Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Most of what we know about people’s acceptance or rejection of racial integration comes from vignette studies that take place in a lab. These studies consistently find blacks to be strong proponents of integration and whites to be advocates of segregation. One paper found that most black participants reported their ideal neighborhood to be half black and half white, while most white participants said they would move from such a neighborhood. If you step out of the lab and watch families search for housing in real time, you see something different and more unsettling. White movers have strong aversions to living in black neighborhoods—but so do black movers. I never once heard a black renter voice a desire to move into an “integrated neighborhood,” although they would be contributing to racial integration simply by moving from a majority-black neighborhood. Instead, I heard them speak of a desire to “get away from these black motherfuckers,” as Crystal did. When Arleen was house hunting outside the inner city, she once said, “The only people I have a problem with is people my own color.” Natasha once said, “Black people don’t know how to act….If I had a choice, I would move out there [to the suburbs] too! Ain’t nobody want to stay out here, and you hear gunshots all the time.” In these sentiments you don’t find a (positive) desire for integration but a (negative) repulsion directed at majority-black communities. For vignette studies about racial preferences, see Reynolds Fa...