Ethnic groups need to work together toward common goals in order to relieve racial and cultural tensions in urban neighborhoods, Harvard professor William Julius Wilson said Thursday.
Wilson, who based his findings on the research from his forthcoming book, gave his presentation at the Kiva Classroom. The book, which he co-authored with a colleague and a field research team of University of Chicago graduate students, centers around research conducted in four Chicago neighborhoods during the early '90s.
He said Chicago is among the 100 largest cities in the United States experiencing a steep drop in its white population and a sharp rise in Latinos.
"Many Americans have come to associate the decline of the central city with the state of migration of whites and the growing presence of Latinos on top of an already large population of blacks," Wilson said.
He added that the result has been competition on racial and ethnic lines for housing, recreational areas, schools and, most especially, neighborhoods.
"We approached this study with the belief that it would be useful to compare neighborhoods representing different racial and ethnic groups for two reasons," Wilson said. "First, to capture the full range of neighborhoods' racial ethnic tensions, and second, to explain variations in changes in neighborhood racial and ethnic antagonism."
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The four neighborhoods chosen, Wilson explained, are protected by pseudonyms and represent mainly working and lower middle classes. He said that they are each based on ethnic and racial predominance: Groveland, with a 95 percent black community, Beltway, with a 92 percent white population, Archer Park, with a 79 percent Latino population and Dover, with a 60 percent white population in 1990.
Wilson said that by 2000 Dover's white population had decreased to 18 percent and 77 percent of its residents are now Latino.
He pointed out that the different racial and ethnic tensions in each neighborhood seemed to stem from the attention to differences, rather than commonalities.
Wilson said that with information obtained by the field researchers, they discovered that Beltway responded negatively to black encroachment and showed intense pressure to maintain high social organization, including resisting gangs, supervising children and beautifying the neighborhood.
Next, he said, Dover's white residents openly expressed resentment toward Latinos and Latinos expressed resentment toward them.
"Tensions between whites and Latinos bubble beneath the surface and usually erupt in public forums," Wilson said.
In Archer Park, he said, Latinos exhibited hostility toward blacks, and then in Groveland little evidence of racial tension toward whites was observed. Wilson added that this sharp contrast could be because most residents worked for the city, state or federal government and also were more likely to hold unionized jobs, thus feeling much less competition for jobs and resources.
Wilson said that the only time that racial and ethnic tensions eased was when residents within the community were forced to work together for a common goal. He referred to an example when both white and Latino residents in Dover worked together to stop the bussing of their children to schools in black inner-city neighborhoods.
However, Wilson said that although America is often described as a melting pot, research suggests neighborhoods will remain divided racially and culturally in the near future.
He added that the way to minimize racial antagonism is to increase interdependence between groups and help them work toward common concerns, such as education, where they can overlook their differences.
He suggested that urban leaders foster feelings of interdependence and create situations that enhance cooperation, not competition.
"It's so important to create an atmosphere of coalition building, an atmosphere that would bring together the leaders of these diverse communities to identify goals and concerns shared by the various groups," Wilson said.
Wilson is one of 18 Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professors at Harvard, the university's highest academic distinction. He was selected by Time magazine as one of Time America's 25 most influential people in 1996.
