Urban Injustices

Although city dwellers share a commonality in urbanism as a way of life, the lived experiences of urban residents are often significantly different. For many cities, and especially for American cities, the tale of two cities is actually the story of one - the two different realities above exist within the same greater space. These different realities can play out in the lives of folks who live merely blocks away, even on the same street. Main transportation corridors and landmarks, like 8 Mile in Detroit and Troost in Kansas City, can serve as barriers that demarcate affluence from poverty. And far too often, these disparities in lived experience fall along racial lines.

At Macalester, I learned more about historic racist practices like redlining and white flight that continue to leave their legacies on American cities. Often times, these stark differences exist in such close proximity today because of arbitrary borders that a government employee had drawn back in the 1930s. Racist processes and segregation that played out in the 20th century led academics like Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton to declare cities in the United States an "American Apartheid" and coin terms like "hypersegregation" (1993). The effects of this separateness pervade through nearly every facet of our lives from education to housing to the workplace, and each of these are interconnected.

It is processes like redlining and white flight that many scholars of Critical Race Theory (CRT) advocate should be taught in school, and debates surrounding CRT are igniting with the increasing politicization of education. CRT also emphasizes the importance of integration, as segregation continues to incur deep social costs for all races (Omi & Winant, 2015).

However, "solving" segregation is not easy, and still today, government institutions are just acknowledging the harm they have done to further it. It took until 2015 for the Minnesota Department of Transportation to apologize to residents of the Rondo neighborhood for routing I-94 through the heart of their community and destroying and displacing it. But there remains much work to be done beyond apologizing. However, toward the goal of integration, many people do not want to part from their communities, and there are several benefits to clustering for minority populations in segregated areas. Focusing on integration as a universal ideal is thus often flawed (Young, 2002). Emphasizing the necessity to resolve these issues remains incredibly important regardless, and one solution would be reparations for Black Americans and/or the descendants of slaves (Coates, 2014). However, the issues of segregation and inequality are so entrenched in our spaces and society that the wheels have only barely started moving for reparations.