Urban Sociology and Segregation - Essay Example

This rural migration puts huge impact over the entire social fabric when the rural people start living in the urban part of the world where various different ethnic, religious, cultural communities collectively. This may be separately identified within the context of urban segregation. And, racial residential segregation is identified as the degree to which two or more than two racial groups live and they are separated from one another in different segments of the urban environment (Massey and Denton, 1988) additionally, the concept of segregation is wide and fundamentally has five dimensions- evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization and clustering (Massey et al., 1996). And, the city of New York is home of about 20 million population, representing a separate economic, social, cultural, religious and ethnic representation.

At this point of time, racial issues and racial crimes have much affected the social fabric of the city. In the following parts, first, segregation and its components, history of urbanization in New York and its current issues, and it is followed by conclusion. Segregation and New York urban sociology Segregation is an institutionalized form of social distance depicted in physical distance. Grouping or separating people on the basis of race, ethnicity and religion is called as segregation. The fundamental aim of using segregation is to highlight and explain inequality in society on the basis of any framework, supporting a particular segment on the basis of caste, color, race or religion.

Segregation brings many disadvantages such as limiting opportunities and restricting people freedom that have separate identity than the dominant group. History provides many examples where the sword of segregation has been used to humiliate people belonging to other groups. For example, in the United States, the blacks were separately treated than whites; they were disallowed to study with whites in schools rather they were asked to go into schools where only blacks were studying. Grady and Ramirez (2007) contend that African Americans have been facing a unique set of economic, social and political disadvantages, which are rooted in slavery and at the same time maintained by racism.

And, at the same time, the blacks were restricted to inferior civil services. Not only American history, but also Indian and German history is also filled with such examples. Massey et al. (1996) provides five dimensions of segregation such as evenness, exposure, concentration, clustering and centralization. Exposure is defined as a measure of the extent to which minority group members interact with the members of the majority group or with each other (Lieberson and Carter, 1982). West Indians and Latinos have provided a sizable part of New York City’s nonwhite population.

As a result, they have formed influential members of the city’s nonwhite political class since the start of the 20th century. At that time, nonwhites and whites were beginning to form part of social fabric of the city of New York. Race was mostly dominating factor at that time. Politically, blacks were showing their political loyalty to their black political leaders. And each time they gave them their vote and support during the time of elections. On the other hand, the whites were not different from them.

They had created their social class where only whites were allowed to participate. In the same manner, whites gave their political vote to white politicians. Additionally, on the economic point of view, there was no much