Compounding Inequalities: How Racial Stereotypes and Discrimination Accumulate across the Stages of Housing Exchange. Issue 4 (August 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Korver-Glenn, Elizabeth
• Is Part Of: American sociological review. Volume 83:Issue 4(2018)
• Page Start: 627
• Page End: 656
• Publication Date: 2018-08
• Subjects: racial inequality -- housing -- discrimination -- stereotypes; Sociology -- Periodicals; Social history -- Periodicals; 301
• DOI: 10.1177/0003122418781774
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0003-1224

Abstract

Despite numerous legal interventions intended to mitigate racial discrimination in the United States, racial inequality persists in virtually every domain that matters for human well-being. To better understand the processes enabling this durable inequality, I undertake a case study of the housing market—a domain centrally linked to persistent, systemic disparity. I examine how racial stereotypes permeate the distinct but serially linked stages of the housing exchange process; the conditions under which stereotypes are deployed in each stage; and how such dynamics accumulate to affect ultimate processes of exclusion and inclusion. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork and more than 100 in-depth interviews in the Houston housing market, my findings demonstrate that widely shared, hierarchical stereotypes about race, supported by conditions such as network-necessitated rapport-building and discretion, compound discrimination across discrete stages of housing exchange. I argue that as this accumulation occurs, inequality between minorities and minority neighborhoods and whites and white neighborhoods is rendered durable.