Structuring Local Environments to Avoid Diversity: Anxiety Drives Whites’ Geographical and Institutional Self-Segregation Preferences

Abstract

The current research explores how local racial diversity affects Whites’ efforts to structure their local communities to avoid incidental intergroup contact. In two experimental studies (N=509; Studies 1a-b), we consider Whites’ choices to structure a fictional, diverse city and find that Whites choose greater racial segregation around more (vs. less) self-relevant landmarks (e.g., their workplace and children’s school). Specifically, the more time they expect to spend at a landmark, the more they concentrate other Whites around that landmark, thereby reducing opportunities for incidental intergroup contact. Whites also structure environments to reduce incidental intergroup contact by instituting organizational policies that disproportionately exclude non-Whites: Two large-scale archival studies (Studies 2a-b) using data from every U.S. tennis (N=15,023) and golf (N=10,949) facility revealed that facilities in more racially diverse communities maintain more exclusionary barriers (e.g., guest policies, monetary fees, dress codes) that shield the patrons of these historically White institutions from incidental intergroup contact. In a final experiment (N=307; Study 3), we find that Whites’ anticipated intergroup anxiety is one driver of their choices to structure environments to reduce incidental intergroup contact in more (vs. less) racially diverse communities. Our results suggest that despite increasing racial diversity, White Americans structure local environments to fuel a self-perpetuating cycle of segregation.

Places that Feel Racist: How the Built Environment Re/Creates White Racial Spaces and Time

“…Moreover, Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) reminds us that “Black matters are spatial matters,” (p. xiii) and that the dehumanization and anti-Blackness require white spaces. White spaces are structurally configured to exploit and dehumanize Black people (and other non-Black people of Color) through various means, such as segregated neighborhoods (Anicich et al, 2021; Rothstein, 2017), green spaces, the location of supermarkets and grocery stores, and where roadways are built; meanwhile, there are little to no such accommodations or considerations for communities of Color (Anicich et al, 2021; Archer, 2020). On top of it all are the ways that police create bluelines around some communities of Color to be more actively surveilled and patrolled (Gruber, 2021).…”

“…While dominant, white psychotherapy theories can enable many white people to interiorize race as an intrapsychic identity (in part, because there is little conflict and friction between the external racial ecology and the internal psychological identity of whiteness), systemic racism makes the interiorizing of race almost a near impossibility for many people of Color since our internalized notions of ourselves as racialized beings is in constant conflict and tension with the spaces around us. Conversely, race, for many white people, is not a constant relevant issue, or identity in white spaces, since most of these spaces are created for the racial comfort of white people (Anicich et al, 2021). White culture, norms, expectations, and ideologies are constantly revolving in white spaces in ways that reassure white people that they are welcomed and therefore feel “in-place” (Liu et al, in press).…”