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MR. SECRETARY, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL

Can and Should the Federal Government Use Affirmative Action to Promote Residential Integration?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2011

Florent de Bodman  and
Pamela R. Bennett
Florent de Bodman
Affiliation:
École Nationale d'Administration
Pamela R. Bennett*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
*
Pamela R. Bennett, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218. E-mail: pbennett@jhu.edu
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Abstract

Racial segregation has been a persistent feature of the American social landscape and a longstanding contributor to racial inequality, particularly between Blacks and Whites. Affirmative action policies have been used to address the systemic discrimination and attendant socioeconomic consequences to which African Americans have been subjected. Yet affirmative action has not been widely used in all domains in which segregation and systemic discrimination occurred. Although such policies have been adopted in the domains of employment and postsecondary education, few federal affirmative action programs have been used in housing. This is surprising given high levels of segregation across the metropolitan United States, as well as the stated integrative objectives of the U.S. Congress when it passed the Fair Housing Act of1968. To understand this puzzle, we use the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, a housing mobility effort of the Federal government and the Chicago Housing Authority that used explicit racial criteria, as a surrogate for affirmative action in housing more broadly. We conduct a comparative analysis of Gautreaux and affirmative action in college admissions using insights from applied political philosophy and sociology. By confronting Gautreaux with a more traditional affirmative action program, we are able to identify and compare the judicial, moral, and instrumental justifications for each, enabling us to draw conclusions about whether and how affirmative action can justifiably be used on a large scale to reduce neighborhood segregation, the possible forms it could take, and the difficulties it would face. We close with a discussion of the recent shift toward integration taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration, its relationship to affirmative action, and its implications for declines in residential segregation in the United States.

Keywords

Racial Residential SegregationAffirmative ActionGautreauxHousing MobilityRestorative Justice
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Fall 2011 , pp. 441 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2011

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