For many Americans of color, the promise of local democracy seems unfulfilled. On average, African Americans and Latinos are underrepresented descriptively on municipal councils, ideologically distant from local elected officials, and poorly represented in the overall ideological orientation of local government policy. At the same time, however, the picture is not uniformly bleak: There are perceptible differences in how well or how poorly different local governments perform in substantively representing the preferences of African American and Latino constituents.

Finally, chapter 11 considers “differentiated” citizenship. This model would incorporate people into the political life of the city as members of their cultural subgroups rather than as individuals. Differentiated citizenship thus enables historically marginalized groups to assert collective rights that have often been denied them under the individualistic liberal model. These groups would have the ability to exercise control over places with which they share deep cultural, economic and political ties. Differentiated citizenship thus attempts to steer between republican and postmodern citizenship. It calls for recognition of normative subgroups in society, but in a manner that will incorporate those subgroups into political life, rather than enabling them to withdraw from political life. Differentiated citizenship rejects both the republican insistence upon a homogenous political community that rigidly polices its borders as well as the postmodern refusal to draw boundary lines at all. Ultimately, differentiated citizenship is problematic because it reinforces the marginalization of the groups it wishes to empower by legitimizing the status quo of racially identified places.