EXPERT REPORT OF THOMAS J. SUGRUE
Gratz, et al. v. Bollinger, et al., No. 97-75321 (E.D. Mich.)
Grutter, et al. v. Bollinger, et al., No. 97-75928 (E.D. Mich.)
IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
The population of the United States, and of Michigan in particular, has become increasingly diverse over the past thirty years. Americans of different races and ethnicities, however, live in worlds that have a long history of separation and are still, to a great extent, separate. This widespread separation between groups exacts a high price. This report examines the scope, causes, and consequences of persistent racial separation in the United States, with special attention to Michigan and metropolitan Detroit. I have chosen to focus on Michigan and Detroit as examples because the University of Michigan draws nearly two-thirds of its students from its home state and over half of its students from the metropolitan Detroit area.
While the aggregate population of the United States is increasingly diverse, the nation's minority groups are disproportionately concentrated in certain states and regions. The same pattern is true in Michigan: whole sections of Michigan are virtually all white. Almost three quarters of Michigan's blacks, for example, live in the Detroit area. Virtually all blacks, and more than 85 percent of Hispanics, live in Michigan's eleven metropolitan areas. This means that the vast majority of Michigan's counties have tiny minority populations. White residents in those counties are unlikely to have any significant contact with members of racial or ethnic minority groups.
Even when whites and minorities live in the same geographic regions, they still live in separate neighborhoods and lead separate lives. As a result of longstanding official policies, standard practices in the real estate industry, and private attitudes, the degree of racial separation in residence in the United States remains high. Three of the ten most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States are in Michigan. Metropolitan Detroit, home to about half of Michigan's residents, offers a particularly stark example of the persistence of black-white segregation. Detroit is the second most segregated metropolitan area in the country (following only Gary, Indiana), and rates of residential segregation in Detroit were higher in 1990 than they were in 1960. Many suburban
communities on the borders of Detroit have remained almost completely white despite their proximity to adjoining minority-dominated city neighborhoods.
Largely because of the patterns of residential segregation, but also as a result of years of official policies, American primary and secondary schools are seldom diverse. Most students attend school with other students like themselves. Michigan ranks in the top four states in the country in the degree of black/white school segregation. In the metropolitan Detroit area, for example, 82 percent of the black students attend schools in only three school districts, which are nearly all black. More than 90 percent of the area's white students attend schools in districts with black student populations under ten percent (and most under three percent).
The costs of this persistent and pervasive racial separation are profound for minorities and non-minorities alike. Whites do not live near minorities, and they do not attend school together. Residential and educational distance fosters misconceptions and mistrust. It affords little or no opportunity to disrupt the perpetuation of racial stereotypes that are a basis and justification for racial separation. The high degree of separation by race reinforces and hardens perceptions of racial difference. It creates racially homogenous public institutions that are geographically defined, limits the access of many minorities to employment opportunities, and leads to racial polarization in politics. Residential segregation has led to a concentration of poverty in urban areas and means that members of minority groups, even those who are considered middle-class, have direct experience with poverty and its consequences. And numerous surveys by public opinion researchers demonstrate that large gaps divide whites and blacks on their views of a wide range of issues, and that those gaps have persisted over time. These patterns are the consequence of the fact that few Americans of different racial and ethnic backgrounds interact in a meaningful way on a daily basis.
In sum, today's racial and ethnic separation is a legacy of the past which we have not yet overcome.