one million families. Blacks are disproportionately represented among the subprime victims, especially black women. The lending and financial services structure that caused this crisis is complicated by evidence of redlining and of steering blacks into subprime loans, all of which contributed to the present foreclosure crisis. This subprime dilemma merely adds new terminology to a long history of racial discrimination in housing in America. In the end, this Article argues that the search for an understanding of the cumulative events that facilitated the exploitation of blacks by subprime lenders illuminates the institutional and national impediments to reversing the present and future harm of the subprime crisis and to ensuring blacks equal access to one of the benefits of full citizenship - property. First, in Part II, I contend that the disparities in subprime lending experienced by black borrowers and especially by black women result from intentional reverse-redlining and steering by lending institutions, their loan officers, and brokers. Next, in Part III, I consider why blacks and black women are disproportionately victims of subprime mortgages and of predatory lending. Finally, Part IV concludes by discussing the after-effects of subprime and predatory lending and offers possible solutions for rethinking how blacks are to overcome this deeply profound experience with housing discrimination which I suggest made blacks prime subprime victims. It focuses on the property dilemma or rather the dilemma of the landless.

Race, Not Class: Explaining Racial Housing Segregation in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area, 2000

Two techniques, computation of segregation indices within income categories, and indirect standardizations based on income and two measures of housing cost, are used to assess the extent to which residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area in 2000 may be attributed to socioeconomic differences between whites and African Americans. Both techniques indicate that the overwhelming majority of segregation is attributable to race, not class. In all income categories, segregation of blacks from whites is as great or greater than in the overall population. Indirect standardizations show that housing cost measures using estimated value of the house explain away somewhat more segregation than those based on monthly owner cost. However, the former type of measure may itself reflect consequences of racial discrimination in housing and lending. Despite a modest decline in the proportion of segregation attributable to race, the large majority of segregation remains tied to race, not class.

Racial Discrimination in Housing: A Moving Target

L'A. se penche sur le livre de Stanley Lieberson sur la methodologie dans la recherche sociale, pour representer la discrimination raciale dans le parc des logements aux Etats-Unis. Malgre les efforts legislatifs pour eliminer l'inegalite dans l'acces aux logements, les injustices se perpetuent

The Labor Market Effects of the 1960s Riots

Although the united states has experienced race-related civil disturbances throughout its history, those that occurred in the 1960s were unprecedented in frequency and scope. Between 1964 and 1971, hundreds of riots erupted in American cities, resulting in large numbers of injuries, deaths, and arrests, as well as considerable property damage concentrated in predominantly black neighborhoods. Law enforcement authorities took extraordinary measures to end the riots, sometimes including the mobilization of National Guard units. In retrospect, the riots marked a turning point in American racial politics, as the carefully orchestrated demonstrations of the early civil rights movementgave way to violent, chaotic civil disturbances. At the time of their occurrence, the riots prompted congressional investigations into their proximate and underlying causes and into their immediate consequences in the form of looting, property damage, injuries, and deaths.1 Subsequently, a large sociology literature developed that attempted to identify city-level correlates of the occurrence and [End Page 1] severity of riots.2 But there have been comparatively few studies of a systematic, econometric nature that examine the impact of the riots on the relative economic status of African Americans or on the cities and neighborhoods in which the riots took place.3 In this paper we study the impact of the 1960s riots in the context of long-term racial disparities in labor market outcomes. Among full-time male workers, the racial gap in average earnings narrowed up to 1975, with periods of sharp convergence (for example, the 1940s) alternating with periods of relative stasis (for example, the 1950s and early 1960s). Since 1970, racial convergence in earnings has slowed markedly, and a substantial part of the observed convergence has been driven by the selection of low-income black males out of the full-time labor force.4 Over the same period, the proportion of blacks living in "high poverty" urban neighborhoods increased sharply, and black ghettos turned increasingly "bad" in the sense that residential segregation led to increasingly poor socioeconomic outcomes among young blacks.5 The post-1970 rise in concentrated poverty in black central-city neighborhoods has received a great deal of scholarly attention. One prominent view, associated with the work of William Julius Wilson, is that the underlying causes of this adverse trend are essentially macroeconomic in nature.6 Technological change and the relative decline of manufacturing employment may have reduced relatively high-wage job openings for urban, unskilled workers. The geographic concentration of poverty was then reinforced by the movement of relatively well-off blacks from central-city neighborhoods to suburbs and the proliferation of single-parent [End Page 2] households. Another prominent view, associated primarily with the work of Massey and Denton, emphasizes that preexisting residential segregation and ongoing racial discrimination in housing allowed for the potent endogenous magnification of adverse economic shocks. Feedback among macroeconomic forces, residential segregation, and social norms may have pushed entire neighborhoods into a downward socioeconomic spiral.7 The hypothesis we are pursuing is that the riots may be examples of such negative shocks. Like any shock, some of a riot's impact will be felt directly—in this case, by individuals who were immediately affected by the event. To some extent, these effects may be offset by private sector responses (for example, insurance payments) or changes in government policies (subsidies or loans to riot-afflicted businesses or infrastructure investment in riot areas). But other, and potentially much larger, effects may be indirect. A riot might alter the course of a city's economy by influencing the economic decisions of individuals who were not directly affected by the event. In essence, the hypothesis under investigation has two parts: that a riot's effect on African Americans' labor market outcomes was, on net, negative; and that the magnitude of the local effect increased with the severity of the local riot. We present two complementary...

Measuring Discrimination in Education: Are Methodologies from Labor and Markets Useful?

This paper reviews the methodologies most frequently used by social scientists when measuring discrimination in housing and labor markets and assesses their potential usefulness for analyzing discrimination in education. We begin by briefly reviewing what economists typically mean by racial discrimination in housing and labor markets and note that the standard definition is somewhat more complicated in the case of education. We then review four methodologies—standard statistical methods (e.g., multiple regression), methods using more complete data (e.g., productivity vs. wages or applications for jobs/housing vs. acceptances), experimental/audit methods, and natural experiments based on actual policy changes. The strengths and weaknesses of the four methods when used on housing and labor markets are assessed. We then consider the extent to which each of the methods can be applied to education and the potential usefulness and limitations of trying to do so. We conclude that each of the four methods has some potential uses in analyzing discrimination in education.

Measuring Discrimination in Education: Are Methodologies from Labor and Markets Useful?

This paper reviews the methodologies most frequently used by social scientists when measuring discrimination in housing and labor markets and assesses their potential usefulness for analyzing discrimination in education. We begin by briefly reviewing what economists typically mean by racial discrimination in housing and labor markets and note that the standard definition is somewhat more complicated in the case of education. We then review four methodologies—standard statistical methods (e.g., multiple regression), methods using more complete data (e.g., productivity vs. wages or applications for jobs/housing vs. acceptances), experimental/audit methods, and natural experiments based on actual policy changes. The strengths and weaknesses of the four methods when used on housing and labor markets are assessed. We then consider the extent to which each of the methods can be applied to education and the potential usefulness and limitations of trying to do so. We conclude that each of the four methods has some potential uses in analyzing discrimination in education.

Use of Black English and Racial Discrimination in Urban Housing Markets

The authors argue that racial discrimination in housing markets need not involve personal contact between agents and renters. Research indicates that Americans can infer race from speech patterns alone, thus offering rental agents an opportunity to discriminate over the phone. To test this hypothesis, the authors designed an audit study to compare male and female speakers of White Middle-Class English, Black Accented English, and Black English Vernacular. The study was conducted during the spring of 1999 in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The authors found significant racial discrimination that was often exacerbated by class and gender. Poor black women, in particular, experienced the greatest discrimination.

Images of Race, Class, and Markets: Rethinking the Origin of U.S. Fair Housing Policy

As the first national law to address racial discrimination in housing, the 1968 Fair Housing Act was truly a landmark piece of legislation. It prohibited homeowners, real-estate agents, lenders, and other housing professionals from engaging in a range of practices they had commonly used to keep neighborhoods racially segregated, such as refusing to sell or rent to a person because of his or her race, lying about the availability of a dwelling, or blockbusting (inducing white owners to sell by telling them that blacks were moving into the neighborhood). The last of the 1960s-era civil rights laws, the Fair Housing Act tackled the arena long felt to be the most sensitive to whites. Intense controversy, demonstrations, and violence over fair housing issues had occurred in many cities and states since at least the 1940s. Although John F. Kennedy promised during his presidential campaign to end housing discrimination “with the stroke of a pen,” once elected, he waited two years to sign a limited executive order. In 1966, a fair housing bill supported by President Johnson failed in Congress. Unlike other civil rights bills, the issue of housing evoked opposition not just from the South but also from the North. Opponents claimed that it challenged basic American values such as “a man's home is his castle”; to supporters, the symbolism of homeownership as “the American Dream” only underscored the importance of ensuring that housing was available to all Americans, regardless of race.

Housing Discrimination and Residential Mobility: Impacts for Blacks and Whites

We merge metropolitan-level measures of racial discrimination in housing markets derived from two national housing audit studies, along with tract-level 1980 census data, with the 1979-1985 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the impact of housing discrimination on patterns of residential mobility between neighborhoods of varying racial composition. We find no evidence that housing discrimination in the metropolitan area impedes African Americans' mobility into whiter neighborhoods. Contrary to expectations, in multivariate analyses based on black movers, the level of housing discrimination is positively associated with the percentage of the population that is white in the tract of destination. Housing discrimination against African Americans is positively associated with the rate at which mobile white households move into whiter census tracts. These findings imply that eliminating racial discrimination by real estate and rental agents will fail to increase black residential mobility into racially-mixed and predominantly white neighborhoods. For both black and white households, life-cycle factors, such as age, children, and home ownership, impede mobility out of the current neighborhood. Conditional upon moving, socioeconomic resources, such as education and income, facilitate mobility into whiter neighborhoods.

The role of ‘race’ in the likelihood of city participation in the United States public and section 8 existing housing programmes

Research on US housing and politics provides evidence for persistent racial discrimination, dual housing markets (one for whites and one for blacks in particular) and racial segregation. Research also shows the relationship between government subsidised low‐income housing programmes and continued segregation. This work focuses on an additional aspect of racial discrimination in housing: local officials, capitulating to the housing industry, consider the possible effect government subsidised housing will have on racially segmented markets before entering some programmes. This paper explores the relationship between the size of the black population, as one indicator of the racial composition of a city, and the likelihood of city participation in public housing and Section 8 Existing housing. The quantitative analyses of US cities shows a negative relationship between the size of the black population and the likelihood of city participation in Section 8 Existing housing, a programme that provides participants the possibility of crossing segmented market boundaries. The results also suggest that the relationship between race and public housing is different than that between race and Section 8 Existing housing. Public housing does not necessarily provide participants the opportunity to cross boundaries. Rather it concentrates people, giving local officials more control over the location of poor racial minorities. Finally, the paper argues that the negative relationship between the size of the black population and the likelihood of city participation constitutes yet another form of racial discrimination in housing.

Commutes, Neighborhood Effects, and Earnings: An Analysis of Racial Discrimination and Compensating Differentials

Recent “tester” studies indicate that minority workers face restricted residential and employment opportunities because of racial discrimination in housing and labor markets. These restrictions may create a spatial mismatch between where urban minorities reside and where metropolitan area jobs are located, resulting in reduced proximity of minority workers to jobs. Prior studies of racial discrimination and urban spatial mismatch, however, have paid little attention to the possibility that differences in employment commutes may be partially offset by compensating variations in neighborhood amenities, quality-adjusted house prices, and earnings. Such effects could help to mitigate the impact of discrimination on minority workers.Using a unique subset of the 1985 and 1989 American Housing Surveys, we estimate a fixed effects commute time model that controls for quality-adjusted house prices, neighborhood amenities, and earnings. Results indicate that although blacks have longer commutes than comparably skilled white and Asian workers, roughly one-third of the estimated difference is offset by neighborhood amenity and housing price differentials. However, even after controlling for neighborhood fixed effects and earnings, educated black workers have significantly longer commutes than comparably skilled Asian and white workers. Additional findings indicate that regardless of race, household mobility is an important mechanism through which the market attains a spatial equilibrium, providing further support for arguments that restricted proximity to residential opportunities and jobs reduces the economic welfare of minority households.

The Ecology of Racial Discrimination in Housing

This research investigates the spatial variation in racial housing market discrimination. Using 1980 data for Cuyahoga County (Cleveland, Ohio), regression analysis indicates that compared to integrated or majority-black tracts with stable 1970-1980 racial compositions, all-white tracts, and especially transitional tracts evidencing large gains in proportion of black residents, have higher discrimination rates, ceteris paribus. These findings support the hypotheses that housing agents discriminate when they fear losing business from their prejudiced white customers and when they can exploit an unstable situation characterized by relatively high white/black housing demand elasticity ratios.

Racial and Ethnic Competition.

Most studies of racial and ethnic relations discuss the position in a single country. Professor Banton's book is notable for its internationalism. It formulates principles that govern the development of relations between racial and ethnic groups everywhere, drawing upon case studies from across the globe. The arguments which organize this mass of evidence are taken from a rational choice theory of behaviour, combining elements from modern economics with older sociological interpretations. According to this theory, much turns on whether people, as they seek their economic and social goals, choose to compete as groups or individuals, for group competition reinforces any boundaries that are marked by physical difference, whereas individual competition dissolves them. Many of the concepts that have been used in racial and ethnic studies reflect the values of the more articulate groups in given societies at particular times. As the concepts of economics are less tied to varying cultures and circumstances, they can inform comparative history of racial relations in South Africa, the United States and Britain (as seen in three substantial chapters). They can also be used (as later chapters show) to illuminate the dynamics of racial discrimination in housing and employment markets, fitting the theory to the complexity of every-day transactions and bringing sociology into relation with social policy.