William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University, and director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, spoke Monday evening at a packed Hamilton Chapel. His lecture was titled "Roots of Racial Tensions: Immigration and the Realities of Today's Urban Ethnic Neighborhoods." Wilson concluded, "If you want to change things, don't try to get people to change their attitude, create situations which minimize racial tension- the best way to fight racism in American is to achieve low unemployment." He is the second speaker in the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center's year-long series on Immigration and Global Citizenship.
Paul Hagstrom, director of the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center and associate professor of economics, opened the evening with introductory remarks about the Center's theme of immigration and ceded the floor to Professor of Philosophy Todd Franklin to introduce Wilson to the community. In his talk, Wilson presented data collected in four Chicago neighborhoods between 1993 and 1995. The group selected four neighborhoods in Chicago that were representative of working, lower middle class environments. Each neighborhood, representative of a different ethnic or racial group prominent in Chicago, was studied for transitional trends and racial attitudes over a span of 20 years, from 1980 to 2000.
Wilson found racial tension in the white community, the Latino community and the white neighborhood in transition, but not in the African American community. Based on a combination of city demographical data showing ethnic movement in and out of these neighborhoods, and interviews with past and current residents to judge racial tension and attitudes, Wilson concluded that racial tension occurs most frequently in the neighborhoods experiencing settlement of other ethnic and racial groups into neighborhoods not strongly dominated by any one group. The African American neighborhood, the only one of the four communities to still have firm control of their area, was the only neighborhood where few racial antagonisms were observed.
Paul Jones '03 asked Wilson about the source of neighborhood tensions in his study. Wilson suggested that the tension is due, in a large part, to actual and perceives competition from another group threatening to take over a given neighborhood, replacing the existing values with strange new ones. Wilson closed with a final thought on prejudice, "Prejudice is a product of situations, economic, social, political; if you don't understand that you will never come to grips with the reality of these problems."
