The Roles of Place, Race, and Privilage in Unequal Opportunities

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In this article, Squires and Kubrin argue that place, race, and privilege interact and combine to play a large role in the unequal opportunities that different citizens have in metropolitan areas across the United States. They first explain the existence of “bad” neighborhoods in these metropolitan areas and attempt to describe their development over time. They discuss how place has played a role in this. For example, they discuss sprawl, which they define as “a pattern of development associated with outward expansion, low-density housing and commercial development, fragmentation of planning…, auto-dependent transport, and segregated land use patterns” (48). They explain how sprawl has negatively affected inner-city neighborhoods. Additionally, the authors discuss the impact of race on the formation of unequal life opportunities. Racial minorities do not have access to the same opportunities as white people in America today. Although improving in recent years, the United States remains a highly segregation nation. This segregation, which is both a cause for and result of sprawl, is an example of how place and race interact in the formation of bad neighborhoods and unequal opportunities. Finally, the authors define how privilege affects inequality. Living in an area of large concentrated poverty as well as family social status, being born into either extreme wealth or poverty, have a large effect on the opportunities that one will have in life.

In addition to describing the factors that go into the development of unequal opportunities in urban areas, the authors list some of the costs of living in a bad neighborhood. These “concentration effects,” as they call them, include access to healthcare and financial services. ...

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...olicies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hope VI program.

Overall, I found that the article was very compelling. Because I lived my entire life before coming to college in an extremely small Midwestern town, Memphis has been quite a change for me. I have learned a lot about poverty and its geographic and racial dimensions merely by being in Memphis. Overall, the arguments that the article made did not surprise me. However, some of the large differences in statistics between, for example, black and white people as well as urban and suburban residents did surprise me. I had no idea how large the problem of opportunity inequality is in metropolitan areas. The article made me want to learn more about the problem of unequal opportunities based on place, race, and privilege and what I can do to help fix and bring attention to the issue.

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