As demographers and policy makers laud steps toward neighborhood integration, urban ethnographers remind us that diverse communities can perpetuate inequality if the dynamics that produce it are left unaddressed. This qualitative study focuses a cultural lens on social relationships in two stably diverse neighborhoods, mapping the connections between what the author terms “habits of whiteness” and dimensions of racial domination. One of the habits is anxiety, exhibited as an amplified sense of danger in multiethnic spaces, which results in greater social control due to a normative emphasis on social order, rules, and surveillance. A second is ambivalence, which manifests as the ability to simultaneously express appreciation for yet feel discomfort about multiethnic diversity, and it results in social distance as people limit their engagement with “others” and legitimize social and geographic boundaries as natural. This study thus contributes a detailed cultural understanding of the processes that reproduce racial hierarchy in stably multiethnic spaces.
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