welcome to this lecture on Webb boys the color line and urban sociology in this lecture I would like to introduce the American classical sociologist web Duo um introduce his Concepts um the color line among which and and then uh introduce the subfield of Sociology which is ur sociology uh drawing on the mandatory reading for today Massi and Denton's book on American aparte um with um the topic of racial segregation figuring Central stage so um web Bo wrote um more than 100 years ago and one of his main topics U was the color line in the United States a topic which European classical sociologists largely ignored um Max vber and Duo were in an active um correspondence they also met in St Louis when Max vber visited the United States and B boce was much of a source to Max vber to inform him about um the problem of race in the United States something that Bieber only knew about um secondhand um the bo wrote then about the problem problems of racial inequalities which up to the current date um characterize um the United States society and I wanted to show you this along three different dimensions first of all there's obviously the economic dimension of racial inequality on the left hand panel here you see um um wealth inequality um around the last 150 years and on the Y on on the y axis you see the factor by which um total household wealth of white households exceed um black households household growth um you see this for the abolition of slavery that was in there was an enormous wealth Gap with white households uh owning uh almost as much as 60 times as much as black households um this then strongly declined um up to about the 19 uh 20s but you also see that ever since the decline has been rather um stagnating such that um in the recent decades um the factor by which white households wealth exceeds black households wealth um hovered around six to eight um so still a large uh basically wealth Gap um racial wealth gap on the right hand side of this panel you also see one of the primary drivers of this wealth capap which is housing so for most uh in particularly lower and middle uh income uh class households um housing makes up the major item in households wealth portfolio um and you also see that um obviously tenants do not mostly do do not own any kind of housing wealth homeowners do but the home ownership rate between africanamerican and white households in the United States um has in PR consistently different So at around 1870 here you see that the white households um exceeded black households home ownership rates by around 49 percentage points this was reduced then um to around 26 percentage points at the beginning of the 20th century but you'll also see that despite common increases particularly in the postwar periods with the suburbanization mortgage extension in the United States the home ownership gap between white and black households um did not um um decrease significantly anymore so um when this article here um uh closes in 2007 there was still a home ownership gap of 23 percentage points um and ever since with the foreclosures and the subprime crisis um uh in 2008 this has even been increasing if um this first dimension of racial inequalities interest you further check out this YouTube tutorial uh video of um a recently published economics paper which details with very interesting data the different drivers of um uh in a way household wealth along the color line uh since 1949 a second dimension along which black and white households still differ um are the mortality and life expectancy rates so here you see a depiction of the deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the United States by gender and race over the last 100 years and you see a common Trend which is the decline in mortality rates this is due to the hygiene and the health Revolution uh the decrease in particular of infant mortality rates but you also see that the the ranking by agenda and race here was relatively stable over time and that there has been a persistent um race uh Gap in mortality rates uh between in particular here the White and the black males with black males in the United States still showing significantly higher mortality um rates per population than um their white counterparts this also translates into uh life expectancy at Birth which you see on the left hand side here of the panel which I drew from The Economist um the number of years that a newly born um at the respective date here um was expected to live um then differed systematically between the White and the black population in the United States even though there has been a certain catchup process um there's still a significant difference um um in the most recent years between these two kinds of population so the third dimension along which um white and black population in the United States differs uh is education um here on the right hand side you see the share of the over 25 year old with a bachelor's degree in the United States uh and you see that um the uh white population here again holds uh significantly more uh bachelor's degrees than either Hispanic or black population um despite a common increase again but there's also no sign um in recent years of um the black population to catch up so these are just three three Di Dimensions um of racial inequalities in the United States which um have been with web Deo at the time of his writings uh more than a 100 years ago and which are still with us today and that's also a dimension so dimension of the the color line of racial differences which um are a clear blind spot also in European uh classical sociology uh which is why we introduced this in this lecture so William Edward burat or simply we The Voice um was born around the time of bers um in 1868 uh clearly outlived Max vber was a contemporary of his uh still um and he was the son of fre slaves in the north um um uh of the United States with also I think a grandfather from which is why we see this French sounding name and um so Webby boys lived in a lower or middle class kind of family was able to attend F college and then Harvard University um and majored in in history he also had an exchange here at the German University where um he studied with the historian Gustav scha from the German historical school who was also one of Max viber's acquaintances and teachers uh in the United States he also was in touch with William James who is known of as one of the founders of American pragmatism American sociologists at the time uh frequently uh studied at least a year in Germany because German universities were seen a bit as um the model to follow in the United States something which changed um after the first uh and second world war in particular when it was rather German sociologist uh visiting the states in order to keep up with Professional Knowledge um but um yeah at the time this was still the other way around and um web Bo also then majored not only in uh history also wrote disertation um on a historical topic and mainly look at how the US supported uh and also benefited actually from slave trade even after its formal abolition 1808 um his first writings then are very much uh in empirical sociology with uh his treaties uh on the Philadelphia negro in quotation marks so at the time of writing it was still common to to use this uh this term um also in book titles uh even though we wouldn't user today and this treaties uh basically on racial segregation in the seventh W of Philadelphia introduced very much um Urban sociology and founded what may be called the Atlanta school of Sociology um at a black college then in Atlanta where wey boys um had a couple of PhD students who um worked on similar topics and did not not only do scholarly work but also engaged um in uh reform activities um reform activities then um became more and more the center of activity of the boys um who joined the National Association for the advancement of color people in 1909 in the 1900s he also wrote what is probably his major publication The Souls of Black Folk and of 1903 um and gradually moved from actually being an academic into being more of um let's say a public intellectual a reformer and also newspaper editor of the crisis uh he considered himself to be part of what he once referred to as The Talented tenth um so something like the Black Elite to promote africanamerican civil and political rights which um is very much the counter program to um Duo's main adversary at the time bererti Washington who in his rather conservative Atlanta Compromise mainly suggested an economic integration of the black population in the United States through industrial education kind of strategy um and accepting basically the uh civil and political inequalities of the time so Washington was very much then cherished by the white establishment obviously and Deo was something um like the young Challenger at the time who eventually probably um also was more successful um throughout the 20th century then the boy activities shifted once again to something like a panafrican movement also interested in colonialism he had a a real interest also in in socialism um and engaged also in this long-term plan of encyclopedia which saw it stays then as the encyclopedia Africana eventually um over the 20th century he was yeah real International public figure met with uh all kinds of um politicians presidents of the world and was very much in the International Peace movement and Anti-Imperialist movement um towards the end of his life then hunted by the FBI thought Exile in in Ghana where he also inspired the movement for Independence and he left us with more than 20 20 books also several novels among which also an autobiographies um here's a class like a standard biography also cited in the photo here in case this interests you further so um the boys basically put the what he calls the the race problem center stage of his sociology in general and I wanted to introduce just some of his key key Notions uh before moving on to uh one of his legacies namely Urban sociology so one key term that describes let's say the state of African-Americans um is the notion of double Consciousness and I quote here from his uh his book Soul's book um quote it is a peculiar sensation this double Consciousness the sense of always looking at oneself Through The Eyes of others of measuring one's Soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity one feels this tuness an American and negro two souls to thoughts to unreconciled strivings to wearing ideals in one dark body whose dark strength alone keeps it from being torn aunder the history of the American Negro is the history of this strive this longing to attain self-conscious manhood to merge his double self into a better and truer self in this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost unquote so the double Consciousness then describes in a way a psychological dualism uh or in sociological terms also just the RO conflict that African Americans have been faced with that the boy also himself experienced um and it basically describes that in like even everyday kind of moments African-Americans are always reminded to not just be citizens of the country but um to basically uh been treated um as a kind of second second class citizen um so for wey boys himself um this was particularly noticeable as see he also saw a certain alienation of the Black Elite to which he rained himself from then the broader black population um so one of the legacies of um Duo's writing is um to basically attack biological definitions of race and I quote again here um from his 1890s writings quot what then is race it is a vast family of human beings generally of common blood and language always of common history traditions and impulses were both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of Life unquote so the definition um of race by repy Bo encompasses um let's say many sociological features such as the common history tradition common common language and is opposed to let's say the more common biological definitions of race that even uh the British sociologists and that web Theo was familiar with um Herbert Spencer in particular defended so these sociologist were motivated by an evolutionary theory of society and of races and um web Bo very much criticizes um this um evolutionary notion of race and opposes it with the idea that graes are socially uh constructed such that um basically every every society uh determines through socialization processes say yeah through institutions um the kind of racial definition that it eventually follows um in his uh very concrete um work uh then um the bo uh looked at um the problem of urban uh poverty and of racial segregation through the lens of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward where he um spent one and a half himself interviewing more than a thousand people getting census material and initiating in a way the urban sociology that is still with us nowadays you just see here one of the many illustrations um that he already uses in his work here of that is the uh 18th and 17th uh then streets of the seventh w at the time um already using in a way the color uh C of mapping color mapping that Urban sociologists still use the day and use today and um describing the early patterns of racial segregation at the time so um Urban sociology is basically also what then in the official record of American sociological history then figures as the starting point of the Chicago school Chicago school then was yeah basically a white sociology uh founded um in the 1910s having roughly two generations of um sociologists uh who um studied basically Chicago as the laboratory of social change at the time um the most important uh writing founding this Chicago school is probably uh parks and burges um um uh basically article on the city um which um established at the time um one pattern of urban segregation and growth taking again Chicago which you see depicted here in the right hand side as um the model um so you see that um um this model of City growth describes um how the city was segregated ated um in different layers around the center which is the loop in this case um where basically you had um yeah something like the um what is also called the ghetto um and slum areas in the first layer around the circle you have the sort of um second Zone here at the dirt Zone with working class homes um also with German immigrants uh and um the fourth layer here with the residential zones and single family dwellings um so concentric City growth is one of the sort of standard assumptions of this model um which um is basically using um yeah an adaptation of biological um processes in order to describe the city this is also called Urban Ecology the idea being that um just citizens in the city compete for for space and they order space according to different a moral principle and instead of a natural order emerging um the city constructs in a way a social uh spatial order with segregation um of different yeah ethnic and also class groups um The Chicago School is also known for many monographies that have been published on different phenomena um of mainly the 192s and then 30s um all have sort of an urban sociology Focus here are just a couple of the like main titles the Gold Coast and the slum very important one the middlet town stud also by um basically the lind a couple of sociologists who wrote basically about middl toown um that is um a city in Indiana which they studied in 1929 just at the start of the Great Depression uh then and they Revisited the city in 1937 to um basically offer um a comparison of these two snapshots one of the main findings was that everyday life in um um the so-called middl Town hadn't really changed um so much despite um the upheavals of the Great Depression um so uh The Chicago School almost uh 20 30 years after repy boy's writings um then officially institutionalized Urban sociology uh in the heart also of Sociology um and um inspired um up to the current day studies on Urban segregation um the classical book in this context is probably American aparte by Massi and Danton which you read for today um which traces in a way um racial segregation in the United States um since the late 19th century to the current day and as a title already suggests um even though the United States are not as very much Extreme as the South African society where the term aparte comes from it is um and we will see this also later on probably one of the most segregated society that there is and so segregation um and let's say theorization of American cities um have been observed in many classical Works actually on the problem of race and um that is the case for the American dilemma that was published by the Swedish Economist gunar murdell in 1944 uh giving in a way an external view on the problem uh of race also in the work dark ghetto of 1965 and again by the ker commission report which was published in reaction to the urban riots of the 1960s and led to um yeah one of the pieces of legislation which was meant to counteract um racial segregation in your city so in all of these um uh writings um the uh gation and segregation have been prominent but according to Massi Danton um this somehow got a bit lost with the uh housing loss of the Johnson Administration um the problem of persistent Ur Urban poverty particularly among the africanamerican population um has uh traditionally received these four different kind of explanations which Messi and Danton mention but um which all have also their problems and the main problem is that they ignore um actually segregation as one of the main causes also of this persistent Urban poverty so a cultural uh explanation is that this let's say culture of poverty um that makes poverty persistent so once people are unemployed once families are disrupted or once childhood is Disturbed then in a way poverty becomes um a transgenerational kind of phenomenon a problem of this kind of culture of poverty explanation is obviously that it ignores a bit where the culture originally comes from and um most likely it is about structural causes that produce um this kind of poverty which is why say structural explanations about economic changes um might be more relevant one key uh structural transformation um that took place in American cities at the time um was um the creation of the the rust bells that is the large scale deindustrialization um of American cities um in the North Western sorry the northeastern regions in the United States uh which left many of the black population then um unemployed um in the cities they had migrated to in The Great Migration um so structural economic explanations are probably one uh important part but we will see also in a second that um the ghettoization um or let's say the large scale segregation of American cities preceded already um the uh wave of the industrialization of the 1970s um a Third Kind of explanation um is just racism individual racism or institutional racism um by the Black by the white population against the black population which acts through school schooling laws or housing and housing policies and um yeah we will see also in a second that this is um very much um an explanation that um we see as a driver of residential segregation um a final uh kind of explanation that Menton site here um is the one on welfare disincentives so um this is a let's say particularly conservative explanation of why there is a persistent Urban poverty uh and that is um that the welfare state Pro like incentivizes sometimes the wrong uh kind of choices in families so um one example ex Le asent GIF here is that um the welfare state supports um uh just uh families without fathers for instance um supporting these families with welfare and um hence incentivizing the formation of these families one very obvious problem with this kind of welfare um this incentive explanation is that much of the urban poverty that mident described already existed long time long time before um these welfare policies even were put into place so even before the the start of Social Security of the 1930s um the urban uh ghetto was already a phenomenon in the United States which is why Messi and Danton think that many of these explanations just share um at least the common problem that they ignore uh residential segregation as a cause filter or also amplifier of of U uh africanamerican poverty in cities so here's a brief um history of racial segregation along their their lines so they describe in their book how um um segregation um around 1890 when they gathered their first um also data on segregation cities was relatively low before the Great Migration uh that is before um African amans um not only urbanized that is they moved from let's say Southern uh sort of uh sharecropping farmer arrangements to often Northern um industrial kinds of Employments um um and at the time um the segregation levels in cities so very small part of the population African-American population was even living in cities but their segregation levels were actually similar to those of Irish or German immigrant groups at the time uh who were also known to um cluster at least in in in certain cities um segregation and this holds actually over the entire time period up to the current day was um lower in the South one of the reasons is also just the building uh Arrangement uh uh or sort of urbanistic kind of arrangement um that is um there were grid patterns with so-called white Avenues and black alleys which LEDs to a relatively segregated Arrangement but um on a neighborhood level still relatively mixed in the South there was also an all lead whereas um at this time before the great migration in the north also um yeah with families like the one uh of web Bo um there was at least a participation also of um the Black Elite in um uh common in public life in universities Etc so then with a Great Migration uh starting around 1910 also with the demand for um War uh time employment in the industrial North then begins also um segregation to rise in the city one um mechanisms to which this happened was also racial violence in Northern cities and even bombings of black homes which basically kept um black households out of white neighborhoods and forc them to move into largely black neighborhoods so yeah segregation was not not necessarily here a question of choice but it was really a question of violence then yeah um on top of um let's say this individualized kind of violence came then institutions that institutionalized racism most importantly than historically before the federal uh institutions came in place so local institutions such as neighborhood associations um or real estate boards who um made sure that um let's say neighborhoods um could pass certain so-called restrictive covenants which basically just stated anyone who wants to move in the neighborhood has to be um white um as plainly as that or um these Covenants adment also certain building sizes um let's say number of bathrooms um certain plot sizes which made it economically uh almost impossible for blacks to move in so um the these kind of associations were also supported then by real estate agents and their boards who also made sure that real estate agents just wouldn't um uh sell houses in white neighborhoods to potentially black buyers um these restrictive covenants were outlawed in a Supreme Court decision in 1948 um but we will see also in a second that and they have been replaced in different kinds of let's say more indirect ways of institutional racism um at the time also cities themselves used ordinance in order to um maintain segregated patterns of residences and all of this led to basically segregation uh of Education housing and also the labor market at the time um through the additional migration during the Great Depression Depression and World War II into the northern cities where housing shortages were dominant uh segregation levels uh even increased much further since the 1940s sociologists can also use opinion PS which um also demonstrated a very strong um individualized racism so most um basically white respondents then answered that they wouldn't want to live in in a black neighborhood or that they wouldn't want black neighbors so a combination of also individualized and institutional racism institutional racism then was entrenched in the um housing institutions which were put in place during the Great Depression and which very much governed um The suburbanization Wave um in the postwar period up until the 1970s um the two Central institutions with discrimin discriminatory mortgage lending practices were the homeowners loan corporation Hulk and the federal Housing Association Administration um FHA um the Hulk was in a way a bad bank that um bought um mortgages that were under water in the Great Depression um and um handed out new mortgages to these homeowners under water um but um only to those homeowners um who were resident in non-risky zones and um the hall then created in a way risk maps of American cities by four different categories of risk um and would give out mortgages only in the less riskier kind of zones um and as it happened then a critical Criterion for determining riskiness was also the shap of africanamerican population so red lining um refers in way to the red color that was attributed to the most risky zones on these risk maps of mortgage lending by The Hulk and um incidentally then these um uh reddish zones were those were um predominantly African-Americans lived um the Hulk was um basically just a bad bank institution but the the red lining practices were also taken over by and then the federal housing Administration who insured and gave out mortgages in the post war period on a much larger scale including also the Veterans Administration that gave out mortgages to Veterans um but also the private Banks uh followed um this original zoning racialized zoning in a way of um of the hul um and thus entrenched um institutional racism through the mortgage market so in brief African-Americans who wanted to access um uh basically mortgages were uh discriminated against on the grounds of them buying in Risky zones where they wanted to live um one uh last reinforcing mechanism um through which federal institutions entrenched this um segregated patterns was also public housing construction and urban Redevelopment so what happened is that Federal money was often used to um get rid of mostly africanamerican neighborhoods um with a resettlement of the population in rather peripheral uh zones um in public housing projects which were largely underfinanced and led also to um bad housing conditions but also reinforced existing segregation patterns um they also helped to just create this um postwar division of American cities into the white suburbs um and the black inner city Parts which we already saw a bit emerging in the map uh from the ch school so um why is this at all relevant I mean segregated cities is this good or bad um Massie and Danton in their book in the later chapters then show that segregation actually adversely impacts individuals um through a mechanism which nowadays sociologists call context effects so context effects are effects so that describe what a neighborhood does to individual independently of um the individual's uh sort of characteristics or other individuals characteristics so um if you place the very same person at random in um a good versus a bad neighborhood then the neighborhoods determine the outcomes of this individual just by themselves um so in the case of the bad neighborhood then the lower the individuals life chances in particular in the Spheres of Education labor markets and housing and through these context effects then if you grow up in a bad neighborhood you're disadvantaged from the start which is why segregation is a problematic um sort of Affair so um to sum up um mass and Danton then describe that the height of um their study on segregation um quote oneir of all Americans in the United States then live under conditions of intense racial segregation they're unambiguously among the nation's most spatially isolated and geographically secluded people suffering extreme segregation across multiple Dimensions simultaneously black Americans in these metropolitan areas live with en large contiguous settlements of densely inhabitated neighborhoods that are packed tightly around the urban Cor or in plain terms they live in ghettos unquote um okay so to arrive at this statement and this um broad Narrative of American segregation Massi and Danton are also known for um having made use of um the let's say classical repertoire of urban sociology um which is measuring segregation and I wanted to briefly introduce the key measures that the two authors uh use also in their study which is on the one hand the the similarity index um also called segregation index um or the case that there is just one minority and a majority in the neighborhood in the city and the exposure index um there which is um basically the inverse of the isolation index which the authors use a lot so these two indices um measure um the different different dimensions um in of segregation of um unequal sort of distribution of individuals across Urban space um which this little graphic here on the right hand side helps to explain so um each of these Arrangements here depicts a city um say um and um the dots then describe individual s who are regrouped in the city um they are um of a minority in this case a minority is black points and majority of your white points um the dimension of evenness then describes um basically um so that is measured by the dissimilarity index describes um how unevenly or evenly um the minority group is distributed across Urban space um the similar so both of these indices range from zero to 100 and um the index um or uneven or the even as um then is lowest um namely zero when all of the minority members um are equally represented in all of the different neighborhoods in a city so this is roughly the case here on um the upper left hand side where you see um that uh in all of these neighborhoods so think about little neighborhood circles uh around these dots then you have an equal share of uh uh black points in relation to White points the the similarity index uh would be most uneven um when you basically have all of the minority population gathered in one neighborhood only so basically the situation of a ghetto in these cases the dissimilarity index reaches a number of more than 50% perhaps even 80 or maximum 100% if the dissimilarity index is 80% uh then you can also interpret this index as saying that 80% of the minority population has to move to other neighborhoods in order to make the distribution across neighborhoods equal again yeah um so this would state of uneven distribution would be uh breed here on the lower left hand side where you see a clustering of the black points here in uh predominantly three kind of neighborhoods so this would yield a higher dissimilarity index okay so the dissimilarity index measures the evenness or non- evenness of the population um by minority majority groups um over uh ger Urban space um the exposure or isolation index in turn um describes a different dimension of segregation which is how exposed are you to um members of um your minority group or the majority group so the um exposure index is very high when you have um basically a lot of exposure to members of the other group and it is very low when you have um uh only exposure to uh members of your own group um so in a way um in terms of measurement the exposure index uh looks at how um the average in this case minority member yeah um is sort of exposed yeah times um the um um majority members uh uh of every neighborhood or How likely is it that the average minority member encounters a majority member in a specific neighborhood yeah so where where the similarity index measures in a way um the deviation of the distribution of the minority from the ideal equal distribution the exposure index sort of measures uh yeah a much more sort of everyday kind of interaction uh Dimension that is How likely are you to meet someone from the other group in your in your neighborhood one crucial um feature of the exposure index is also that it depends on the size of the minority and majority um the larger the the minority is the more likely you are also to encounter someone from the minority independently of how they are distributed over time in the empirical study you see that the the similarity an exposure index with their dimensions of evenness versus exposure are relatively similar actually over time um but they do measure different dimensions so um in general um they can be influenced through two broad Tendencies the one tendency is um you have a selected migration coming into the city that is for instance through the gra migration the newly arriving um population settles selectively in certain neighborhoods only so the Anchor Point theory of migration for instance predicts that people rather settle in neighborhoods where they already know um sort of family members or friends often from the same ethnic groups um and this Anchor Point Theory would then predict that selective migration may increase um segregation both as measured um by the similarity or exposure index the second um kind of um mechanism through which segregation can increase is then that there are General Trends in the cities such as house Rising house prices or Rising rents for instance and the uh population in the city then reacts uh selectively to these Trends so uh when they like Rising house prices are rents then the poorer households for instance might selectively move to the poorest areas and dust increasing segregation um reversely um in context this in context of gentrification right so when sort of rich people move to poorer neighborhoods because they think they are uh like the latest grand um uh gentrifying this neighborhood um you have a selective migration that goes actually against the segregation flow so gentrification is one actually process through which selectively then segregation can be decreased okay so these are different dimension itions of measuring segregation and you can actually apply these little formulas yourself um go to any kind of website of City statistics Berlin for instance or New York um and just look for um minorities majorities you can do this by by Race by by gender by income income group what have you and you can calculate uh the segregation in this very easily yourself so what are the long run Trends then and here I draw a bit on the economist Glazer and Victor uh writings um who have used the similar techniques as Menton to describe basically the very same process that um the two sociologists have been describing in their book up to the 1980s that is um they observe a rise of both um dis similarity and isolation index um from about 02 or let's say 20% um up to um then for the isolation index 50% and 80% for the uh the similarity index so at the height of um um Urban segregation um around then 1970 uh in the United States and this is then um the a for all of the major American cities um the 80% of the black population in the cities would have had to move in order to make the distribution across the city equal again no and again the likelihood for an africanamerican to meet only um African-Americans in the neighborhoods in 1960s would be um 60% yeah so if people didn't work in their neighborhoods if they just lived in their neighborhoods a likelihood actually to meet um a a person of uh the white population would be very low ever since in 1980s and this is where um glaz's work uh goes a bit beyond Menton um the upgraded numbers here also show that um gentrification and immigration in particular brought segregation levels down yeah so here by 19 2010 then segregation levels have been reaching um again the levels of around 1920 again uh and this is due to gender vacation so I mentioned this already so this is a process um um in cities where richer households move to poorer neighborhoods mostly because they think that they're artistically interesting culturally Innovative cheap in housing uh by moving there they increase rents and gradually um push out the resident population and but in this process because in a way Rich households move into POA neighborhoods there's more mixture uh hence less segregation than there would normally be uh but immigration also um lower segregation levels one other uh tendency that brought segregation levels down according to Glasser um is that there's been a catchup process in mortgage lending um so since the 1970s um there was the idea to extend mortgages more to African-Americans also in the sub prime mortgage lending to increase home ownership rates and also create more more mixed cities um with the uh burst of the subro bubble however um this catchup process might also have seen an end last but not least um the creation of the rust Bel um the unemployment in northeastern cities um led to a reversal of the m migration flows of the Great Migration and African-Americans have been moving more and more also into the sunb belt uh breaking with some of the past dependencies um uh that made uh uh ghettos so persistent over time still we are now at a segregation or the similarity index of more than 50% that is in current American cities more than 50% of the black population has to move in order to equalize cities again and in international comparison this is still um very a very high value so in this uh interesting article by Sonia arachi here uh we find one of the rare comparisons of segregation levels um in this case ethnic segregation using different ethnic groups um in European cities um and here's a comparison along the segregation index so the similarity index that is which you see depicted here on the x axis and this is just the percentage of immigrant population in the respective cities and countries on the y axis uh this is for time periods in the 1990s however uh arachi then notices that many of these cities cluster by welfare state types so we will see in a future lecture that countries welfare states are obviously not um the same across countries they differ quite a bit and there are different sort of clusters like the liberal cluster to which um the UK but also the US pertain uh is opposed to the Social Democratic cluster of the Scandinavian country r or the corporalist kind of conservative welfare clusters um to which then also Germany belongs in this context it's interesting to see that um it's only the Anglo cities in this case so um the British cities which reach ethnic segregation levels as high as uh the United States so this only holds perhaps also for some selective cities uh like Barcelona here apparently um but otherwise segregation uh levels of more than 50% are rather unknown and when you think about the like most extreme levels here of segregation in an average American city of the 1970s of almost 80% this is not even depicted on the European um um map you also see that most European cities are rather below even 40% the German cities mostly below 30% segregation index um so um that is in in the German case for instance uh here the Turks uh Turkish and ex Yugoslavian population was used to compose the ethnic segregation indices um and um they then rather range um below 30% so less than 30% of this ethnic group would have to move in order to make the city equal again um which is much lower in comparison to um the racial segregation indices in the United States even um despite the recent decrease all right so this was uh meant to introduce you to um the Urban sociology branch of Sociology which was very much inspired by web Deo uh work on the color line one of the first if not the first um American Urban sociologist um and um the study of segregation giving High house prices and rents giving housing shortages um is still one very much um uh done in the current day this was the end of the lecture have a a great day