Abstract
In 2023, separation by invented racial categories and socioeconomic status is a defining feature of our American landscape, our social institutions, and our public spaces. At the root of much of this separation is the belief in a hierarchy of human value, or racism. It is this belief that has given rise to America’s peculiar antinomy. We are a multiethnic democratic society marred from our earliest days by the theft of Indigenous lands and slavery. From this diseased root metastasized a tangle of laws, government policies and practices, and acts by private institutions and individuals that spread and worsened segregation in every sector of our lives. This separation is not a benign demographic outcome of an erroneous belief in a hierarchy of human value. Segregation is an independent force that, by keeping us apart, helps calcify racist beliefs and worsens imbalances in resources and power. This brief is intended to grow readers’ understanding of (1) the nature, roots and causes of racial and economic segregation; (2) the damage segregation exacts in people’s lives and their communities; and (3) hopeful models and insights from community-based practice and research that might reduce segregation and (or) redress its harms.