"This highly accessible and engaging book is rich with sociological insight. While recognizing the inevitable sorting role of schools, the authors offer a creative road map towards a more equitable future in education—and in life."
—ADAM GAMORAN, president, William T. Grant Foundation

"We all know that schools sort kids into good and bad jobs. This elegant little book reminds us that schools are also relentless categorizers inside their gates: the free-lunch kids learn they’re poor, the honors kids learn they’re special, and the ‘first years’ learn they’re far from first. Schooled and Sorted makes a brilliant case for regaining control over the categories that define our children’s lives."
—DAVID B. GRUSKY, Edward Ames Edmond Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and director, Center on Poverty and Inequality, Stanford University

"Schooled and Sorted makes a convincing case that it takes more than just skill-building curricula and effective teachers for a school to provide its students with ladders to the middle class. When schools also make well-intentioned efforts to boost achievement and motivate students by grouping or categorizing them, the results can be counterproductive. This book explains why and what can be done about them."
—GREG J. DUNCAN, distinguished professor, School of Education and Departments of Economics (by courtesy) and Psychology and Social Behavior (by courtesy), University of California at Irvine

We tend to view education primarily as a way to teach students skills and knowledge that they will draw upon as they move into their adult lives. However, schools do more than educate students – they also place students into categories, such as kindergartner, English language learner, or honor roll student. In Schooled and Sorted, Thurston Domina, Andrew M. Penner, and Emily K. Penner, explore processes of educational categorization in order to explain the complex relationship between education and social inequality – and to identify strategies that can help build more just educational systems. 

Some educational categories have broadly egalitarian consequences. Indeed, Domina, Penner, and Penner argue that when societies enroll young people in school, making them students, they mark them as individuals who are worthy of rights. But other educational categories reinforce powerful social categories – including race, gender, and class – and ultimately reproduce social and economic inequality in society. Elite colleges, tracked high schools, and elementary school gifted programs provide not only different educational experiences, but also create merit and inequality by sorting students into categories that are defined by the students who are excluded.

Schooled & Sorted highlights that many of the decisions that define educational categories occur in school-based committee meetings and other relatively local settings. The local nature of these decisions provides many opportunities to define educational categories differently, and for school communities to bring about change. 

Schooled & Sorted is an illuminating investigation into the ways sorting within schools translates into inequality in the larger world. While some educational categorization may be unavoidable, the authors suggest ways to build a more equitable system – and thus a more equitable society.

THURSTON DOMINA is Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
ANDREW M. PENNER is a professor of sociology, University of California, Irvine
EMILY K. PENNER is associate professor of education, University of California, Irvine

"Patchwork Apartheid is a landmark study of racial capitalism and social inequality in the United States. By putting newly available data into dialogue with detailed local histories, Colin Gordon takes readers beyond the storylines and summary facts that typically guide discussions of residential segregation in America. More than any other work I know, this book brings residential segregation into focus as a social, economic, and political process in motion—and as a process in which private actors and market agreements played preeminent roles in constructing the nation’s racial and spatial boundaries. Beautifully written and powerfully argued, Patchwork Apartheid should appeal to public and academic audiences alike. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins, operations, and consequences of residential segregation in America."
—JOE SOSS, Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service, University of Minnesota

"Colin Gordon is a singular historian, and this is a singular book. Patchwork Apartheid itemizes the schemes and evasions by which white homeowners continued to insist on their right to assert and convey their right to all-white neighborhoods (and an all-white sector of the housing market) long after the United States Supreme Court had ruled those rights to be legally unenforceable. Gordon is a master of summoning historical particulars into a dramatic refiguration of our understanding of the time and space of American history."
—WALTER JOHNSON, Winthrop Professor of History and professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

"Patchwork Apartheid is a remarkable contribution to the rapidly evolving scholarship on the origins of segregation in America. Gordon marshals an unprecedented amount of data to document how private restrictions established racial barriers dividing neighborhoods, suburban subdivisions, and society as a whole. These individual agreements made in the first half of the twentieth century could not be more relevant today, as we collectively grapple with the legacy of our explicitly segregationist past."
—JACOB FABER, associate professor of sociology and public service, Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, New York University

"Colin Gordon’s prodigious research results in a groundbreaking comparative study of the history, structure, and lasting impact of racially restrictive covenants in an important swath of Midwestern cities. In describing the experience of these central locations, Patchwork Apartheid illustrates important reasons for our national patterns of metropolitan-wide residential segregation."
—CAROL M. ROSE, Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization and professorial lecturer in law, Yale Law School

For the first half of the twentieth century, private agreements to impose racial restrictions on who could occupy property decisively shaped the development of American cities and the distribution of people within them. Racial restrictions on the right to buy, sell, or occupy property also effectively truncated the political, social, and economic citizenship of those targeted for exclusion. In Patchwork Apartheid, historian Colin Gordon examines the history of such restrictions and how their consequences reverberate today. Drawing on a unique record of property restrictions excavated from local property records in five Midwestern counties, Gordon documents the prevalence of private property restriction in the era before zoning and building codes were widely employed and before federal redlining sanctioned the segregation of American cities and suburbs. This record of private restriction—documented and mapped to the parcel level in Greater Minneapolis, Greater St. Louis, and two Iowa counties—reveals the racial segregation process both on the ground, in the strategic deployment of restrictions throughout transitional central city neighborhoods and suburbs, and in the broader social and legal construction of racial categories and racial boundaries.

Gordon also explores the role of other policies and practices in sustaining segregation. Enforcement of private racial restrictions was held unconstitutional in 1948, and such agreements were prohibited outright in 1968. But their premises and assumptions, and the segregation they had accomplished, were carried forward by an array of private and public policies. Explicit racial restrictions were accompanied and sustained  by the discriminatory  business practices of real estate agents and developers, who characterized certain neighborhoods as white and desirable and others as black and undesirable, thereby hiding segregation behind the promotion of sound property investments, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. These practices were accompanied and sustained by local zoning, which systematically protected white neighborhoods while targeting “blighted” black neighborhoods for commercial and industrial redevelopment, and by a tangle of federal policies that reliably deferred to local and private interests with deep investments in local segregation. Private race restriction was thus a key element in the original segregation of American cities and a source of durable inequalities in housing wealth, housing opportunity, and economic mobility.

Patchwork Apartheid exhaustively documents the history of private restriction in urban settings and demonstrates its crucial role in the ideas and assumptions that have sustained racial segregation in the United States into the twenty-first century.

COLIN GORDON is a professor of history at the University of Iowa

***

Interactive maps, datasets, and codebooks

The datasets linked below show the spatial location of racial restrictions on property in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County in Missouri, and in Black Hawk and Johnson Counties in Iowa. Each zipped file contains a Geographic Information System (GIS) shapefile, and a codebook (describing the shapefile attributes) in CSV format. The data for Hennepin County, Minnesota was collected by the Mapping Prejudice project.
 

This bibliography comprises two main sections: first, writings on relief problems and issues immediately preceding or arising from World War II, and second, publications dealing with relief programs instituted to deal with problems that arose during, or as a result of, World War I.

SIGRID HOLT was the librarian in the Charity Organization Department at the Russell Sage Foundation.

American Aid to Germany, 1918–1925 is the fourth of a series of occasional papers under the editorship of Donald S. Howard. It contains excerpts from the book America and Germany, 1918–1925, by Sidney Brooks. Topics include conditions in Germany after World War I, transport and finance problems, the child-feeding program administered by the American Friends Service Committee, and clothing distribution by the Friends.

The Long Mile Beyond Berlin is excerpted from an address by Shelby M. Harrison before the New York Academy of Public Education on November 19, 1942. It discusses the tasks of relief and reconstruction that will face the United States after the current war.

SIDNEY BROOKS was the author of America and Germany, 1918–1925 (Macmillan, 1925).

SHELBY M. HARRISON was general director of the Russell Sage Foundation.

DONALD S. HOWARD was assistant director of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.

“Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley have written an insightful book that documents just how fragile the American Dream is and always has been for Black workers. Anyone who wants to understand the complex, nuanced relationship between race, gender, and economic insecurity needs to pick up Work in Black and White immediately.”
—ADIA WINGFIELD, vice dean of faculty development and diversity, professor of sociology, Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts and Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

“Work in Black and White deftly weaves Black and White workers’ sense making of their labor market insecurities with clear historical and demographic analyses. ‘Stories have the power to make inequality legitimate,’ the authors write and go on to document the commonalities and divergence in stories told by educated men and women. While Black and White workers share aspirations for security, they part ways on how to understand the barriers to achieving it. Black workers recognize continuities in racism and White nepotism but also tend to believe they have some control over their own futures. Whites misperceive their precarity as a loss of racial privilege, while being blind to their advantaged reliance on White networks to get and keep jobs. Both groups embrace myths around hard work, education, and meritocracy and so are unable to imagine, much less generate, a political agenda to deal with the profound structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy. Read this book.”
— DONALD TOMASKOVIC-DEVEY, professor of sociology and director, Center for Employment Equity, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Work in Black and White reminds us that leaving school is just the beginning of the struggle for economic security. Many workers experience recessions as new threats and recoveries as challenges to their past accomplishments. And, of course, nothing works the same for women and men or Blacks and Whites. Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley build a case for employment policy that goes beyond credentials and self-reliance; America needs to reset the imbalance between workers and employers.”
—MICHAEL HOUT, professor of sociology and director, Center for Advanced Social Science Research, New York University

The ability to achieve economic security through hard work is a central tenet of the American Dream, but significant shifts in today’s economy have fractured this connection. While economic insecurity has always been a reality for some Americans, Black Americans have historically long experienced worse economic outcomes than Whites. In Work in Black and White, sociologists Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley draw on interviews with 79 middle-aged Black and White Americans to explore how their attitudes and perceptions of success are influenced by the stories American culture has told about the American Dream – and about who should have access to it and who should not.

Branch and Hanley find that Black and White workers draw on racially distinct histories to make sense of today’s rising economic insecurity. White Americans have grown increasingly pessimistic and feel that the American Dream is now out of reach, mourning the loss of a sense of economic security which they took for granted. But Black Americans tend to negotiate their present insecurity with more optimism, since they cannot mourn something they never had. All educated workers bemoaned the fact that their credentials no longer guarantee job security, but Black workers lamented the reality that even with an education, racial inequality continues to block access to good jobs for many.

The authors interject a provocative observation into the ongoing debate over opportunity, security, and the American Dream: Among policymakers and the public alike, Americans talk too much about education. The ways people navigate insecurity, inequality, and uncertainty rests on more than educational attainment. The authors call for a public policy that ensures dignity in working conditions and pay while accounting for the legacies of historical inequality.

Americans want the game of life to be fair. While the survey respondents expressed common ground on the ideal of meritocracy, opinions about to achieve economic security for all diverge along racial lines, with the recognition – or not – of differences in current and past access to opportunity in America.

Work in Black and White is a call to action for meaningful policies to make the premise of the American Dream a reality.

ENOBONG HANNAH BRANCH is Senior Vice President for Equity and Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University

CAROLINE HANLEY is Associate Professor of Sociology, William & Mary