The Only Thing Integrating America
Cities with a large military presence are some of the most diverse places in the country.
Stephen Menendian, a researcher at UC Berkeley, has long worried that Americans don’t understand is. They couldn’t, he reasoned: Much of the research on it has failed to fully capture its scope. The dominant tool that scholars have used to assess the problem, known as the dissimilarity index, measures how racially mixed a given area is. According to the dissimilarity index alone, America is more integrated now than at any point in the 20th century. But the index, although useful, can understate the issue, missing neighborhoods that are intensely segregated within
