This month is the 100th anniversary of the death of Jacob Riis, the Danish immigrant and celebrated chronicler of social malady whose outrage over turn-of-the-century inequities left him with plenty of psychic space to accommodate a full catalog of bigotries. Riis’s compassion for the underclasses was of the kind never distant from disdain. In “How the Other Half Lives,” his classic exploration of slum life in New York City, he evinces equal horror at the conditions in which new immigrants are forced to live and the cultural characteristics he believes contribute to their depredations. “Chinamen” are lost in their opium haze; Southern Italians are complacent idiots.

Expressions of prejudice were not uncommon among Progressive-era writers and thinkers, who at the same time devoted so much energy to improving the lives of whole populations against whom they seemed to feel such animated bias.

Today we find ourselves in the midst of a different, inverted paradox, one that makes it possible for whole news cycles to be given over to the luridly disgraceful words of someone like Donald Sterling while we are able comparatively to ignore a study like the one released in March, from U.C.L.A.’s Civil Rights Project, ranking New York as the state with the country’s most segregated schools. Greatly affecting that ranking, the study pointed out, were the demographics of public education in New York City where, despite the primacy of liberal values, the percentage of schools in which at least nine-tenths of the students were black or Hispanic rose sharply from 1989 to 2010.