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By Audrey Crummey
Daily Bruin Contributor
Though certain areas of L.A. County are growing more diverse,
segregation is increasing at a faster rate than integration,
researchers say.
Findings from 1940-2000 census results show that as the number
of Latinos and Asians in L.A. County rise, whites and African
Americans grow more isolated, some say.
“We have found a clear pattern of
“˜resegregation,” said USC professor Philip Ethington,
who discussed his research, a project in conjunction with the
University of Michigan, during Tuesday’s presentation in
Kinsey Hall with researchers from universities throughout the
nation.
The resegregation can be attributed to new immigrants who are
likely to settle together, and that African Americans become more
isolated as a result, Ethington said.
The percentage of African Americans in L.A. county is decreasing
because few people of African descent are immigrating to the area,
Ethington added. Whites also tend to become more isolated as a
result of the population boom among Latinos.
“Whites have had the freedom to settle wherever their
wealth enables them, to flee the growing diversity of the
metropolis,” Ethington said.
This accounts for the fact that Latinos are decreasingly less
likely to have whites as neighbors, despite the increase in the
Latino population, he said.
Ethington’s research stated that 40.7 percent of
municipalities in Southern California have a multiracial mix,
compared to 22.1 percent in 1980. As a result, many individual
cities have become more diverse, but the area as a whole grows
increasingly segregated.
Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociology professor at the City
University of New York, said New York City is in a similar
condition.
“Segregation has stayed relatively constant,” he
said.
The African American population continues to increase, but in
separate areas from other races, he said.
While much of Tuesday’s presentation focused on
segregation since 1940, a third speaker, UCLA urban planning
professor Paul Ong, said segregation in California is not a modern
problem.
“Some of the earlier ghettos ““ if you want to use
the term “˜ghetto’ ““ were in California,” he
said.
Ong cited a Los Angeles land use act, passed in the 1870s which
segregated Chinese immigrants by creating boundaries outside of
which laundry mats were not permitted. Most of the laundry mats
during that time, Ong said, were operated by Asian Americans.
As for modern-day residential segregation, Ong’s research
showed similar results to Ethington’s and
Beveridge’s.
Ong also found that new housing developments can create more
integration in cities and that in areas such as New York City and
Los Angeles, residential segregation has a close, but not perfect,
relationship to school segregation.
The group also discussed some of the difficulties of analyzing
data regarding race and urban neighborhoods.
The study in New York classified people as white, black or
other, failing to represent Asians and Latinos separately.
Beveridge said he chose these categories because many people do not
consider Hispanic a separate race ““ that Latinos are either
white, black or “other.”
“We did not racialize Hispanics, which I think is
appropriate,” Beveridge said.
But in a census, people whose native language is Spanish tend to
identify themselves as Latino as opposed to any other race,
Ethington said.
Additionally, the “Asian” category represents many
individual races and cannot always be grouped into one category,
other members of the audience noted.
“We did the best we could,” Ong said.
With reports from Kelly Rayburn, Daily Bruin Senior Staff.