African American Economic and Racial Residential Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

John Iceland, U.S. Census Bureau
Cicely Sharpe, U.S. Census Bureau
Erika Steinmetz, U.S. Census Bureau

Residential segregation has received considerable attention in the past few decades. Because neighborhoods vary by social class, it was thought that economic progress among minority groups, particularly African Americans, would result in greater integration. However, social scientists have observed that African Americans of various social classes remain residentially segregated at very high levels. Using data from the 1990 Census and Census 2000, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of economic inter- and intra-group racial segregation patterns for African Americans using various measures of segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas. We not only use the most common segregation measure-the index of dissimilarity-we also use measures that capture five dimensions of segregation: evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering. Comparing data on these dimensions over two censuses will permit a detailed accounting of changing urban settlement patterns for African Americans at different income levels.