September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:10 AM EST Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Sewell Chan, a reporter for The New York Times who contributes regularly to the paper’s City Room blog, which is devoted to metropolitan issues. Chan was interested in a recent report that showed New York City’s non-Hispanic white population growing after several decades of sharp decline; at the same time, the number of immigrants in New York City, both the foreign-born and their children, is approaching levels last seen at the start of the twentieth century. A byproduct of these demographic developments has been a slight relative drop in the black population. New York is not the only city undergoing such change. In Washington, D.C., African-Americans composed 71 percent of the city’s total population in 1970; today, they account for 57 percent. Whites, whose share of the capital’s population fell from 65 percent in 1950 to just 27 percent in 1980, now compose 38 percent of its residents. As in New York, much of the difference can be accounted for by the growth of Asian-American communities. Likewise, in Newark, a classic study in postwar white flight, the arrival of Portuguese and Hispanic immigrants has brought the black population down to about 53 percent. On the local level, the reentry of non-Hispanic whites and the arrival of new immigrants into existing black urban neighborhoods is no doubt highly disruptive, though in many ways the same can be said of the arrival 50 years ago of large numbers of black immigrants into previously white-ethnic neighborhoods like Brownsville, Flatbush, and Canarsie. On a macro level, we may be witnessing the end of what the funk artist George Clinton famously termed “Chocolate City” in his 1975 hit song of that title. “We didn’t get our forty acres and a mule, but we did get you, C.C. . . . God bless C.C. and its vanilla suburbs.” As in the early and mid-twentieth century, some of America’s largest urban centers are once again host to a tremendous amount of ethnic and racial diversity. Even sweeping categories like “Hispanic” mean less than they once did, as today only one-third of Hispanic New Yorkers are Puerto Rican. Where this all leads is anyone’s guess, though as one who has written on ethnicity and urban life, I tend to see more good than bad in this story.
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