Ethnicité et race. Séminaire MIM. Séance 17

Similarities and differences in the housing and educational barriers faced by blacks and Hispanics in the US

African Americans and Latinos in the United States are the two largest minority groups and suffer many of the similar barriers to adequate housing and education, although Blacks have suffered more from discrimination based on the color line and Latinos have suffered from anti-immigrant discrimination, lack of ability to speak English, and sometimes undocumented status, as well as color discrimination of a less intense variety. Blacks have a history of much more extreme housing and school segregation though both declined during the civil rights era. The massive growth of the Latino population is largely the result of immigration after the l960s by young immigrants who had large families and this population, which did not become nationally visible until the 1980s grew in a period of little civil rights enforcement. Both are overwhelmingly concentrated in metropolitan areas. Latinos have become even more segregated than blacks in the schools by race and poverty and experience increasing residential segregation as their numbers grow rapidly. Intermarriage is much more common among Latinos than blacks. Latinos and blacks are segregated from each other in spite of similar income and educational levels. Differences in the experiences of the two groups also vary geographically to some extent Discrimination has often been most vicious and overt in the traditional areas in which these groups resided --the Southern US for Blacks, and the Southwest for Latinos. Today, while there are still concentrations of these two groups in parts of the U.S., there are few growing areas that do not have both Blacks and Latinos, which is causing new challenges for formerly white communities and in communities where the situation that was formerly biracial has become multiethnic. Both are highly concentrated in schools that are segregated from both whites and middle class children. In spite of many common challenges, building alliances among these groups for housing and educational reforms and integration has been difficult, particularly at the local level. The talk will discuss the opportunities posed by the Obama Administration.

Discutante : Agnès Van Zanten (OCS, Sciences Po)

Conférence en Anglais

Patricia Gándara is currently Co-Director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and has published recently The Latino Education Crisis. The Consequences of Failed Social Policies with Harvard University Press (2009) and Forbidden Language: English Learners and Restrictive Language Policies with Teachers College, Columbia University Press (forthcoming).
Gary Orfield is Professor of Education, Law, Political Science and Urban Planning at UCLA , after 16 years as Professor of Education and Social policy at Harvard The books he has authored or been an editor of include: Congressional Power: Congress and Social Change, Must We Bus? Segregated Schools and National Policy, Diversity Challenged: Evidence on the Impact of Affirmative Action, Dropouts in America, Twenty-First Century Colorlines, The Reconstruction of Southern Education, and School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?. He is co-founder and co-director of the Civil Rights Project and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Education. .

The Civil Rights Project, directed by Gándara and Orfield, is the most active center of research on issues of civil rights and racial discrimination in the U.S., having commissioned more than 400 studies by scholars from across the U.S. in its thirteen year history. It was founded in 1996 at Harvard andmoved to UCLA in 2007. Its reports can be found at civilrightsproject.ucla.edu.