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en. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is warning President Biden and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that he will not support a bipartisan infrastructure bill that does not include a provision for reconciliation.
"Let me be clear: There will not be a bipartisan infrastructure deal without a reconciliation bill that substantially improves the lives of working families and combats the existential threat of climate change," Sanders said in a tweet on Sunday afternoon. "No reconciliation bill, no deal. We need transformative change NOW."
The demand from Sanders comes a day after Biden walked back remarks on Thursday suggesting he would only support signing a bipartisan bill if a larger reconciliation package was also passed.
"At a press conference after announcing the bipartisan agreement, I indicated that I would refuse to sign the infrastructure bill if it was sent to me without my Families Plan and other priorities, including clean energy," Biden in a statement on Saturday afternoon before saying his comments "also created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent."
On Sunday morning, several Republican senators said they accepted Biden's clarification and indicated they trusted the president to stick to his word.
“I recognize that he and his Democratic colleagues want more than that, they want other legislation as well," Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said. "And we Republicans are saying absolutely no, we will not support a bill which is to be passed with a massive tax increase, and at the same time trillions of dollars in new spending. That is not something we will support."
Manchin, a moderate who represents a critical swing vote within the Democratic caucus and helped broker the deal between the White House and Senate Democrats, defended his position in Congress on Sunday.
“It’s the way I’ve basically been in public life, and I’m not changing. I’m sorry that this 50/50 worked out and people were unhappy with it, but it is what it is. And if they think that I’m going to change and be something that I’m not, I won’t. And I’ve been very clear,” Manchin said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Monday that the lawsuits were “legally insufficient” and didn’t provide enough evidence to prove that Facebook was a monopoly. The ruling dismisses the complaint but not the case, meaning the FTC could refile another complaint.
“These allegations — which do not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebook’s market share at any point over the past ten years — ultimately fall short of plausibly establishing that Facebook holds market power,” he said.
The FTC said in a statement that it is “closely reviewing the opinion and assessing the best option forward.” The agency has 30 days in which to file a new complaint.
Boasberg closed that avenue for the states, however, in dismissing outright their separate complaint.
The U.S. government and 48 states and districts sued Facebook in December 2020, accusing the tech giant of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors and seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of the social network’s Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services.
The FTC had alleged Facebook engaged in a “a systematic strategy” to eliminate its competition, including by purchasing smaller up-and-coming rivals like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. New York Attorney General Letitia James said when filing the suit that Facebook “used its monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users.”
Facebook, in an e-mailed statement, said: “We are pleased that today’s decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook. We compete fairly every day to earn people’s time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services.”
Richard Hamilton Jr., a former prosecutor and Justice Department antitrust attorney, said the judge, while finding the FTC’s arguments insufficient, gave the agency a sort of road map for how to bulk up its case in another round.
“Whether government or private entity, you still need to sufficiently plead the case,” Hamilton said. He noted that as Boasberg saw it, the FTC failed to demonstrate how it arrived at the claim that Facebook controls 60% of the market in social networking and how that market power is measured.
Alex Harman, competition policy advocate for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said: “Courts really have a hard time with that market definition for some reason. It’s Exhibit A for why we need the laws changed.”
An ambitious package of legislation to overhaul the antitrust laws, which could point toward breaking up Facebook as well as Google, Amazon and Apple, was approved by the House Judiciary Committee last week and sent to the full U.S. House.
Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, the chief Republican sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement that Monday’s ruling “shows that antitrust reform is urgently needed. Congress needs to provide additional tools and resources to our antitrust enforcers to go after Big Tech companies engaging in anticompetitive conduct.”
The aftermath of a U.S. airstrike in Iraq. (photo: Alaa Al-Marjani/Reuters)
Trump’s berserk recklessness opened a window to rein in presidential war powers. Biden’s actions show that window is now closed.
he Biden administration’s legal justification for the airstrikes it carried out Monday in Syria and Iraq was simple and straightforward: According to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby, “the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq.”
This is what is sometimes known as a “naked Article II” assertion of presidential power. That is, the executive branch is claiming the right to use armed force without reference to any authorization from Congress. Kirby made the same case in almost exactly the same words in February when Joe Biden bombed northeastern Syria. “The President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to defend U.S. personnel,” he said at the time.
This may seem confusing, given that Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution declares that “the Congress shall have Power … To declare War.”
The rationale for this clause can be found in a famous 1793 polemic by James Madison, considered the father of the Constitution, which had been ratified just four years earlier. Madison argued the power to declare war must be “fully and exclusively vested” in Congress because history showed that “the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war: hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.”
Madison therefore called for a “rigid adherence to the simple, the received and the fundamental doctrine of the constitution, that the power to declare war including the power of judging of the causes of war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature: that the executive has no right, in any case to decide the question.”
This perspective constrained the executive branch to some limited extent through the end of World War II. Then, in 1950, President Harry Truman ordered hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Korea with no congressional authorization. His State Department instead issued a memo explaining why “the President’s authority to send the Armed Forces outside the country is not dependent on Congressional authority.” Why? Because “the President’s control over the Armed Forces of the United States is based on article 2, section 2 of the Constitution.” Article II, Section 2 states, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed under false pretenses, did provide some congressional authorization for the subsequent massive expansion of the Vietnam War, then already in progress. However, there was never any congressional support at all for America’s secret military campaign against Vietnam’s next door neighbor, Cambodia. The U.S. dropped about half a million tons of bombs on the poor peasant nation, about the same amount we used in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. The Nixon administration explained that this was fine and perfectly legal because the Korean War “stands as a precedent for executive action in committing United States armed forces to extensive hostilities without any formal declaration of war by Congress.” The U.S. had “in no sense gone to ‘war’ with Cambodia,” and Nixon didn’t need any authorization from Congress, given “the constitutional designation of the President as Commander in Chief.”
This perspective on presidential power has since become doctrine for Republicans and many Democrats. Congress authorized the Gulf War in 1991, but then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney felt this was unnecessary. “We had the Truman precedent from the Korean crisis of 1950,” Cheney said. “From a constitutional standpoint, we had all the authority we needed.”
The Justice Department provided Cheney and the rest of the George W. Bush administration with a legal justification for pure presidential power soon after the 9/11 attacks. Article II, it said, establishes that “the Founders entrusted the President with the primary responsibility, and therefore the power, to use military force in situations of emergency.” So the president did not need congressional authorization to attack “terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11.”
That said, presidents have generally preferred to do a sort of legal two-step on this issue. They like to say they are acting “in accordance with” some kind of congressional authorization, even as they say Article II means they don’t need it. 2001’s Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed with a sole “no” vote after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has proven particularly useful in this regard. According to a 2018 Congressional Research Service report, the 2001 AUMF had been cited by presidents 41 times: 18 by the Bush administration, 21 by Obama, and twice by Trump.
But even the 2001 AUMF couldn’t be stretched to cover the U.S. participation in the 2011 overthrow of Libya’s government. The Obama administration’s legal rationale for that was simply Article II. Then Trump bombed Syria on several occasions, explaining in a 22-page 2018 memo that “Article II provides the President with the authority to direct U.S. military forces in engagements necessary to advance American national interests abroad.”
After Washington officials witnessed Trump’s extraordinary recklessness — which during his first year in office could have genuinely led to nuclear war with North Korea, just on his sole decree — there was a brief window when it appeared the next administration might have limits placed on its war powers, either by itself or by Congress or both. But with Biden’s action since taking office, that window appears to have closed. It’s not surprising, but America’s continuing retreat from what Madison called “the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free,” is nonetheless extremely ominous.
Climate activists and Indigenous community members gather to protest construction of the Line 3 tar sands pipeline. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images)
“This is an outrageous and unlawful effort to blockade people who are engaged in protected First Amendment activity.”
Minnesota sheriff’s office blocked access Monday morning to one of the protest encampments set up to resist the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline.
In a notice delivered at 6 a.m. to pipeline opponents, who own the property, the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office stated that it would no longer be allowing vehicular traffic on the small strip of county-owned land between the driveway and the road. Sheriff’s deputies arrived with trucks carrying building materials, a witness said.
“I was handed a notice that states the sheriff will be installing a physical barricade across the driveway to our private property,” said Tara Houska, an Anishinaabe co-founder of the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective, which organized the camp. “He’s saying that we have no right of access to our private property by vehicle.”
The pipeline opponents, also known as water protectors, plan to take legal action.
“This is quite simply nothing less than an overt political blockade,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney for the pipeline opponents and director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation. “This is an outrageous and unlawful effort to blockade people who are engaged in protected First Amendment activity and to punish them for their opposition to the Enbridge pipeline, where Enbridge is serving as the paymaster for Hubbard County sheriff.”
Verheyden-Hilliard was referring to an Enbridge-funded escrow account set up by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to reimburse public safety agencies for activity related to Line 3. So far Enbridge has reimbursed Hubbard County $2,660 for riot helmet face shields and chest protectors as well as equipment related to removing pipeline opponents locked to construction infrastructure.
The Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
Water protectors have been using the trail unencumbered by restrictions for around three years, since the camp opened. The barricade was raised only after Line 3 construction ramped up and protest actions increased.
Water protectors see the road blockade as another example of local sheriff’s offices working to protect the interests of Enbridge, the Canadian tar sands pipeline company.
The Namewag camp has been used as a jumping-off point for water protectors conducting direct-action protests, sometimes involving demonstrators locking themselves to pipeline construction equipment or obstructing access to construction sites.
The water protectors oppose the tar sands oil pipeline based on its potential climate and environmental impacts, including the potential harm of a pipeline spill. They say the placement of the pipeline violates treaties signed between Ojibwe people and the U.S. government, because the route cuts through lands to which Ojibwe people have guaranteed access for hunting and gathering.
The Namewag property is bound on one side by county land and on another by land that Enbridge purchased the year after the camp was set up. Drones and helicopters regularly fly over the camp, and water protectors say the sheriff’s office has for months carefully monitored the comings and goings of cars. At one point, sheriff’s deputies even turned away a truck full of gravel they had purchased to manage the driveway’s spring mud.
The first 150 feet of the driveway leading to the Namewag camp are owned by the county. The notice states that the sheriff’s office is blocking the county trail “due to no easement for the current landowner.” It adds, “Vehicles driving on this county owned trail are in violation of the Hubbard County Land Ordinance and enforcement action will be taken.”
Although rules around property access can be complicated, the law favors allowing landowners entry to landlocked property. Blocking a property owner’s driveway with only a few hours notice is highly unusual.
“The state of Minnesota has already demonstrated a clear lack of understanding when it comes to the rights of Indigenous peoples,” Houska said, “and it appears there’s a loose grasp on the basics of U.S. property law as well.”
With the federal moratorium on evictions set to expire, the United States is on the verge of a massive housing crisis. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
A flood of evictions is about to slam the United States. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The federal government can stave off the crisis and fix the underlying injustices causing it. Here’s how.
he United States is on the precipice of a post-pandemic eviction crisis. More than half of all renter households lost employment income between March 2020 and March of this year, causing one in five of those households to fall behind on rent. For black renter households, fully 29 percent owe past-due rent.
Much of the fallout has been delayed by the eviction moratorium issued by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). But that moratorium is set to expire on July 31, and Americans struggling to keep a roof over their heads know what lurks around the corner. The US Census Bureau’s biweekly Household Pulse Survey issued on June 15 revealed that nearly 4.2 million people nationwide report that it is likely or somewhat likely that they will be evicted or foreclosed upon in the next two months.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are multiple steps the federal government can and should take to stave off this crisis, and to fix the underlying injustices that are causing it.
In the short term, the Biden administration should extend the CDC moratorium to reflect the lingering economic struggles caused by the pandemic. If the CDC does not reconsider its indication that it would not extend the deadline past the end of July, states and local governments should extend their existing moratoriums or enact new ones. California lawmakers, for example, are not only considering an extended moratorium, they are making plans to use federal stimulus money to pay all of low-income renters’ back rent accumulated during the pandemic. Renters in the United States are still digging themselves out from COVID’s devastation, and our lawmakers need to act like it.
Lawmakers and courts should also require landlords to offer mediation to their tenants or take other informal steps before filing for a court order of eviction. A landlord should not be able to spend a few minutes completing a check-the-box form, plunk down as little as $87, and thereby inscribe a “Scarlet E” that will haunt a tenant for decades. Even when an eviction case is resolved with a settlement or in the tenants’ favor, future potential landlords often check court records, find a past eviction record, and then reject the applicants outright. Many Americans with eviction records thus become homeless or are forced to rely on expensive extended-stay motels.
For this same reason, lawmakers and judges should also restrict public access to eviction records, as has been done to varying degrees in Nevada, Oregon, California, and Washington, DC. Restricted access is already the rule for many other civil legal cases. Not allowing a past eviction to haunt a renter for decades on end is in keeping with the national trend toward expunging criminal records of past defendants, and a strong majority of voters support these policies.
“People with evictions on their records still need a place to live, but they are forced to pay the same amount of money for lesser-quality housing,” says judge Garland Graves, whose court handles eviction cases in Warren Township, Indiana. “It is a mark on their record that causes them real harm.”
Given the high stakes involved, tenants facing eviction should have a right to an attorney in eviction proceedings, where most landlords have counsel and very few tenants ever do. Nine cities have already enacted programs to provide counsel in eviction proceedings.
“There is a real imbalance of power between landlords and tenants in our current system,” says Alieza Durana of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. “We need a tenants’ bill of rights that rectifies that imbalance, and that includes a right to counsel.”
The federal government should exercise its power to ban exclusionary zoning laws, especially those that prohibit multifamily housing and establish minimum lot sizes. Those zoning restrictions have a blatantly racist legacy. And we must rehabilitate the often substandard public housing in the United States, as called for in Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal for Public Housing Act.
Housing as a Human Right
These short-term fixes are urgently needed, but they should be just the first step in a full reorientation of our approach to housing. The current crisis provides an opportunity for a long-overdue national commitment to housing as a human right and a public good, rather than a commodity that is withheld from millions in order to guarantee unearned profits for a few.
The simple inability to pay monthly rent is far and away the top cause of Americans being forced from their homes. “In our court we constantly see a single mom with kids, trying to pay the rent on $10 per hour,” says Judge Graves. “All it takes is one hiccup like a car breakdown or a health issue, and the problems snowball from there.”
The first step in elevating people over property interests is to immediately remedy the shameful fact that only one in four eligible families receive federal rental assistance. As the National Low-Income Housing Coalition and other advocates have demanded, we must guarantee rental assistance to every eligible household. Given the very limited public-housing supply in the United States, the fastest way to achieve this is by making the housing choice voucher program universal. The government would provide a subsidy in the amount needed for low-income renters to afford market-rate housing without the undue hardship of paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent.
But a voucher expansion cannot be the long-term solution, since it perpetuates a core problem in the US approach to housing: we already make an enormous public investment in housing, but those dollars often end up in the pockets of wealthy individuals and for-profit developers and landlords.
Consider the mortgage interest deduction, which costs the federal government as much as $70 billion per year. That total is far higher than the entire budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and exceeds the Urban Institute’s estimated cost of providing a housing voucher to every eligible renter ($62 billion per year.) Most Americans get zero benefit from the mortgage interest deduction, but the wealthy do: 80 percent of its benefits are raked in by households in the richest 20 percent.
We generously subsidize corporate landlords, too. The Center for Popular Democracy has tallied $470 billion in government-provided benefits handed to those companies in the form of loopholes to avoid capital gains taxes and preferential tax treatment for limited liability corporations, real estate investment trusts, and corporations that invest in “opportunity zones,” which is often a vehicle for gentrification.
Even when the government programs are targeted at providing help for the poor, the wealthy win out. The housing choice voucher program is the largest low-income housing program in the country, with $19 billion per year spent providing rent support for tenants to pay private landlords. Data on who those landlords are is lacking, but it seems clear most are likely large for-profit companies. The other largest low-income housing programs, the low-income housing tax credit and project-based rental assistance programs, similarly direct government dollars into private, for-profit hands, with only some of the benefits accruing to people in need of housing.
The Poverty and Race Research Action Council, among other advocates, has outlined how the federal government could change those programs to invest instead in government and nonprofit housing. We should move our housing billions out of the private market and into social housing, built on a foundation of full public-sector ownership and management. In so doing, we will commit to democratic control of housing, which will minimize costs and include mechanisms to remedy race and income segregation.
Social housing is not a pipe dream concocted by a random think tank or tenant advocacy group: it is an approach with a proven track record in multiple European communities. For example, as Ryan Cooper and Saoirse Gowan have reported in Jacobin, the majority of Viennese live in municipal and cooperative housing, and three of every four Finns are eligible for publicly financed housing.
Like judges, advocates, and tenants across the country, Judge Graves in Indiana is bracing himself for a flood of evictions after the CDC moratorium expires. As worried as he is about protecting the rights of tenants in his court in the coming months, he is even more disturbed by what he sees on the more distant horizon: “If we don’t take some major action, I’m concerned we are just not going to have enough places for all of the people who need a place to live.”
The time for that major action is now.
The toppled statue in Toronto of Egerton Ryerson, one of the architects of the Indigenous boarding school system. (photo: Olivier Monnier/AFP/Getty Images)
Hundreds of unmarked graves, and testimonies of countless horrors, belie our angelic self-image
t’s not often that Canadians have to apologise for their country. I’ve travelled the world reporting on conflict and human rights and am always greeted positively when I say I’m Canadian. “It is a beautiful country,” I am told. “Your country cares for its citizens.” In Canada, people make sympathetic noises when I retell whatever tragic story I have been working on. “We are so lucky to live in Canada,” they say.
Canadians like the idea of a “good” country full of “good” people. There’s even a name for it: “the angel complex”. Look at all the immigrants and refugees we welcome here, goes the doctrine – we’re not like those American racists, or those European xenophobes. Canada see itself as proudly multicultural, tolerant, peace-loving and polite. A beacon of light to the world.
Except for the 5% of the population who were here first. For the Indigenous people of this land, the country’s existence has been the cause of centuries of suffering so severe that human rights tribunals have labelled it genocide.
It is dangerous to believe your own hype, to be convinced that you are the “good guys”. Since 1980, 2,000-4,000 Indigenous women have gone missing in Canada – disappearances rarely taken seriously by the police. The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls came to the “inescapable conclusion” that Canada, from its precolonial past until today, had aimed to “destroy Indigenous people”.
The 2019 report explained how Canada’s policies qualified as genocide. What followed its publication was not a countrywide acknowledgment or a day of remembrance but quibbling among the chattering class about what really constituted genocide: Rwanda, Auschwitz – those were genocides! There was talk, too, of how damaging the term genocide would be to Canada’s international reputation. We’re mostly good, why let our actions over the past 200 years get in the way?
In 2015, four years before that report on the missing women, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed its work. This had been a mammoth undertaking that included taking testimony from more than 6,500 survivors of the residential school system – obligatory boarding schools that the Canadian government paid Christian churches to run. Indigenous children were forced to attend. They were malnourished, often sexually and physically abused, and used as guinea pigs for medical experiments. After years of painstaking investigation the commission came up with 94 calls to action for the Canadian government. Until a few weeks ago the government had completed only 10 of those.
Last month, when the remains of 215 missing Indigenous children were found in unmarked graves at the site of a residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada’s dirty secret was exposed to the world. Thousands of Indigenous children had been going missing for almost two centuries: why did it take so long for them to be found? Every one was someone’s child, stolen from their parents, brutalised, neglected and buried in an unmarked grave. Parents and family members of those children had been saying for years that there were grave sites around the school. It took so long because no one who could do something believed them or cared.
Last week 751 more unmarked graves were found at the site of the Marieval Indian Residential school in Saskatchewan, which operated until 1997. That leaves 137 more residential school grounds to examine. It is fair to extrapolate that many more unmarked graves of children will be found. Yet the desire for obfuscation and denial is still strong. In a tweet after the Kamloops discovery, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, referred to residential schools as “a dark chapter”, as if it was something long in the past.
Seven generations of Indigenous people passed through those “schools”. They were created to “take the Indian out of the child”, in the words of Canada’s first prime minister, John McDonald, to force assimilation through loss of language and culture.
The stories of the reality of life for children at these schools, as recounted in the TRC’s four volumes, including 6,500 testimonies of child survivors, contain horrors on an unbelievable scale. One man speaks of being raped so many times by the priest in charge that he hurled himself in front of a huge log being rolled downhill, breaking multiple bones to ensure he would be taken away.
Children frequently died trying to escape; some drowned, others were found frozen by the roadside. One girl made pregnant by yet another rapist priest was told her baby had been thrown in a furnace. Even the lucky child who escaped physical or sexual abuse would have been separated from their parents indefinitely, had their culture denigrated and their hair cut off, forbidden to speak their own language, given a number instead of a name, been underfed, ill-clothed and called racist names.
In the last month there has been a flurry of activity by a government suddenly eager to act. The calls to action made by the TRC in 2015 are suddenly top of the agenda. Why did it take the discovery of the children’s remains for Canada to finally believe that it committed genocide?
Violence and torture on this scale reminds me of reporting on life in Cambodia under Pol Pot. It has all the elements of the worst things I’ve seen anywhere – hunger, displacement, kidnapping, rape, disappearance, unmarked graves, genocide.
It is time for Canada to remove its halo and look in the mirror. It can no longer fall to the survivors of Canada’s genocide to educate us, to prove they suffered. If there is to be true reconciliation in Canada, these stories must be carried by all of us. The Kamloops unmarked graves make it impossible to say that we did not know.
A neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
The consequences for environmental justice are stark.
icture this: two babies born on the same day, maybe even within the same hour, at the Harlem Hospital Center in New York City. One baby, born to a Black mother, goes home to her family down the street in East Harlem. The second is taken home just a few blocks south to the Upper East Side by her white mother.
Fast forward to these babies’ adulthoods, and they’ve stayed close to the people and places they’ve grown to love — but their ability to access things like fresh food, quality pharmacies, well-resourced schools, clean water, and even something as simple as the trees that shade their blocks are drastically different. The way their communities are policed and incarcerated is substantially different, too. As a result, the two people are expected to die roughly 19 years apart, despite living just a few blocks from one another.
A new study and interactive map from researchers at the University of California Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, or OBI, demonstrate a comprehensive attempt to better understand residential racial segregation, the common phenomenon at root of these disparate inequalities, across the U.S. The study finds that, while residential segregation declined modestly from 1970 to 1990, it began increasing in 1990 and has been getting starker ever since. As a result, more than 150 large metropolitan regions in the U.S. — a whopping 81 percent of the total — are more segregated now than they were 30 years ago, according to the study.
“Segregation is the invisible undercarriage of every expression of systemic racism in this country,” Stephen Menendian, lead author and Director of Research at OBI, told Grist. “While segregation might not explain everything with inequality, it’s the sine qua non of racial inequality, which has a role in all injustices.”
The study’s sobering results are partially the result of careful methodological choices. Rather than relying on traditional measures of segregation like the so-called Dissimilarity Index, which measures how much movement it would take for two racial groups to become evenly distributed in a given locality, the researchers opt instead to use the Divergence Index, which measures the extent to which the demographics of a given geographic unit diverge from the broader whole of which it is a part: how the demographics of a census tract differ from those of its city, or how those of a city differ from those of a broader metropolitan area. The authors say that this better allows the study to account for America’s increasing diversity (which could lower dissimilarity scores even as segregation itself persists) as well as the increasingly regional nature of segregation.
This methodology finds that the one-time manufacturing hubs of the mid-Atlantic and Midwest’s “Rust Belt” disproportionately account for the country’s top 10 most segregated cities, with Detroit — the Blackest city in America — topping the list. Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia are not far behind. When metropolitan areas, which include cities and their connecting suburbs, are considered as a whole, New York City reigns supreme. While segregation is worst in these places, it has increased all across the country. Since 1990, the metropolitan area of Fayetteville, Arkansas, has seen the greatest increase in segregation, while cities in the West, such as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Santa Cruz, California, have also become significantly more segregated.
Segregation may have picked back up in recent decades, but its roots stretch back much further.
“The real driving force behind segregation in the North and West,” Menendian explained, “was the real estate industry.” Real estate companies have historically propagated racist beliefs that Black residents negatively impacted property values, were undesirable neighbors, and posed existential risks to communities and neighborhoods. As the government got more involved in regulating housing in the early 20th century, these ideas made their way into official policy. With that came exclusionary single-family zoning policies in places like Berkeley, California; racially restrictive zoning ordinances in cities like Baltimore, Maryland; and the nationwide practice of redlining, which denied investment to communities of color from Chicago to Miami and everywhere in between.
Segregation’s hold on the country has led to Black and Latino communities’ disproportionate exposure to environmental pollutants, which when coupled with poor health care options, unhealthy food options, as well as less access to green space and even safe jobs, culminates in a predisposition to premature death: Today Black Americans are expected to live six fewer years than white Americans.
Another new study by the conservation nonprofit American Forests found that segregation can even account for something as mundane as why affluent U.S. communities have 65 percent more trees than their poor counterparts. Closing that tree cover gap would support 4 million jobs, mitigate 57,000 tons of air pollution, and remove the equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere as taking 92 million cars off the road, according to the group. It would also improve health and safety outcomes in poor communities. (Tree cover has been shown to help lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and increase energy levels.)
However, Medendian and his co-authors Arthur Gailes and Samir Gambhir believe that fixes that focus on the symptoms of segregation, such as tree cover inequality, without addressing the deepening segregation itself won’t make any substantial differences in disparate life outcomes.
“In this particular moment of greater awareness of the extent and reality of systemic racism in the country, it’s important that we draw attention to what undergirds injustice,” Menendian said. “Segregation causes the inequalities that lead to police patrolling certain neighborhoods more aggressively, why life expectancies are lower in some neighborhoods than others, why frontline workers are disproportionately residing in certain neighborhoods, and why some people don’t have access to clean air or water.”
“If we’re going to actually make progress on these inequalities we need not continue focusing on the symptoms, but the causes,” he added.
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