Residential Segregation is the Linchpin of Racial Stratification

Abstract

Three decades of research have amply confirmed Pettigrew’s (1979) prescient observation that residential segregation constitutes the “structural linchpin” of racial stratification in the United States. Although the centrality of segregation as a stratifying force in American society remains, however, patterns of segregation have changed substantially since the 1970s. At that time, African Americans were highly segregated almost everywhere and socioeconomic attainments had no effect on the degree of segregation experienced by African Americans. Race was very much a master status and most whites subscribed to an ideology of segregation, either de jure or de facto. In the early 1960s, for example, absolute majorities of white Americans still supported segregation as a matter of principle, agreeing on surveys that schools, transportation, occupations, and neighborhoods should be racially segregated and that intermarriage should be prohibited (Schuman et al. 1998).