Conceptualizing Racialized Regional Dynamics

Elisa Avila, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Populations of people of color in the United States have historically been forcibly moved, removed, or shuffled, through various formal and informal institutional practices. Some scholarship frames changes in residential diversity as caused by people of color(Lichter, Parisi, and Taquino 2018). However, practices of exclusion by white population have had long term and continuing impacts on where people reside (Loewen 2005). Instead of considering exposure to diversity (Lichter et al. 2018), this paper explores the impact of white dominance as a context that meaningfully shapes the residential composition of a place over time (Lee and Sharp 2017). By presenting a new conceptual framework for analyzing metropolitan regional growth, I situate place-based population change in a context of racialized processes. Using the Cincinnati Metropolitan area from 1970 to 2010 as a case study, I show how a region experiencing population decline exhibits racialized patterns of heterogeneity. This framework improves our understanding of how place-based practices affect dynamics of racialized population change in a larger region by incorporating time, place-based practices, and spatial relationships. The regional lens enables scholars to address complex regional systems as both rooted in place and informed by larger social-racial dynamics. Building from theoretical foundations in urban sociology and empirical findings on racial exclusion, this framework will help sociologists understand how metropolitan regions are shaped by racialized social contexts through intra-regional dynamics. Lee, Barrett A. and Gregory Sharp. 2017. “Ethnoracial Diversity across the Rural-Urban Continuum.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 672(1):26–45. Lichter, Daniel T., Domenico Parisi, and Michael C. Taquino. 2018. “White Integration or Segregation? The Racial and Ethnic Transformation of Rural and Small Town America.” City and Community 17(3):702–19. Loewen, James W. 2005. Sundown Towns A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. First Touc. Touchstone.

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 Presented in Session 220. Race, Region, Place,