“Because the World Consists of Everybody”: Understanding Parents’ Preferences for Neighborhood Diversity

Previous research, primarily using survey data, highlights preferences about neighborhood racial composition as a potential contributor to residential segregation. However, we know little about how individuals, especially parents, understand neighborhood racial composition. We examine this question using in–depth interview data from a racially diverse sample of 156 parents of young children in two metropolitan areas. Prior scholarship on neighborhood racial preferences has mostly been animated by expectations about in–group attraction, out–group avoidance, the influence of stereotypes, and perceived associations between race and status. However, we find that a substantial subset of parents expressed a desire for racially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods—a residential preference at odds with racial segregation. Parents across race conceptualized neighborhood diversity as beneficial for children's development. They expressed shared logics, reasoning that neighborhood diversity cultivates skills and comfort interacting with racial others; teaches tolerance; and provides cultural enrichment. However, these ideas intersected with racial segregation and stratification to shape parents’ understandings of diversity and hinder the realization of parents’ aspirations. Beliefs about the benefits of neighborhood diversity were rarely a primary motivation for residential choices. Nonetheless, parents’ perceptions of the advantages of neighborhood racial mixing reveal the reach of discourse on the value of diversity and suggest a potential opportunity to advance residential desegregation.

Managing Singapore’s residential diversity through Ethnic Integration Policy

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore Singaporeans’ view to a multicultural neighbourhood, specifically, their views on the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP), a housing policy that promotes residential desegregation, and whether this policy has engendered a positive perspective to residential diversity. Design/methodology/approach A grounded theory approach is used to answer the following research questions: how do Singaporeans feel about residential diversity? Does the EIP influence attitudes to residential segregation in Singapore? What do these attitudes mean for governments and policymakers around the world? The research involved focus group discussions with 27 Housing and Development Board real estate agents, in order to tap onto their vast network of clients and better understand the prevailing sentiments on the ground. Findings The two major considerations when Singaporeans choose a flat are its price and location. Within the confines of these two factors, however, other considerations like race, nationality and the socio-economic makeup of a neighbourhood will influence their decisions. Social implications These considerations can be condensed into the factors of constrained choice and voluntary segregation. By limiting the impact of voluntary segregation, the EIP can be credited with bridging the racial divide. However, with constrained choice being unaddressed by the policy, the emerging formation of a class divide is an unintended consequence. Originality/value Because almost all developed economies are culturally plural, understanding Singapore’s approach to residential desegregation offers insights as to how other countries may learn from the Singapore experience in managing and encouraging multiculturalism, especially since ethnic residential concentration can reduce the formation of strong social relationships.

Prefiguring Postblackness in Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody: A Black Black Comedy in Three Acts

This chapter offers a reading of Charles Gordone's 1969 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, No Place to Be Somebody: A Black Black Comedy in Three Acts. Through No Place to Be Somebody, Gordone questions cultural memory's master narrative of the African American Freedom Struggle. The protagonist, Gabe Gabriel, is both playwright and “a solo black performer within the context of the play,” and the chapter situates his four solo performances within No Place to Be Somebody's onstage action as counternarratives to heroic era accounts of both the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the residential desegregation of the era. Gabriel refuses black identity's monolithic representation offered in both direct action protest and black cultural nationalism. He and Gordone offer black subjectivity as neither rooted in nor limited to cultural memory's binary opposition between civil rights heroism and Black Nationalist villainy.