Haas Institute Assistant Director Stephen Menendian gave a keynote talk on April 1 at a fair housing conference in San Rafael on the topic of residential racial segregation. Stephen prefaced his remarks with an explanation that the fundamental problem with segregation is not that it separates people from each other, but that it separates people from resources. "Segregation is the principle mechanism in generating racial inequality and group-based inequality," he said. Separate can never be equal, and it's not because people are learning in different classrooms, it's because of the distribution of communal resources, he added. Those resources are comprised of both tangible ones like money, goods, and services, as well as intangible ones like social networks, social capital, referrals, and information. Stephen's presentation focused on racial residential segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, drawing from his research published in a series of reports on the topic.
Watch other videos from the Fair Housing Conference here.
