Understanding the separation of race within major cities

Today many people do not see that there still is a separation of race in communities. This problem is not noticed because it is not shown on the news or on Facebook, unless you live in these communities. For me personally, I never really thought the separation was as bad as it is today. I live in a small town in Michigan called Fowlerville. It is a small farming community and everyone who lives in this community are all separated by farm fields but not by race. If you take a look at the picture shown below it will show what I am talking about. It shows that majority of the community is 'white' but the other races are just mixed within and there is no divided line between races. I kind of feel like this how most small towns are. In the second picture, you can see from the neighboring communities around Fowerlville. In these neighboring communities, you cannot really see a divided line between races in these communities. Before I started looking deeper into this subject, I did not think there would be a big separation of race within a town or city. Maybe it is because I did not grow up around a separated community and it made me miss or ignore this separation when I went to a major city. 

Picture 1, Zoomed in picture of my community in Fowlerville, Michigan.

Picture 2, Zoomed out picture of neighboring communities/towns around Fowlerville.

 In the third picture below, you can see the major city of Detroit. As you can see, there is a big separation of race within the major city of Detroit. You can see that there are patches of different races within this one city and there are big divided lines between the different races. You can see that the Hispanic community have their own patch on the lower part of the city and the Black community is the majority of the city but stops around 8 mile road where there is a divided line between  the white and black community.

Picture 3, Detroit Michigan and its separated community

With these pictures taken from the 2010 US block data. You now can see that there still is a separation of race within communities in the cities and you can see this throughout the US in all of its major cities. But what brings this separation? Let's compare the income between the communities of Fowlerville and Detroit Michigan. In the two pictures below from Data USA, you can see the household income in each community. As you can see the median household income for Fowlerville is around 44k and for Detroit it is around 25k. Just taking a glance at these two different incomes, you can see that Fowlerville's income per household is kind of spread out between different incomes. Now if you take a look at Detroit's income, you can see that the majority of its households are in the 10k range. 

Picture 4, Bar graph of the income per household in Fowlerville Michigan

Picture 5, Bar graph of the income per household in Detroit Michigan 

Could this be the reason of why there are big separation of race? Could this difference in incomes be the reason of separation of race? After seeing this, I believe that the household income does have some factor into this separation of race. As Fowlerville's income range is kind of spread out throughout the community and not just one major percent makes up the whole community unlike Detroit. With that big of a separation of income, you will get some people who move into the same income community and I figure that is where the separation comes from. The separation of wanting to live with the community of same income. For instance, a rich person would not want to live near burnt down buildings. They would move into a community of same income. These are just my thoughts on this subject but what is your thoughts after seeing this?

Breaking the Social Norm

In today’s culture, we have various norms that are specific to a type of gender but who wrote these norms? Who wrote that males couldn’t wear a skirt or couldn’t wear makeup? These norms are not written down anywhere but they are socially written in our society. Now what will happen if you break these social norms? Take the one of the norms, let’s say the norm of it is okay for a girl to wear yoga pants or leggings in public but not a guy, and put them in a public place and see what happens. Instead of just having this guy just stand in public, let’s have him do something that he would do like it was just a normal day like grocery shopping. A group of friends and I decided to do this exact experiment, to have one of us, a guy, wear yoga pants while grocery shopping, and see what other people’s reactions would be.

                                                       THE EXPERIMENT

Our friend Jake volunteered to be our genie pig for this social experiment. He got some yoga pants and we decided to go to Walmart right around when most people would be getting off work, so around five O’clock in the afternoon. We thought grocery shopping was an everyday activity that while your shopping you pass many people throughout the store. This is why we wanted to go around five O’clock as we wanted as many people to be at the store. When we got to the store our friend got a cart just like he would do usually and just start walking around shopping. The rest of the group just acted like we were shopping as well but was really watching and listening to other people as our friend walked by. We followed our friend around Walmart for about an hour or more and we were not surprised of the results.

                                                       THE RESULTS

The results of this experiment was not surprising to us. As Jake walked around the store, he felt very uncomfortable as he felt more exposed than he usually would be shopping and that he felt people were staring at him. He had a right to feel this way about people as the group observed that as he passed by people they gave him weird and disgusting looks. Sometimes, people would eve laugh or even whisper to the person they are with about Jake. Now what makes these people think that it is weird for a guy to be wearing this? It all comes from our society. In our society, a guy has to wear ‘boy’ colors and clothing, while a girl has to wear ‘girl’ colors and clothing. If you take a step back and look deeply into everyday things, you will see that this norm is in everything. For example, take a look at two different big hit music videos; Justin Bieber “Boyfriend” and “Call me Maybe” by Carly Jepsen. These two big hit music videos are different in some ways but also very similar through the gender norm of guy must do manly things and a girl must do girly things. In “Call me Maybe” right away you have a girl looking out the window looking at a guy who is trying to start a lawnmower while she’s inside reading romantic novels. Now what happens if it was the other way around? The girl outside doing the “manly” thing of mowing the grass and the guy reading a romantic novel. Do you think this music video would have gotten over 800 MILLION! Views? I don’t think so. Now move forward to Justin Bieber’s big hit music video of “Boyfriend.” Same thing with “Call me Maybe,” right away not even a minute in you have Justin Bieber driving around in a muscle car. He is showing that he is manly for driving these cars and doing a manly thing. Now what if it was the girl who drove up to him in these cars? This just shows you that this norm is placed everywhere in our life. It starts from the time we are very young and watching cartoons to mid-aged adults watching music videos and continues throughout our life. This norm restricts our personality from a young age with this concept of what is acceptable and what is not. Now when you are just walking through the store or driving around, try to take a step back and look to see if you can see this social norm being placed out there.