How does racial hegemony influence trust and ownership?
Based on the racial and ethnic enclaves that form in the various regions of the City of Chicago, I hypothesized that there might be some noticeable differences in trust or social cohesion between communities that have a high degree of racial hegemony, or where there is clear racial majority, and those that do not. In order to measure this, I examined the Chicago Population Counts data set from the City of Chicago Data portal. This data set combines metrics from the Census Bureau, American Community Survey, and other city-wide sources. For each community area, I calculated the Percentage Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White. I then categorized each community that had greater than or equal to 52% of one race as being composed of the majority that race. The total counts can be seen in Table 3 below.
Calculating the average trust in local government across all community areas yielded a result of 43.58% people across community areas saying they trust the local government. On average, across all community areas, 44.45% of people say they feel like they belong. As shown in Table 3, the levels of trust in community areas with a dominant racial group were not better compared to the trust levels in community areas with no dominant racial group (labeled “None” and yielding 47.44% trust on average). Trust in the Asian and White neighborhoods was higher than average while in the Black and Hispanic neighborhoods it was less than average. These results lead me to believe that it is not the nature of racial hegemony that is impacting levels of trust. In fact, the lower levels of trust in primarily Black and Hispanic areas and higher levels in primarily White areas reflect the correlations found with Hardship, which I will examine further in the Trust chapter. Looking at the sense of community belonging reported in these community areas, it is again slightly higher than average in community areas with no racial hegemony, higher than average in White and Asian communities, and below average in Black and Hispanic communities. While there are differences between racial groups, there is no distinct difference between neighborhoods where there is a clear dominant racial group and neighborhoods without.