In this time of high racial tensions, it is worth revisiting the debate over segregation. For more than half a century, from the Fair Housing Act of 1968 through the recent Supreme Court decision in Inclusive Communities, law has ostensibly set a goal of housing integration. But is this goal still sensible, in an age when most Americans live in expanding suburbs? This article analyzes the foundations of the traditional assumptions and concludes that: (1) the common perception that black Americans are trapped inside central cities is no longer true, as most black Americans now live in suburbs; and (2) today’s remarkable racial segregation in the suburbs appears to be largely the result of private ordering. The article relies on demographic, sociological, and economic sources (with a special focus on the Washington, D.C., area) to develop a simple model of how small preferences can lead to widespread suburban segregation. These findings may be discomforting for both progressive and conservative viewpoints of race relations. But the article also concludes that the old legal goal of integration of minority races into a majority-white culture is both naïve and patronizing for twenty-first century America, which is rapidly diversifying as more races and cultures migrate to our nation