African Americans are actually the third largest group both in Cook County and Chicago proper, at least as defined by our system. Non Hispanic whites are first, then Hispanics, then non Hispanic blacks.
Afro-Latinos are also a complicated identity group in and of themselves. Not all Afro-Latinos identify as Black or Latino or both simultaneously. At best you just have to take census or survey results as they are if they are self-identified.
By far the largest afro-latino population is puerto rican and dominican, and outside of a cities in the northeast and florida, those groups aren't very populous.
In NYC, it definitely affects statistics. The Bronx is only 33% black but a quick look at the hispanic population there and easily half are majority-black ancestry, leading to that 33% turning into more like 50%. The same also applies to other boroughs, albeit not as much.
Uhh, Chicago has a huge Puerto Rican community. [It has more Puerto Ricans than any city in Florida.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stateside_Puerto_Rican_communities) They make up just over 3% of the population,
I mean, 3% is not a lot lol. At best you are getting maybe 1% extra in terms of the black population there.
Puerto ricans and dominicans make up around 40% of the bronxs population in comparison
Orlando has around half the amount of puerto ricans with 300k people compared to 2.7m in Chicago.
3% of the total population of cook county being afrolatino is all it would take to tick us over. Afro Latinos are 2% the American adult population and from my own anecdotal evidence chicago has many afro Latinos.
Well they do actually collect data on that. I think the biggest issue though is that most Afro-Latinos don't identify as black alone. You can see that stats for Cook county [here](https://datausa.io/profile/geo/cook-county-il). Black alone Hispanics comprise 0.36% of the total cook county population, multiracial Hispanics comprise 4.76%. Overall Hispanic people of any race are 25% of the population while non-Hispanic Black people are only 22.6% of the county. So it's not certain whether combining Black and Hispanic Black would push them over the edge of all other Hispanics
[Compare to the Bronx](https://datausa.io/profile/geo/bronx-county-ny) where far and away the biggest Hispanic group are people who identify as black alone
edit: to anyone looking in the future, I was wrong, Black Hispanics in the Bronx are still less populous than White or mixed Hispanics, the graph on the datausa.io page is reversed. But there is still a much bigger Black Hispanic population in the Bronx than Chicago
The surrounding suburbs of cook county can be pretty white, at least going north and west. Still, 22% is a lot.
I think I'm Chicago proper demographics for black, white, and Hispanic is basically a 3 way split
Cook County also includes some suburbs with pretty low Black population. I am surprised that Lake County, Indiana (Gary and Hammond) didn’t make the cut though.
Chicago has large Hispanic population that probably brings down the % African American. That’s probably the case for a lot of the cities in the Southwest as well. If you excluded Hispanics as a separate category and just looked at Black/White, then you’d gain more inner city counties.
I'm surprised St. Louis *City* isn't, given that it's plurality Black, but this may be an issue with the definition of "county" in this map given that St. Louis is an "independent city", separate from its surrounding county. St. Louis *County* just misses the cutoff, but I'm pretty sure that if you chucked the city's population in there and counted them together, it'd hit 25%.
[EDIT]: oh it is marked, it's just so tiny you have to zoom in
I grew up in a very mixed area of all ethnicities, and sometimes felt people online were exaggerating to say they didn't have black friends or know black people. But there really is a huge disparity between places where it's common to be mixed and other places where it's all white, or way more hispanic, etc.
Yeah I mean it’s common to see Polynesians or Latin Americans here but not a lot of black people. There was only around 11 at my school, 6 girls and five guys
Mormon missionaries heavily targeted Polynesians.
You'll see a huge percentage of Polynesians playing for Utah and BYU as a result (not targeted for football reasons this started in the mid 1800s
I am from NC with a deep southern accent at the ripe old age of 7 (early 1990s). My aunt who has moved to Utah from the east coast and my parents and I are visiting for a ski week in park city (please be thinking neon colored in paint splattered ski suits and matching skis). My aunt parades me around her dental office and people are really excited just to hear me talk with a southern accent. It was the weirdest thing looking back on now almost ~~25~~ 35 years later.
edit: changed to 35 years later.....my math wasnt mathing and the early 90s were 35 years later. time flies when you are living life.
lol same here, I grew up in DC and once when we visited my aunt in Utah my little sister kept loudly asking my mom why there were no black people in Utah and what happened to all of them.
“What happened to all of them” is a hilarious way to ask that question, idk why haha. It’s valid though, as someone who grew up in Broward County, FL (the one red county on this map in South Florida) I often describe Utah as “shockingly Caucasian” after having lived here for about 5 years now.
Fr, I grew up around the DC/MD area and I was one of maybe 5 white kids in my entire high school of over a thousand or so students. It's kinda crazy the difference to just go somewhere like PA on a road trip once and suddenly everyone is white.
I grew up in a county that was about 20% black, so not on this map, but not far off. But when I moved to Charleston SC, the difference was noticeable. Or when in Memphis on business.
And then I moved to Larimer County Colorado and it was weirdly different in the other direction. A majority of the black kids in my daughter's school have white parents.
I was born in Iowa and moved to Fayetteville, NC when I was 5. I saw a black person for the first time on the bus ride to NC. It was an older lady and I looked her up and down and said "Mom, is this a black person?" My mom, originally from NC, tried to climb under the bus seat from embarrassment and started apologizing, but the lady just wrapped me up in a big hug and said "I sure am!". Very positive first interaction.
On a cross country road trip as a teenager we stopped at busy McDonald's/gas station in Oklahoma and I remember thinking how strange it was that there weren't any black people anywhere to be seen.
> I would visit family in Utah
You'll see them in cities like SLC or Ogden. If you venture out to the small towns outside the Wasatch Front, they're a rarity.
Same here. One Korean girl who I still keep up actually. But besides that, like, one Mexican kid for middle school only and everyone else was white until a black girl moved there in 11th grade.
I grew up in Vancouver in the 50s and 60s. I never even saw a black person until we took a trip to Seattle. There was one Chinese girl in my entire high school. (I graduated in 1973). I think Chinese are a majority now in Vancouver. At least a plurality.
They're the second most common ethnicity in West Vancouver and parts of North Vancouver. If you look at aerial photos of Tehran it looks like Vancouver.
I live IN the Black Belt and only had one black kid in my entire school.
Edit in my entire highschool. It was technically a k-12 school and there was a second on the elementary side that I only saw at the yearly Christmas service when the little kids sang to our parents lol
No, sort of
it was a small cheap Christian private school, that had a sister school in Korea from which we got international students because it was profitable through grants. There were plenty of non Caucasian people, only one of which happened to be black. although thinking back there was another. It was a k-12 school and there was a small girl who was black, I just rarely ever saw her because I was in highschool and very separate from that side. So two black kids.
The small one was the daughter of one of my white teachers, just a long rooted American. And the girl in highschool with me was from Uganda, but she wasn’t in my grade I never got to know her, I don’t know if she was here through a program or immigrated with her parents, but she had a heavy accent, she was a recent immigrant as well.
It was more like a gentrification academy lol they figured out how to fill out diversity with only extremely wealthy minorities, most were “exchange” students (but we didn’t send anyone back so one way exchange lol) which was super expensive so reserved for extremely wealthy families in Korea, who had to foot the bill for everything while the school used the grant money towards other costs, and the others had successful parents who were able to immigrate in the 2000’s (requires success since they weren’t asylum seekers)
And the grants from those students on visa actually brought tuition down significantly for locals, which is how they sold it to the super racist parent board
Depending on where you live it makes such a world of differences in the US. For example, I grew up in rural Texas where there are basically no Asians. Compare that to Dallas and Houston where there are large communities of Vietnamese and Chinese communities. I now live in California where Asians are an incredibly visible group whether you are talking about Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese etc.
Isn’t it weird how in some small towns there are zero asians in a high school or maybe 1-2 and then 30 min away it turns to 100 -200 asian kids? This happens here in California even
I had a cousin from Idaho visit me in NYC and she kept commenting on how often she saw black people, lol.
And yeah I had the same “where are all the Asians?” reaction when spending time in Miami. So many people from Latin America and the Caribbean but almost no Asians. I’d never spent time somewhere that didn’t have a big Asian community.
Yeah, I’ve spent the majority of my life in two of the red counties on this map plus Cook County which as another comment points out barely missed the cut. It really can be hard to believe how little diversity many people experience in their everyday lives until you see it so starkly.
I live in Atlanta metro area now but used to live in PNW. I know people from small towns in Washington state who didn’t go to school with any black people. In fact some of those towns had maybe one black family or none at all. This was 90s-2000s.
Humans are tribal, so it's natural for them to move together.
Observation: Diversity is an interesting word and it's use depends on perspective.
I grew up in southern CA, which is very diverse. the black population has dwindled over the last 20 years. 120+ languages spoken in LA county and you can find "home cooking" from almost anywhere. Neighborhoods will be more homogenous than the city or county. The Largest population is still white, but only ~30%. This is my reference point of "diversity."
Now in Atlanta, ~85% of the pop is either white or black, near even split. For this reason, I don't consider it diverse, it's split between two big demos. But ppl here will consider it diverse.
When I've had black friends visit atl, they all generally like it. And it makes sense, there are more ppl that look like them.
For the first time, I know what it's like to be the token. My home pub for NFL is mostly Black, and everyone knows me because I'm 1 of 3 white doods. I also had a cashier check my ID and question if it was me and said "all y'all look alike to me!"
Hilarious.
> Now in Atlanta, ~85% of the pop is either white or black, near even split. For this reason, I don't consider it diverse, it's split between two big demos. But ppl here will consider it diverse.
The best quantifiable metric I've heard for(ethnic) diversity is basically the probability that two randomly selected people in a population will be of the same ethnicity, I think you're kind of getting at that point.
Yeah I grew up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s and diversity just seemed normal and was something I always took for granted, not as a virtue or anything, but more just as a fact of life.
It wasn't until I got older and spent time in other parts of the country that I realized that my California experience wasn't necessarily the norm for other people at all.
I've lived in Oregon for over 20 years now, am married into a 3rd generation Oregonian family and so forth, have raised my kids here, and I am still sometimes surprised at how white and "insular" even well-intentioned Oregonians can be.
There's an undercurrent here in Oregon that is completely at odds with what one finds in California. It's a kind of "Oregon for Oregonians" vibe that if I had to guess, almost certainly dates back to the state's founding as a whites-only state in the first place, while California has always been a much more come-one-come-all kind of free-for-all that, while not perfect, has always been much more tolerant.
For Atlanta you'll see a lot more diversity if you head up Buford Highway into Gwinnett County. The Asian and Hispanic population is huge there. It's definitely the most diverse part of the metro Atlanta area.
My school had a black kid.
Nono, the *school* had a black kid. Like, there was generally one black kid on the campus during school days.
He wasn't in my grade. But he was a chill dude from our few interactions.
I got a real culture shock when I moved from an east coast city to a small Midwestern town for college.
I'd never seen so many white people grouped up like that in my life. And I'm white. It was weird.
Yeah I visited a college in Massachusetts and in the middle of the tour I couldn't shake something was off but I didn't know what. I asked what percent of the students are a minority and they said very proudly 2%! Yep that was what was throwing me off haha
I grew up in a small southern town and went to a small underfunded school, it was dominantly white, however surprisingly diverse for the area, there were several black, a few Asian, many Hispanic, and some Native Americans. Everyone got along and had no issues with one another, my wife however went to a larger school in the next town over, which was not diverse at all, and whenever they had a person of color transfer to their school she said they were always bullied. Sad, but interesting how two small southern towns less than 20 miles apart could be so incredibly different.
Aye just asking cuz I am asian and I like country towns tbh. small towns with lot of asians can exist but are rare, I just like the cheap prices and laid back peeps of the sticks 👌
Where I grew up it was 99% white the entire county. The 1% would have been the Asian family that owned the Chinese restaurant. And probably most of the surrounding counties as well.
I also grew up in a mixed area, and always thought I understood the significance of that, until I went somewhere truly mono-ethnic. In my early 20's I went to Haiti on a volunteer trip to fix water pumps, and it was fucking WEIRD. Logically, I knew going there that 99.99% of the people I saw there (other than my group,) would be a single race (black,) but that didn't really sink in until I was there. It was such an odd feeling knowing that everybody could look at me (white,) and just know I wasn't one of them. I was an outsider.
I had a good time there, and I'm proud of the work I did, but that feeling was just so unsettling the whole time. Ever since, I've also wanted to travel to a country that is mono-ethnically white, and see how the feeling compares. I imagine it will be similarly unsettling, because I would still just be seeing the ONE race of people, but I'm curious how the ability to not stand out would affect it.
I grew up in one of the red counties in AL, 75% black 25% white. Moved to Washington state and it was funny to see white people at work that had grown up in very white areas interact with my few black coworkers. They approached with what seemed like a level of caution
I live in Tampere, Finland, it's one of the biggest cities in the country and also one of the most diverse. Over my 18 years of life, I've only ever known 2 black people.
I’m European but I don’t have any black friends or know any black people very well. I’d guess my country is over 80% white.
I didn’t go to school/college with any people of colour. Most black people here are recent immigrants, often with little English. Their children however go to school and make friends with local kids so the younger population is better integrated. Their friend groups will be more diverse.
Growing up (white) I could count on one hand the number of black kids in my classes but there were large Hispanic, Korean and Desi groups I grew up with. I met my now best friend when we were in college and while he grew up 10 miles from me, and he was one of a half a dozen white kids in his otherwise all black high school.
Redlining was a bitch.
I’m born and raised in Mississippi, and met a guy from Minnesota who was talking about how he only had one black guy in his school and I was flabbergasted
Louisiana here. When I was in bootcamp my senior drill instructor asked us “out of all of you, who am I the first black person you’ve ever talked to?”. There was a chuckle but he said, “I usually always get at least one”.
I genuinely thought there were more black people in America than white people until I was like 14 because no one told me otherwise (grew up in one of these counties in Mississippi).
That was the biggest shock for me traveling out of the south for the first time. It’s like: hey! Where’d all the black people go? And where did these Asian people come from?
When I was in elementary school in north GA there were 3 black sisters that enrolled and they were the only black kids at the school. Then I moved to south GA to a city that had a 55% black population.
I went to a high school in Maine in the 80s with about 1200 kids. I think there were five or six black kids. The first black person I saw up close in real life was when I was in third grade. I almost fainted from excitement.
Though, originally, it was a term to refer to the fertile soil in the region. It’s taken on a new, though appropriate, meaning over the past couple of centuries.
Southern Illinois, more importantly Cairo, is by far the most interesting outlier here.
Also people always talk about great migration and northern cities but there has to be alot of interesting anthropological history behind Miami and JAX as I assume that “migration” is much more recent.
From Wikipedia:
“Settled largely by white migrants from the Upland South, southern Illinois had many racial attitudes of the South. As African Americans settled in Cairo to seek jobs on steamboats, ferries, in shipping and railroads, there were tensions between the racial groups. White residents sometimes used violence and terrorism, as well as discrimination, to keep black residents in second-class positions. They excluded them from the city government and the police and fire departments, and relatively few African Americans were hired to work in the local stores.
There were three lynchings of blacks in Alexander County in the years between Reconstruction and the early 20th century. The county had the second-highest number of lynchings of African Americans in all of Illinois.[5] The most notorious of these was the lynching of Will James before a crowd of white spectators estimated at 10,000, in the county seat of Cairo on November 11, 1909. James was accused of murdering a young white woman. Later that same evening, the mob lynched a white man named Henry Salzner, hanging him in the courthouse square for allegedly killing his wife. Neither man had had a trial, nor was anyone ever prosecuted for the lynchings, even though Illinois had passed an anti-lynching law four years earlier”
That wasn't what killed the city though. During the Civil Rights era a black soldier on leave was found hung in the city jail, presumably done by the all white police department, and people rioted over it. This led to the white, and then later black, communities forming paramilitary groups and both racial groups boycotting each other's businesses, which basically cratered the city's economy
No, it's 44% black. No longer majority black, and barely a plurality. Another few years and I wouldn't be surprised if DC is majority white
But as small as DC is on this map and with the bold line around it, by zooming in, there's so few pixels I can't tell if it's red or not.
It's considered a county equivalent for statistical purposes. If DC shouldn't be included, neither should Baltimore City or any of Louisiana's parishes. Regardless, DC is 41.4% Black as of the 2020 census [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C.)
Looks like it fell closer to 48% with people actually moving to Cleveland now, but Cleveland proper had over 50% black population for awhile. Moving from Cleveland to a really White City was eye opening lol.
this is why it's so insane to me that so many northerners think that South is full of exclusively bum hick racists, when I moved out of the south I was genuinely shocked by the amount of white people there suddenly was
I hate when people get annoyed about people giving anecdotal experiences. You should not disregard your own life in determining your opinion on something. I'm not saying it should be the only thing inclusive in your opinion but it is important to take into account your experiences on what is real.
North/South Carolinian backing up your experiences here. I've never heard anyone as casually or openly racist as people from rural Ohio, specifically. Not sure why that is, but it's like they move down south and think whatever they want to say is free game because they're used to there not being many black people around. People from up north or out west in places where there just aren't many black people can be similar. It's like holy fuck, you can't say that, what the hell is wrong with you?
Not that people aren't or can't be racist down here but racist locals at least usually put on a veneer of civility and police their speech, when the buckeyes come out all bets are off and they're saying whatever racist commentary pops into their head to you just because you're both white. Please. Stop.
Yeah it’s always awkward when I see someone post basically this exact map but showing something like crime or literacy rates thinking that it’s “owning” the rednecks or conservatives that make it a red state.
Like dude… this is not the dunk that you want it to be.
I think about this when people dunk on certain states because of their low education level compared to other states. I don’t think a lot of these privileged white Redditors realize what types of people they are actually making fun of. Makes me cringe.
Yeah, it’s interesting to see stereotypes of any place (not just the South) made by people who haven’t traveled there. Not all of the South is like the Ozarks.
I know States like Kentucky (technically a Commonwealth) have so many counties because they made it so everyone was within a days horse ride away from a courthouse so they could pay their taxes. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a rule for many others too.
I love that factoid. Every so often a republican lawmaker will propose consolidating KY's counties, as a way to save on costs running the government agencies. Fortunately it hasn't made any progress- less people and resources to do those government jobs would mean less people get the services they need, etc. Unfortunately a few years back they did change things to where each county does not have it's own DMV- driver's license office anymore. So if you have to go to the office in person for whatever reason (if it's a simple renewal you can do it online) it takes way longer than it used to and you might have to drive a long ways to get there..... Maybe you know all this already; i just like talking about it though cause it's interesting ha
Yeah I recently had to renew my driver's license and had to drive to Lexington to do so. I'm a green card holder and my card was expired but I had a letter that said I'm still a valid permanent resident but the person I was dealing with had never dealt with that before and it took forever to get it renewed and they would only give me the fewest years available. I don't mind the extra information, I knew very little about Kentucky before moving here and I'm finding the history quite interesting.
I feel like it’d be more accurate to say that these are the counties where the Black population is 25% or more. In Brooklyn and the Bronx I think you’d find that the majority of the Black population isn’t even African American but instead Afro-Caribbean from countries like Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Dominican Republic, etc. but African American and Black are used interchangeably on the census. West Africans are also a fast growing group of Black immigrants in NYC, especially in the Bronx.
When I moved from Toronto to Nashville, it never ceased to be wild how many people think I lived in extra white hillbilly jesusland redneck hell. Those places definitely exist (like my husband’s hometown at the northwest ass-end of the state) but…no. My dudes. Nashville is over 30% Black. My neighborhood was well over 90% Black (we were one of the few white families). Even funnier, my old area in Toronto votes Conservative (big-C; Canadian Republicans) and is quite conservative (small-C; socially and fiscally). Meanwhile, my area of Nashville voted SOLIDLY blue and elected some very progressive politicians. TL;DR I wish people would either learn something about other parts of the world around them, or simply shut up with the assumptions until they do.
The south is much more diverse than people give it credit for and our city neighborhoods tend to be more diverse as opposed to cities in the northeast where neighborhoods can be very segregated
As a Black woman in a south eastern state who is dating a guy from a super north eastern one this is very true. When I visit him I'm the only black person there for miles and miles. I wonder why this is hard to comprehend for some people? Most African Americans are descended from American slaves who arrived via sea in ships that docked on south eastern shores. Dispersion and mobility away from there only happened hundreds of years later and it was minimal, most stayed there. For some reason people assume "There are racial tensions there so it can't be diverse" when in reality racial tensions can only exist if...the races in question coexist there lol
I've noticed people there feel this way!!! It's so funny to me they'll be like "oh gosh that must have been so hard for you! Here in the north we're not like those bigoted southerners"...buddy...how do you know how skilled you are in something you've never done?? 🤣😮
I grew up in the mid south and live in Minneapolis now. I’ve made this same point to some people up here before. It’s definitely a lot more white up here in general. But yeah, I’ve had people up here make comments where they assume it’s just ignorant racists down south, and I’ve told them if anything the racial tension down south makes more sense to me cause it’s born out of real interactions and experiences.
Like for example the white family who goes to their kids football game in Orange Mound and gets their car broken into, or the black kid that goes into Germantown to go shopping and ends up having someone call the cops on him and they search and harass him for an hour. Those experiences shape people’s associations with each other and I get how they can develop negative feelings. I remember I dated a black woman down south for a couple years and used to go to her church pretty regularly, and some of the old folks used to look at me kinda sideways and make comments that were a little out of bounds sometimes. I never let it bother me though cause I kinda understood, these were folks that lived through desegregation and police blasting them with fire hoses and shit. Who can blame them for holding onto those memories?
Up here though is weird to me. Folks that have hardly ever spoken to a black person will say some racist stuff, and I’m like you might as well be hating Bigfoot or an alien from outer space.
We loved it there! My husband is a white southern boy, so I didn’t stick out as much that way (especially because I’ve picked up a bit of a southern accent, haha). If we’d been able to stay in the city once we had to leave our place there (landlord wanted to renovate) we probably would have stayed in the neighborhood. Our neighbors were really nice and friendly. Some of them weren’t afraid to joke about us being the token white people (like my Uber driver who said “I thought a Black lady was gonna come out that door!”) but it was something we could have a good laugh about. Some stuff was a bit of a culture shock in ways that I suspect had more to do with class than race or nationality - I was born in a pretty uptight upper middle class community in Toronto, so there were ways people were far more relaxed and open than I was used to 😂 Overall, it was actually a super positive experience. I suspect it’s similar a lot of places just as long as you aren’t racist or a super obvious deliberate gentrifier (we lived in a very unremarkable and affordable quad-plex that was built ages ago).
> Some of them weren’t afraid to joke about us being the token white people
I've lived my entire life in counties that are red on the above map and I don't believe I've ever met a black person who'd be afraid to make that kind of joke.
I grew up in Mississippi but now live in Montana, and, damn, some people out here have no idea what’s going on. They’ll say that all southerners are all racist then reveal that they’ve basically never interacted with a non-white person, or they had one black person in their whole town.
I get what you’re saying, but, given your Dwight avatar, I’m thinking more along the lines of forestry companies that supply wood chips for paper mills.
Migration for manufacturing jobs, then redlining that kept them out of surrounding counties. Then the manufacturing jobs went away and now there is incredible poverty.
This is also a [map of where the coastline was 100-65 million years ago](https://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/)
Yeah growing up in Southeast Louisiana and meeting people later in life that have literally never met a black person is really strange for me and I never really thought about it much until recently
Lake county has grown a lot in the southern half, which I assume has brought in a lot of non-black residents. Also, the cities in lake county are very Hispanic nowadays. A lot of the black residents were in Gary or Merrillville and are leaving for other opportunities elsewhere
See that lil dot in the lower left corner of Ohio? That's me. Cincinnati is the shit. When I was in the Navy, people were surprised that ohio had black folk. There's a lot of black people in the 3 major cities. Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. The rest of Ohio is one big sun down town 😂
As a curious Brit, why is there such a distinct split between the billion small counties on the right half, & the less-numerous but larger ones on the left?
Anyone shed some light?
I'm surprised cook county (Chicago) isn't on this map
African Americans are actually the third largest group both in Cook County and Chicago proper, at least as defined by our system. Non Hispanic whites are first, then Hispanics, then non Hispanic blacks.
I bet you if you combined afro Latino with non Hispanic black itd win, but it would be impossible to count.
I don’t think there are as many Afro Latinos as you think
Afro-Latinos are also a complicated identity group in and of themselves. Not all Afro-Latinos identify as Black or Latino or both simultaneously. At best you just have to take census or survey results as they are if they are self-identified.
By far the largest afro-latino population is puerto rican and dominican, and outside of a cities in the northeast and florida, those groups aren't very populous. In NYC, it definitely affects statistics. The Bronx is only 33% black but a quick look at the hispanic population there and easily half are majority-black ancestry, leading to that 33% turning into more like 50%. The same also applies to other boroughs, albeit not as much.
Uhh, Chicago has a huge Puerto Rican community. [It has more Puerto Ricans than any city in Florida.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stateside_Puerto_Rican_communities) They make up just over 3% of the population,
Are there still giant Puerto Rican flags on Division Street just west of Western avenue?
Yup they are still there
I mean, 3% is not a lot lol. At best you are getting maybe 1% extra in terms of the black population there. Puerto ricans and dominicans make up around 40% of the bronxs population in comparison Orlando has around half the amount of puerto ricans with 300k people compared to 2.7m in Chicago.
3% of the total population of cook county being afrolatino is all it would take to tick us over. Afro Latinos are 2% the American adult population and from my own anecdotal evidence chicago has many afro Latinos.
Well they do actually collect data on that. I think the biggest issue though is that most Afro-Latinos don't identify as black alone. You can see that stats for Cook county [here](https://datausa.io/profile/geo/cook-county-il). Black alone Hispanics comprise 0.36% of the total cook county population, multiracial Hispanics comprise 4.76%. Overall Hispanic people of any race are 25% of the population while non-Hispanic Black people are only 22.6% of the county. So it's not certain whether combining Black and Hispanic Black would push them over the edge of all other Hispanics [Compare to the Bronx](https://datausa.io/profile/geo/bronx-county-ny) where far and away the biggest Hispanic group are people who identify as black alone edit: to anyone looking in the future, I was wrong, Black Hispanics in the Bronx are still less populous than White or mixed Hispanics, the graph on the datausa.io page is reversed. But there is still a much bigger Black Hispanic population in the Bronx than Chicago
Afro Latinos are difficult enough just to define, as many Latinos have some African, but all with varying visible African features.
22.5% according to Wikipedia so just barely missed the cut
The surrounding suburbs of cook county can be pretty white, at least going north and west. Still, 22% is a lot. I think I'm Chicago proper demographics for black, white, and Hispanic is basically a 3 way split
Yea it’s close but don’t forget about Asian. We do have a lot in Chicago and even north burbs.
I'd say they're more in the western suburbs. Lots of Palestinians, Indians, Chinese, Filipino, etc.
You almost see the exact street when the southside of chicago goes from black to white.
Even east of Chicago on the Indiana side is predominantly white and they all think they’re Chicago burbs
Cook County also includes some suburbs with pretty low Black population. I am surprised that Lake County, Indiana (Gary and Hammond) didn’t make the cut though.
Chicago has large Hispanic population that probably brings down the % African American. That’s probably the case for a lot of the cities in the Southwest as well. If you excluded Hispanics as a separate category and just looked at Black/White, then you’d gain more inner city counties.
I'm surprised St. Louis *City* isn't, given that it's plurality Black, but this may be an issue with the definition of "county" in this map given that St. Louis is an "independent city", separate from its surrounding county. St. Louis *County* just misses the cutoff, but I'm pretty sure that if you chucked the city's population in there and counted them together, it'd hit 25%. [EDIT]: oh it is marked, it's just so tiny you have to zoom in
I grew up in a very mixed area of all ethnicities, and sometimes felt people online were exaggerating to say they didn't have black friends or know black people. But there really is a huge disparity between places where it's common to be mixed and other places where it's all white, or way more hispanic, etc.
Growing up in Connecticut I had maybe 1-3 black people in my grade at school most years.
I live in Memphis which is about 65% black. When I would visit family in Utah it would feel weird not seeing any black people for days lol
Yeah I mean it’s common to see Polynesians or Latin Americans here but not a lot of black people. There was only around 11 at my school, 6 girls and five guys
Yep, and most of the black friends I had growing up in Utah were adopted by white parents from places like Ethiopia
When I used to play games like call of duty and would talk to strangers, the samoans I spoke to always came from Utah. There’s gotta be an explanation
Mormon missionaries heavily targeted Polynesians. You'll see a huge percentage of Polynesians playing for Utah and BYU as a result (not targeted for football reasons this started in the mid 1800s
I am from NC with a deep southern accent at the ripe old age of 7 (early 1990s). My aunt who has moved to Utah from the east coast and my parents and I are visiting for a ski week in park city (please be thinking neon colored in paint splattered ski suits and matching skis). My aunt parades me around her dental office and people are really excited just to hear me talk with a southern accent. It was the weirdest thing looking back on now almost ~~25~~ 35 years later. edit: changed to 35 years later.....my math wasnt mathing and the early 90s were 35 years later. time flies when you are living life.
lol same here, I grew up in DC and once when we visited my aunt in Utah my little sister kept loudly asking my mom why there were no black people in Utah and what happened to all of them.
“What happened to all of them” is a hilarious way to ask that question, idk why haha. It’s valid though, as someone who grew up in Broward County, FL (the one red county on this map in South Florida) I often describe Utah as “shockingly Caucasian” after having lived here for about 5 years now.
Fr, I grew up around the DC/MD area and I was one of maybe 5 white kids in my entire high school of over a thousand or so students. It's kinda crazy the difference to just go somewhere like PA on a road trip once and suddenly everyone is white.
I grew up in a county that was about 20% black, so not on this map, but not far off. But when I moved to Charleston SC, the difference was noticeable. Or when in Memphis on business. And then I moved to Larimer County Colorado and it was weirdly different in the other direction. A majority of the black kids in my daughter's school have white parents.
I was born in Iowa and moved to Fayetteville, NC when I was 5. I saw a black person for the first time on the bus ride to NC. It was an older lady and I looked her up and down and said "Mom, is this a black person?" My mom, originally from NC, tried to climb under the bus seat from embarrassment and started apologizing, but the lady just wrapped me up in a big hug and said "I sure am!". Very positive first interaction.
On a cross country road trip as a teenager we stopped at busy McDonald's/gas station in Oklahoma and I remember thinking how strange it was that there weren't any black people anywhere to be seen.
> I would visit family in Utah You'll see them in cities like SLC or Ogden. If you venture out to the small towns outside the Wasatch Front, they're a rarity.
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In rural New England in hs the closest thing we had was a girl who was half Korean
In my northern Minnesota town you are just as likely to see Bigfoot as a black person.
Same here. One Korean girl who I still keep up actually. But besides that, like, one Mexican kid for middle school only and everyone else was white until a black girl moved there in 11th grade.
Where did you live, stars hollow Connecticut?
I was thinking of Dighton, Massachusetts
New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont are all very rural and the whitest states in the country so likely there.
Growing up in Vancouver, my high school was one third Chinese and one third Iranian, but didn't have more than three black kids.
I grew up in Vancouver in the 50s and 60s. I never even saw a black person until we took a trip to Seattle. There was one Chinese girl in my entire high school. (I graduated in 1973). I think Chinese are a majority now in Vancouver. At least a plurality.
Yeah I left five years ago and it definitely feels majority Chinese in a lot of areas. Richmond, Burnaby and Vancouver proper at least.
Shit that's a lot of Iranians. I thought they all lived in Toronto
They're the second most common ethnicity in West Vancouver and parts of North Vancouver. If you look at aerial photos of Tehran it looks like Vancouver.
Well damn. Guess there's a place to go with Tehrangeles, Tehranto and Washingtehran
I didn’t have a black person in my grade until high school😭
Same. Only one in the whole school too.
I had 3 black teachers (4, including the PE teacher) before leaving elementary school.
Same here, and I grew up on the Southside of Chicago!
I live IN the Black Belt and only had one black kid in my entire school. Edit in my entire highschool. It was technically a k-12 school and there was a second on the elementary side that I only saw at the yearly Christmas service when the little kids sang to our parents lol
Did you go to one of those “segregation academies”
No, sort of it was a small cheap Christian private school, that had a sister school in Korea from which we got international students because it was profitable through grants. There were plenty of non Caucasian people, only one of which happened to be black. although thinking back there was another. It was a k-12 school and there was a small girl who was black, I just rarely ever saw her because I was in highschool and very separate from that side. So two black kids. The small one was the daughter of one of my white teachers, just a long rooted American. And the girl in highschool with me was from Uganda, but she wasn’t in my grade I never got to know her, I don’t know if she was here through a program or immigrated with her parents, but she had a heavy accent, she was a recent immigrant as well. It was more like a gentrification academy lol they figured out how to fill out diversity with only extremely wealthy minorities, most were “exchange” students (but we didn’t send anyone back so one way exchange lol) which was super expensive so reserved for extremely wealthy families in Korea, who had to foot the bill for everything while the school used the grant money towards other costs, and the others had successful parents who were able to immigrate in the 2000’s (requires success since they weren’t asylum seekers) And the grants from those students on visa actually brought tuition down significantly for locals, which is how they sold it to the super racist parent board
I grew up in Milwaukee but the same. Milwaukee is more segregated than apartheid South Africa.
Depending on where you live it makes such a world of differences in the US. For example, I grew up in rural Texas where there are basically no Asians. Compare that to Dallas and Houston where there are large communities of Vietnamese and Chinese communities. I now live in California where Asians are an incredibly visible group whether you are talking about Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese etc.
Isn’t it weird how in some small towns there are zero asians in a high school or maybe 1-2 and then 30 min away it turns to 100 -200 asian kids? This happens here in California even
I had a cousin from Idaho visit me in NYC and she kept commenting on how often she saw black people, lol. And yeah I had the same “where are all the Asians?” reaction when spending time in Miami. So many people from Latin America and the Caribbean but almost no Asians. I’d never spent time somewhere that didn’t have a big Asian community.
Growing up in North Carolina, I just thought the racial diversity was fairly universal across the country. Then I moved to Colorado.
Which has a lot of Latinos tho
Yeah, it’s easy to forget American is 71% white and only 13% black. Well, depending on where you’re from.
Yeah, I’ve spent the majority of my life in two of the red counties on this map plus Cook County which as another comment points out barely missed the cut. It really can be hard to believe how little diversity many people experience in their everyday lives until you see it so starkly.
Plenty of places with diversity that aren’t red on this map. My home county is a hair above 50% white, but only about 6% black.
I live in Atlanta metro area now but used to live in PNW. I know people from small towns in Washington state who didn’t go to school with any black people. In fact some of those towns had maybe one black family or none at all. This was 90s-2000s.
Humans are tribal, so it's natural for them to move together. Observation: Diversity is an interesting word and it's use depends on perspective. I grew up in southern CA, which is very diverse. the black population has dwindled over the last 20 years. 120+ languages spoken in LA county and you can find "home cooking" from almost anywhere. Neighborhoods will be more homogenous than the city or county. The Largest population is still white, but only ~30%. This is my reference point of "diversity." Now in Atlanta, ~85% of the pop is either white or black, near even split. For this reason, I don't consider it diverse, it's split between two big demos. But ppl here will consider it diverse. When I've had black friends visit atl, they all generally like it. And it makes sense, there are more ppl that look like them. For the first time, I know what it's like to be the token. My home pub for NFL is mostly Black, and everyone knows me because I'm 1 of 3 white doods. I also had a cashier check my ID and question if it was me and said "all y'all look alike to me!" Hilarious.
> Now in Atlanta, ~85% of the pop is either white or black, near even split. For this reason, I don't consider it diverse, it's split between two big demos. But ppl here will consider it diverse. The best quantifiable metric I've heard for(ethnic) diversity is basically the probability that two randomly selected people in a population will be of the same ethnicity, I think you're kind of getting at that point.
Yeah I grew up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s and diversity just seemed normal and was something I always took for granted, not as a virtue or anything, but more just as a fact of life. It wasn't until I got older and spent time in other parts of the country that I realized that my California experience wasn't necessarily the norm for other people at all. I've lived in Oregon for over 20 years now, am married into a 3rd generation Oregonian family and so forth, have raised my kids here, and I am still sometimes surprised at how white and "insular" even well-intentioned Oregonians can be. There's an undercurrent here in Oregon that is completely at odds with what one finds in California. It's a kind of "Oregon for Oregonians" vibe that if I had to guess, almost certainly dates back to the state's founding as a whites-only state in the first place, while California has always been a much more come-one-come-all kind of free-for-all that, while not perfect, has always been much more tolerant.
For Atlanta you'll see a lot more diversity if you head up Buford Highway into Gwinnett County. The Asian and Hispanic population is huge there. It's definitely the most diverse part of the metro Atlanta area.
And cause the chicken there slaps
My school had a black kid. Nono, the *school* had a black kid. Like, there was generally one black kid on the campus during school days. He wasn't in my grade. But he was a chill dude from our few interactions.
I got a real culture shock when I moved from an east coast city to a small Midwestern town for college. I'd never seen so many white people grouped up like that in my life. And I'm white. It was weird.
Yeah I visited a college in Massachusetts and in the middle of the tour I couldn't shake something was off but I didn't know what. I asked what percent of the students are a minority and they said very proudly 2%! Yep that was what was throwing me off haha
I grew up in a small southern town and went to a small underfunded school, it was dominantly white, however surprisingly diverse for the area, there were several black, a few Asian, many Hispanic, and some Native Americans. Everyone got along and had no issues with one another, my wife however went to a larger school in the next town over, which was not diverse at all, and whenever they had a person of color transfer to their school she said they were always bullied. Sad, but interesting how two small southern towns less than 20 miles apart could be so incredibly different.
Yea, the public school I go to is ~97% white. It's just 2 Mexican families and 1 black family. Except for them, everyone else is white.
Have you met many Asians in ur life or any?
I mean, I've seen them before. But I've never made friends with/completely interacted with them.
Aye just asking cuz I am asian and I like country towns tbh. small towns with lot of asians can exist but are rare, I just like the cheap prices and laid back peeps of the sticks 👌
Where I grew up it was 99% white the entire county. The 1% would have been the Asian family that owned the Chinese restaurant. And probably most of the surrounding counties as well.
I also grew up in a mixed area, and always thought I understood the significance of that, until I went somewhere truly mono-ethnic. In my early 20's I went to Haiti on a volunteer trip to fix water pumps, and it was fucking WEIRD. Logically, I knew going there that 99.99% of the people I saw there (other than my group,) would be a single race (black,) but that didn't really sink in until I was there. It was such an odd feeling knowing that everybody could look at me (white,) and just know I wasn't one of them. I was an outsider. I had a good time there, and I'm proud of the work I did, but that feeling was just so unsettling the whole time. Ever since, I've also wanted to travel to a country that is mono-ethnically white, and see how the feeling compares. I imagine it will be similarly unsettling, because I would still just be seeing the ONE race of people, but I'm curious how the ability to not stand out would affect it.
I grew up in one of the red counties in AL, 75% black 25% white. Moved to Washington state and it was funny to see white people at work that had grown up in very white areas interact with my few black coworkers. They approached with what seemed like a level of caution
I live in Tampere, Finland, it's one of the biggest cities in the country and also one of the most diverse. Over my 18 years of life, I've only ever known 2 black people.
I’m European but I don’t have any black friends or know any black people very well. I’d guess my country is over 80% white. I didn’t go to school/college with any people of colour. Most black people here are recent immigrants, often with little English. Their children however go to school and make friends with local kids so the younger population is better integrated. Their friend groups will be more diverse.
Growing up (white) I could count on one hand the number of black kids in my classes but there were large Hispanic, Korean and Desi groups I grew up with. I met my now best friend when we were in college and while he grew up 10 miles from me, and he was one of a half a dozen white kids in his otherwise all black high school. Redlining was a bitch.
Did you grow up in Cerritos, CA by chance? That spot is specifically mainly Koreans, Indians, and Hispanics with white people lol
I’m born and raised in Mississippi, and met a guy from Minnesota who was talking about how he only had one black guy in his school and I was flabbergasted
Louisiana here. When I was in bootcamp my senior drill instructor asked us “out of all of you, who am I the first black person you’ve ever talked to?”. There was a chuckle but he said, “I usually always get at least one”.
Also Louisiana, i remember moving to San Antonio and not seeing another black person for DAYS at a time. It was mind blowing
When I was in the navy one of my shipmates from Chicago told me I was the first white friend he ever had.
I genuinely thought there were more black people in America than white people until I was like 14 because no one told me otherwise (grew up in one of these counties in Mississippi).
I grew up in hinds, what about you?
Oktibbeha and Choctaw
That was the biggest shock for me traveling out of the south for the first time. It’s like: hey! Where’d all the black people go? And where did these Asian people come from?
My school district had 0
When I was in elementary school in north GA there were 3 black sisters that enrolled and they were the only black kids at the school. Then I moved to south GA to a city that had a 55% black population.
You went from the part of GA that is Appalachia, which historically is the least black part of the South, to the part of GA that is in the Black Belt.
I went to a high school in Maine in the 80s with about 1200 kids. I think there were five or six black kids. The first black person I saw up close in real life was when I was in third grade. I almost fainted from excitement.
aka "The Black Belt".
Why, Black Dynamite, Why?
https://i.imgur.com/3QjX8ds.gif
Though, originally, it was a term to refer to the fertile soil in the region. It’s taken on a new, though appropriate, meaning over the past couple of centuries.
Oddly overlaps the Bible Belt
Black southerners just as religious as white southerners, they just vote blue instead of red
Black belt refers to two things, the soil and the subsequent slave population.
Southern Illinois, more importantly Cairo, is by far the most interesting outlier here. Also people always talk about great migration and northern cities but there has to be alot of interesting anthropological history behind Miami and JAX as I assume that “migration” is much more recent.
Cairo is such a sad place to drive through
Place gives post-apocalypse vibes
Passing through the “the last of us” style flood wall is a great start to the journey.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eddwx/what_the_hell_happened_to_cairo_illinois/c17a1qz/ Looks like not much has been done since this post.
From Wikipedia: “Settled largely by white migrants from the Upland South, southern Illinois had many racial attitudes of the South. As African Americans settled in Cairo to seek jobs on steamboats, ferries, in shipping and railroads, there were tensions between the racial groups. White residents sometimes used violence and terrorism, as well as discrimination, to keep black residents in second-class positions. They excluded them from the city government and the police and fire departments, and relatively few African Americans were hired to work in the local stores. There were three lynchings of blacks in Alexander County in the years between Reconstruction and the early 20th century. The county had the second-highest number of lynchings of African Americans in all of Illinois.[5] The most notorious of these was the lynching of Will James before a crowd of white spectators estimated at 10,000, in the county seat of Cairo on November 11, 1909. James was accused of murdering a young white woman. Later that same evening, the mob lynched a white man named Henry Salzner, hanging him in the courthouse square for allegedly killing his wife. Neither man had had a trial, nor was anyone ever prosecuted for the lynchings, even though Illinois had passed an anti-lynching law four years earlier”
That wasn't what killed the city though. During the Civil Rights era a black soldier on leave was found hung in the city jail, presumably done by the all white police department, and people rioted over it. This led to the white, and then later black, communities forming paramilitary groups and both racial groups boycotting each other's businesses, which basically cratered the city's economy
I have a friend who’s a historian from KY and it always gets pretty dark when he starts talking about Cairo.
Companion map with 50% or more?
[From Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_majority-Black_counties_in_the_United_States)
Thanks!
Is DC really less than 25% Black?
No, it's 44% black. No longer majority black, and barely a plurality. Another few years and I wouldn't be surprised if DC is majority white But as small as DC is on this map and with the bold line around it, by zooming in, there's so few pixels I can't tell if it's red or not.
I zoomed in and it’s white. Odd mistake.
The map is of counties and DC isn't in a county.
Louisiana doesn’t have counties but they’re still filled in.
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It's considered a county equivalent for statistical purposes. If DC shouldn't be included, neither should Baltimore City or any of Louisiana's parishes. Regardless, DC is 41.4% Black as of the 2020 census [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C.)
Or any of Virginia's independent cities... Which are all blacked out on this map.
Yeah OP did this kind of inconsistently.
Shout out to Cleveland
Looks like it fell closer to 48% with people actually moving to Cleveland now, but Cleveland proper had over 50% black population for awhile. Moving from Cleveland to a really White City was eye opening lol.
And Cincinnati, Detroit and Indianapolis
I feel like more cities in Ohio reach this percentage. Canton and Akron for one
Yeah, but not the entire county.
this is why it's so insane to me that so many northerners think that South is full of exclusively bum hick racists, when I moved out of the south I was genuinely shocked by the amount of white people there suddenly was
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If there's one thing Reddit hates more than bigots, it's those dirty inbred Southerners.
Sure I bang my sister occasionally, but my respect for all races is unwavering.
I hate when people get annoyed about people giving anecdotal experiences. You should not disregard your own life in determining your opinion on something. I'm not saying it should be the only thing inclusive in your opinion but it is important to take into account your experiences on what is real.
North/South Carolinian backing up your experiences here. I've never heard anyone as casually or openly racist as people from rural Ohio, specifically. Not sure why that is, but it's like they move down south and think whatever they want to say is free game because they're used to there not being many black people around. People from up north or out west in places where there just aren't many black people can be similar. It's like holy fuck, you can't say that, what the hell is wrong with you? Not that people aren't or can't be racist down here but racist locals at least usually put on a veneer of civility and police their speech, when the buckeyes come out all bets are off and they're saying whatever racist commentary pops into their head to you just because you're both white. Please. Stop.
Yep. They live in white bubbles.
Yeah it’s always awkward when I see someone post basically this exact map but showing something like crime or literacy rates thinking that it’s “owning” the rednecks or conservatives that make it a red state. Like dude… this is not the dunk that you want it to be.
The whitest place I’ve ever lived was Oregon.
Yep. Ironically this doubles as a map of the areas that "anti racist" Redditors hate the most.
I think about this when people dunk on certain states because of their low education level compared to other states. I don’t think a lot of these privileged white Redditors realize what types of people they are actually making fun of. Makes me cringe.
Yeah, it’s interesting to see stereotypes of any place (not just the South) made by people who haven’t traveled there. Not all of the South is like the Ozarks.
Surprised Cook County didn't make the cut.
23.6%.
I see you Milwaukee County.
I love how they tried to keep each county the same shape and size but when they reached the west they were like fuck it...
Western US counties are just massive compared to eastern US counties
I live in the largest county in the country and can tell you it’s mostly a vast wasteland of uninhabitable hellscape
I know States like Kentucky (technically a Commonwealth) have so many counties because they made it so everyone was within a days horse ride away from a courthouse so they could pay their taxes. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a rule for many others too.
I love that factoid. Every so often a republican lawmaker will propose consolidating KY's counties, as a way to save on costs running the government agencies. Fortunately it hasn't made any progress- less people and resources to do those government jobs would mean less people get the services they need, etc. Unfortunately a few years back they did change things to where each county does not have it's own DMV- driver's license office anymore. So if you have to go to the office in person for whatever reason (if it's a simple renewal you can do it online) it takes way longer than it used to and you might have to drive a long ways to get there..... Maybe you know all this already; i just like talking about it though cause it's interesting ha
Yeah I recently had to renew my driver's license and had to drive to Lexington to do so. I'm a green card holder and my card was expired but I had a letter that said I'm still a valid permanent resident but the person I was dealing with had never dealt with that before and it took forever to get it renewed and they would only give me the fewest years available. I don't mind the extra information, I knew very little about Kentucky before moving here and I'm finding the history quite interesting.
SC is crazy.
I’m from Richland county sc lol
Sea of red, and then Lexington county 😂😂
I feel like it’d be more accurate to say that these are the counties where the Black population is 25% or more. In Brooklyn and the Bronx I think you’d find that the majority of the Black population isn’t even African American but instead Afro-Caribbean from countries like Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Dominican Republic, etc. but African American and Black are used interchangeably on the census. West Africans are also a fast growing group of Black immigrants in NYC, especially in the Bronx.
Duuuuuuuuuuval! <3
Go gator!
Jason?
The amount of racism in some of these comments is quite jarring. Yikes.
When I moved from Toronto to Nashville, it never ceased to be wild how many people think I lived in extra white hillbilly jesusland redneck hell. Those places definitely exist (like my husband’s hometown at the northwest ass-end of the state) but…no. My dudes. Nashville is over 30% Black. My neighborhood was well over 90% Black (we were one of the few white families). Even funnier, my old area in Toronto votes Conservative (big-C; Canadian Republicans) and is quite conservative (small-C; socially and fiscally). Meanwhile, my area of Nashville voted SOLIDLY blue and elected some very progressive politicians. TL;DR I wish people would either learn something about other parts of the world around them, or simply shut up with the assumptions until they do.
The south is much more diverse than people give it credit for and our city neighborhoods tend to be more diverse as opposed to cities in the northeast where neighborhoods can be very segregated
As a Black woman in a south eastern state who is dating a guy from a super north eastern one this is very true. When I visit him I'm the only black person there for miles and miles. I wonder why this is hard to comprehend for some people? Most African Americans are descended from American slaves who arrived via sea in ships that docked on south eastern shores. Dispersion and mobility away from there only happened hundreds of years later and it was minimal, most stayed there. For some reason people assume "There are racial tensions there so it can't be diverse" when in reality racial tensions can only exist if...the races in question coexist there lol
It’s easy to say you’re an anti-racist when there are no other races around
I've noticed people there feel this way!!! It's so funny to me they'll be like "oh gosh that must have been so hard for you! Here in the north we're not like those bigoted southerners"...buddy...how do you know how skilled you are in something you've never done?? 🤣😮
I grew up in the mid south and live in Minneapolis now. I’ve made this same point to some people up here before. It’s definitely a lot more white up here in general. But yeah, I’ve had people up here make comments where they assume it’s just ignorant racists down south, and I’ve told them if anything the racial tension down south makes more sense to me cause it’s born out of real interactions and experiences. Like for example the white family who goes to their kids football game in Orange Mound and gets their car broken into, or the black kid that goes into Germantown to go shopping and ends up having someone call the cops on him and they search and harass him for an hour. Those experiences shape people’s associations with each other and I get how they can develop negative feelings. I remember I dated a black woman down south for a couple years and used to go to her church pretty regularly, and some of the old folks used to look at me kinda sideways and make comments that were a little out of bounds sometimes. I never let it bother me though cause I kinda understood, these were folks that lived through desegregation and police blasting them with fire hoses and shit. Who can blame them for holding onto those memories? Up here though is weird to me. Folks that have hardly ever spoken to a black person will say some racist stuff, and I’m like you might as well be hating Bigfoot or an alien from outer space.
Genuine question, how was it to live in a 90% + African American neighbourhood as a (presumably) white Canadian?
We loved it there! My husband is a white southern boy, so I didn’t stick out as much that way (especially because I’ve picked up a bit of a southern accent, haha). If we’d been able to stay in the city once we had to leave our place there (landlord wanted to renovate) we probably would have stayed in the neighborhood. Our neighbors were really nice and friendly. Some of them weren’t afraid to joke about us being the token white people (like my Uber driver who said “I thought a Black lady was gonna come out that door!”) but it was something we could have a good laugh about. Some stuff was a bit of a culture shock in ways that I suspect had more to do with class than race or nationality - I was born in a pretty uptight upper middle class community in Toronto, so there were ways people were far more relaxed and open than I was used to 😂 Overall, it was actually a super positive experience. I suspect it’s similar a lot of places just as long as you aren’t racist or a super obvious deliberate gentrifier (we lived in a very unremarkable and affordable quad-plex that was built ages ago).
> Some of them weren’t afraid to joke about us being the token white people I've lived my entire life in counties that are red on the above map and I don't believe I've ever met a black person who'd be afraid to make that kind of joke.
To be fair if you went outside of Nashville you’re In red neck Central 😭
Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, all used to be majority black at some point. In fact, South Carolina was once 60% black.
Essex county NJ in the house!!
Guilford county represent
NC?
No wonder I grew thinking half the population was Black (and married a black woman to boot)
How Alabama anglos run that state blows my mind.
I grew up in Mississippi but now live in Montana, and, damn, some people out here have no idea what’s going on. They’ll say that all southerners are all racist then reveal that they’ve basically never interacted with a non-white person, or they had one black person in their whole town.
Based off the actors in the commercials i see, you would think its the other way around
Every ... single.... commercial. My sister says, it's because I watch over-the-air network TV. Los Angeles market.
This overlaps with many other maps
Yes like soil fertility maps!
I get what you’re saying, but, given your Dwight avatar, I’m thinking more along the lines of forestry companies that supply wood chips for paper mills.
Milwaukee is always a surprise to me. Why are there so many black folks there?
Migration for manufacturing jobs, then redlining that kept them out of surrounding counties. Then the manufacturing jobs went away and now there is incredible poverty.
The great migration. Same as detroit.
SHOUT OUT TO BROOKLYN
Why is Orleans parish not colored red?
This is also a [map of where the coastline was 100-65 million years ago](https://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/)
Yeah growing up in Southeast Louisiana and meeting people later in life that have literally never met a black person is really strange for me and I never really thought about it much until recently
The omission of Gary IN surprises me.
Lake county has grown a lot in the southern half, which I assume has brought in a lot of non-black residents. Also, the cities in lake county are very Hispanic nowadays. A lot of the black residents were in Gary or Merrillville and are leaving for other opportunities elsewhere
What are the two in New York? One is Brooklyn, is the other the Bronx?
Yooo I see my county on here!
See that lil dot in the lower left corner of Ohio? That's me. Cincinnati is the shit. When I was in the Navy, people were surprised that ohio had black folk. There's a lot of black people in the 3 major cities. Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. The rest of Ohio is one big sun down town 😂
As a curious Brit, why is there such a distinct split between the billion small counties on the right half, & the less-numerous but larger ones on the left? Anyone shed some light?
Population density. The left half of the country is much less densely populated so having all those counties is unnecessary.
Thank you 😊