The Segregation of Our Everyday Lives

American society has long been split across the fault lines of class and race. William Julius Wilson famously observed that poor African Americans who comprise the “truly disadvantaged” remain substantially isolated from the rest of society and the American economy. But not only are Americans divided by race, we are divided by how we travel about the city for everyday activities like shopping, visiting friends and family, working, or going out to eat. Race is the defining element of this segregation of mobility: Black households of all income groups and classes are more isolated and limited in where and how they move around cities, and rarely enter middle-class white areas.

A recent study by some of the world’s leading poverty researchers, including Robert Sampson and Mario Small of Harvard University, sheds new light by tracking the way different classes and races of people are segregated in our cities—not only based on where they live and grow up, but in where they travel in the city.