Abstract
This paper is focused on the impact of cybernetics on social theories of segregation. We historically trace cybernetic models as they moved from information theory into sociology, where they were used to justify de facto segregation as part of 'self-organizing' emergent tendencies in urban environments. Our work is intended to support the fields of spatial justice, Black geographies, and critical quantitative methodologies, by exposing how cybernetic ideas shaped sociological demographic models that racialized urban space. We discuss how the concept of 'racial entropy' and other spatial concepts (evenness, isolation, exposure) emerged as part of a stochastic image of racialized population dynamics. Our objective is to expose how cybernetic ideas came to problematically influence our current discourse about school segregation. These cybernetic ideas were part of a paradigm shift in sociological theories of race relations in the 1970s, when information theory generated a new image of urban space, race, and community.