Thursday, November 17, 2016

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?




















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