It is not just that the limits of our language limit our thoughts, the world we find ourselves in is one we have helped to create, and this places constraints upon how we think the world anew. David Theo Goldberg American equality began as an oxymoron. Although American nationalism is dedicated to the proposition of freedom, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness, this proposition originally extended exclusively to a circumscribed community determined by race. While citizenship is now defined by more equitable means, racial inequality remains the norm. This is clear in a variety of ways but is especially visible spatially in that race continues to provide the organization of U.S. urban geography. Forty years after the striking down of the Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation, self-segregation is ensuring that cities in the United States remain the "most racially segregated urban areas in the world." Despite massive racial changes following the civil rights movement and the contemporary widespread acceptance of multiculturalism, massive segregation persists. As Jessie Daniels writes, whereas statistically whites are contemporarily more likely to be tolerant of racial diversity, "white people vote with their moving vans" whenever people of color represent more than seven percent of the population in their neighborhood. David Goldberg shows that residential racial segregation has persisted despite massive demographic shifts, from the creation of urban ghettos in the 1950s and 60s and white flight to the suburbs, followed by white "urban renewal" programs resulting in gentrification of those same urban spaces and a movement of color to the suburbs.
