Abstract
Residential segregation is both cause and product in the processes that shape the construction of race in America. The concept of race has no natural truth, no core content or meaning other than those meanings created in a social system of white privilege and racist domination. Recent work in critical race theory helps understand residential segregation by analyzing race as a social construction and whiteness as a racial construction. Segregation is the product of notions of black inferiority and white superiority, manifested geographically through the exclusion of blacks from more privileged white neighborhoods and the concentration of blacks into subordinated neighborhoods stigmatized by both race and poverty. In turn, the segregated world we inhabit comes to define race for its inhabitants. The lived experience of people in a segregated society links the perceived natural quality of the world we inhabit with its racialized characteristics-giving the social construction of race a quality that seems both natural and inevitable. Segregation therefore reflects and reinforces socially created concepts of blackness and whiteness. Understanding that race is socially constructed, and that its social construction is made into a naturalized feature of the physical world through residential segregation, can help us understand how to transform the current allocation of privilege. In this Paper, I emphasize the relationships between concentration into segregated residential communities and access to or exclusion from work as central features in the process of the social construction of race.
