To temper premature talk of a post-race America, just look down your street.

Not In My Neighborhood
By Lawrence Bobo

Barack Obama’s success, as Congressman John Lewis put it recently, is another step on the long road toward laying down the “burden of race.” But the growing use of the phrase “post-racial America” should worry us all.

Consider the results of one major social science study, published in Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, which yielded some troubling results about segregation of neighborhoods in America. Researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago and the University of Michigan surveyed a large representative sample of households in Chicago and Detroit. As part of this highly innovative study, every participant was handed a laptop and was asked to view a series of video clips showing different neighborhoods. The set of neighborhoods remained constant. But the video was altered to manipulate their make up, to show either whites populating the neighborhood, or blacks or a mixed-race population.

According to UIC Professor of Sociology Maria Krysan, what the study sought to determine was “whether whites are colorblind in their evaluations of neighborhoods or whether racial composition still matters—even when holding constant the quality of the neighborhood.” The results clearly show that whites rated the neighborhood much more favorably when whites dominated the make-up. And the more negative the stereotypes a white individual held of African Americans generally, the more likely they were to negatively rate the identical neighborhood with a visible black presence.

This research combines new, high-quality data with grounded, real world problems and real world research techniques. While we would all like to believe that cues on social class now drive Americans more than those on race, it simply isn’t true. As sociologist Krysan explained: “These findings demonstrate that ‘objective’ characteristics such as housing [quality] are not sufficient for whites to overcome the stereotypes they have about communities with African-American residents.” Sadly, it was the race cues that mattered, not the class cues.

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