Why do they tend to live in the same neighborhoods? Do whites keep them from living elsewhere? The answer is no. Why are their schools subpar? The schools arent subpar. The deportment in the classroom is subpar.
Actually, many argue that whites
do keep them from living elsewhere in subtle but significant ways.
"Redlining is the practice of denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs,[58] access to health care,[59] or even supermarkets[60] to residents in certain, often racially determined,[61] areas. The most devastating form of redlining, and the most common use of the term, refers to mortgage discrimination. Data on house prices and attitudes toward integration suggest that in the mid-20th century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by whites to exclude blacks from their neighborhoods.[62]
The creation of highways in some cases divided and isolated black neighborhoods from goods and services, many times within industrial corridors. For example, Birmingham's interstate highway system attempted to maintain the racial boundaries that had been established by the city's 1926 racial zoning law. The construction of interstate highways through black neighborhoods in the city led to significant population loss in those neighborhoods and is associated with an increase in neighborhood racial segregation.[63]"
-wikipedia "Racial segregation in the United States"
And school funding is often heavily based on property taxes, and property taxes are heavily based on property values- the result is that poor neighborhoods often do have underfunded schools.
Even small and seemingly innocuous public policy decisions, like funding schools from local property taxes, end up propagating segregation. The most major problem i see is that we're not really critically assessing whether we ever did enough to undo the segregation that existed immediately after slavery, my fear is that we haven't.
