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Moving Up and Moving Out: Confusing Ends and Means About Ghetto Dispersal

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Assimilation is a pervasive ethos of American life. It is central to the nation's self-understanding and it is fundamental to much of American social theory and policy. See Gordon (1964), Glazer and Moynihan (1978), and Lieberson (1980). The disproportionate poverty and isolation of blacks has raised doubts about the receptive capacity of American society and has fostered a debate about the policy response required by the problem. In this paper, I argue that the assimilation model is relevant and useful to an analysis of urban black poverty. From the model, I derive a series of hypotheses that engage a long-running empirical debate over the relation between the segregated ghetto and economic opportunity. This analysis explores the relation between moving up (in socioeconomic status) and moving out (of the central-city ghetto). I argue that the call for ghetto dispersal as a means of breaking the 'underclass' stems from an incomplete understanding of ethnic group mobility within US society as well as of the pervasive tangle of limited opportunities facing blacks throughout the metropolitan region.

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