Re-blogged from zuky:

New York Magazine has published a list of the city’s most “livable” neighborhoods, using a weighted index which assigns 6% importance to “diversity”. The highest ranked neighorhoods are for the most part those with the lowest diversity scores. Last place on the list? Harlem.

I’m not interested enough to actually do the math but I suspect that we could establish a negative correlation in these rankings between “diversity” and “overall ranking”. I say we drop this whole “weighted index” pretense: white people view a neighborhood as more “livable” in direct proportion to how few people of color live there. Moreover: white people especially try to avoid Black folks, followed by Brown folks, followed by Yellow folks, in determining who to flee from and who can be tolerated as “livable”. This rule of thumb underlies published “rankings” like this, which feed into real estate values, which feed social investment in those neighborhoods, which feeds back into all those other factors which have negative correlations to “diversity”. All of this convoluted numerical self-justification is also known as “racism”.