CNN
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Buckhead wants to cut out of the Black Mecca.
According to a September analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about 54% of the residents surveyed “strongly or somewhat support” seceding from Georgia’s capital, ostensibly spurred by fears of recent spikes in crime across the city.
Racial demographics complicate the data. Well-to-do Buckhead is a majority-White neighborhood; Atlanta, majority Black. Some observers worry that cityhood for Buckhead could be devastating, removing access to revenue from a critical tax base and even deepening racial tensions.
The combustible, decades-long debate over Buckhead shines a light on a broader racial reality in the US.
“Today, you really have two kinds of racial residential segregation,” Stephen Menendian, the assistant director and director of research at UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute and the lead author of a June report on racial residential segregation in the 21st century, told CNN. “Within large cities, you have racially identifiable neighborhoods and schools. You also have suburbs that are White and affluent, and then suburbs that are heavily non-White and much poorer.”
As Sheryll Cashin, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, explains it, the consequences of residential caste are vast.
“The successful have seceded from the struggling. Highly educated and affluent people tend to live in their own neighborhoods and support policies like exclusionary zoning and neighborhood school assignments that lock others out and concentrate advantage,” she writes in her essential new book, “White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality.”
