MICHAEL BARONE: ‘Segregation’ Is a Deliberate Act.

Those familiar with the America that emerged victorious but still largely racially segregated after World War II should have no trouble appreciating how racial discrimination and racial segregation have almost entirely disappeared in voting, in the jobs market and in public accommodations. Yet some of the most knowledgeable and perceptive writers and analysts still sometimes use the verb “segregate” without identifying who is doing the segregating.

One example is Clare Malone, a former FiveThirtyEight analyst and now a New Yorker writer. Back in a March 2016 column on how people with low social connectedness tended to vote for Donald Trump, I quoted her analysis of the crowd at a Trump rally. “Something inspirational seems to be happening among the assembled — a sense of collective identity being discovered,” she wrote. The observation stands up well seven years later.

Similarly sharp were her descriptions of two Cleveland suburbs — Shaker Heights, where she grew up, a high-income suburb east of downtown planned a century ago, and Parma, a working-class enclave that grew up west of the Cuyahoga River factories in the 1950s and 1960s.

The differences are not just economic but also ethnic. Parma is populated in large part by the descendants of pre-1924 immigrants from Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. Shaker Heights started off “exclusive,” meaning no Jews or blacks, but has substantial percentages of both groups now, with most of the whites and blacks being college-educated. It’s an unusual mix, similar to Montclair, New Jersey, and Oak Park, Illinois.

Malone ignores those differences, however, when she quotes a Census Bureau finding that “a ‘typical white’ American lives in a neighborhood that’s 75 percent white.” She then adds, “American suburban life seems to regress to a mean of segregation.”

America is basically 75% white. That’s not segregation, it’s the norm.