The 2010 Census: The Ridiculously Detailed New York Times Map

(Ahem: Based on 2005-2009 American Community Survey data, for the sticklers out there.) A racial profile of the United States, block by block, courtesy of the New York Times:



As you can see, this map divides human beings into the five standard types: white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and other. And it characterizes every single city block in the country according to those types. It scales up show whole regions of the country, and scales down so you can check out your own corner of your neighborhood. It is, as the title of this blog post indicates, ridiculously detailed. Which is to say, if you are the sort of person who can spend hours pouring over the patterns of segregation/integration in various US cities (hi!), an enormous time sink.

And, for good measure, they include maps like this, which shows Hispanic population by county, and scales down to individual census tracts:

Bloomberg Wins, More or Less

The New York Times has an interactive block-by-block map of Tuesday's vote for mayor in New York City:



Plutocrat Michael Bloomberg beat out bureaucrat William Thompson to win a third term as mayor. He is a popular mayor, but he rammed a repeal of term limits through the city council and spent roughly nine gajillion dollars of his personal fortune on his re-election, which may have turned off some New Yorkers, and the election ended up much closer than most anyone expected - he won only 51-46. (The Times says, "[t]he results in the mayor’s race are likely to be personally bruising to Mr. Bloomberg, a man of no small ego who told the public last fall that his financial acumen made him uniquely qualified to pull the city out of a deep economic funk.") I would also like to believe that voters were squeamish about continuing to name the city's wealthiest resident as its civil leader, the sort of practice that makes it really hard to stifle the chortles when you start talking about "American democracy."

At any rate, says the Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won re-election Tuesday, but voters were less enthusiastic about him than the last time he ran in 2005. The mayor did well in high-income white areas of Manhattan and Queens, and also in election districts dominated by immigrants, like Flushing and Brighton Beach. But his vote fell sharply in black neighborhoods, especially southeast Queens, where the black middle class has been hard-hit by foreclosure.

Those big blue splotches mostly correspond to the majority African-American neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and El Bronx. Bloomberg got like 90% in the swankier districts of the Upper East Side, and Thompson did about as well in his best districts in places like Bed-Stuy and Brownsville. Bloomberg did well among Jews and white Catholics; it seems like the Hispanic vote leaned toward Thompson, though it's a bit hard for me to tell from this map.

UPDATE: Commenter Gaurav links to a New York Magazine post that compares the NYC election map to the city's white population, based on a map from the Digital Atlas of New York City (which I posted about before). Here's the distribution of the city's white population:



That's a tasty correlation! And Andrew B links to this map from the Digital Atlas showing Hispanic population. Definitely looks like they went for Thompson pretty strongly.

Incarceration Nation II

It occurs to me, regarding incarceration rates, that it would make sense to simply show per capita incarceration rates by state. So here you go - a map that is adapted, again, from Pew's One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (pdf):



More so than in the map of prison funding, some clear geographical tendencies emerge here. One way to characterize the deepest blue states here would be as all the Gulf Coast states plus South Carolina, Oklahoma, Delaware and Arizona. Another way would be: the Deep South plus a few outlying states. Yet another would be: the states Goldwater won in the 1964 US presidential election, plus Texas, Oklahoma, Delaware and Florida. And another still would be: 10 of the 21 states (+ DC) with the lowest proportion of non-Hispanic whites.

I think all of these characterizations, actually, tell us something about why these states, in particular, have the highest incarceration rates: I mean, is anyone surprised that the Deep South has most of the highest incarceration rates in the country? But I think the last characterization is especially interesting. Look at this map based on data from censusscope.org:



Someone who actually knows a thing or two about statistics would be able to run some sort of regression analysis to check this hypothesis, but it looks to me like there's a pretty strong correlation between a state's incarceration rate and its non-white population, but that that correlation is somewhat mitigated by certain regional variables (if the state is in the Interior West, it will have a relatively high number of prisoners; if it's in the Northeast or Far West, a relatively low number). And actually, it might be more correct to say that the correlation holds for states with the smallest white majorities, since for three of the four states which actually have majority-minority populations (Hawaii, New Mexico, and California, but not Texas), the incarceration rates are not notably high.

And really, all of this is totally unsurprising, if you accept this premise: that most of what happens in American politics is inflected by race, and in particular, by the white majority's fears about non-whites. Given this premise, you would expect crime and punishment policies to tend towards the more punitive in places where a large minority population would seem to pose a threat to the white majority, since in those places the (white) majority will be more likely to support policies driven by emotional gratification (i.e., 'lock up the bastards!'). In such places, since non-whites tend to be poorer and have less social capital, the 'bastards' will tend to be equated with non-whites. (And indeed, the incarceration rate for non-whites is much, much higher than it is for whites (one of the strongest bits of evidence that we are still a long ways from a "post-racial" era).) But in places like northern New England, the Upper Midwest, and the northern Plains, non-whites constitute a minuscule portion of the population, so there's less racial anxiety among the white majority. And, since almost everyone in places like North Dakota and Vermont is white, it ends up being mostly white people that are sent to prison; it makes it a little harder to work up the old "lock up the bastards!" dander when the bastards in question (or in the mind's eye, at least) don't have a different (which is to say, dismissable and otherizable) racial identity from one's own.

This could also explain why three of the four states with the highest non-white populations - the aforementioned Hawaii, California, and New Mexico - aren't in the top quintile of highest incarceration rate states. In those states, whites are in the minority, so you'd expect them to be much less able to translate their collective interests into actual policy.

I don't mean to suggest that high incarceration rates are just a function of white racial anxiety. Like I said, there are regional patterns too - I don't think the high rates in the Interior West have especially much to do with race. And I guess it's possible that crime rates might be somehow related to the number of prisoners in a given state. But really: it's the United States we're talking about here. That pretty much means that race is a factor.

Foreclosures and Race

The New York Times has a map of foreclosures in the New York City area, with details down to the level of city blocks.



It's a very uneven pattern, and a pattern that closely follows of the distribution of minority neighborhoods in the region. Says the Times:

But the storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.

And the hardest blows rain down on the backbone of minority neighborhoods: the black middle class. In New York City, for example, black households making more than $68,000 a year are almost five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as are whites of similar — or even lower — incomes.

This holds a special poignancy. Just four or five years ago, black homeownership was rising sharply, after decades in which discriminatory lending and zoning practices discouraged many blacks from buying. Now, as damage ripples outward, black families in foreclosure lose savings and credit, neighbors see the value of their homes decline, and renters are evicted.

That pattern plays out across the nation. A study released this week by the Pew Research Center also shows foreclosure taking the heaviest toll on counties that have black and Latino majorities, with the New York region among the badly hit.

This is especially tragic considering the history of redlining in urban minority neighborhoods. Redlining was the practice of denying access to services, including mortgages, to residents of minority communities, and it was practiced in cities across the US. Here's a redlined map of Philadelphia from Wikipedia:



Give you a buck if you can figure out what the euphemisms in the legend mean... This is the very definition of institutional racism (and it is, by the way, the sort of thing that needs pointing to when people argue that one's position in life is entirely the product of their own effort and moral virtue, rather than any contingent facts about their background or race). Redlining as such no longer exists, but the now infamous sub-prime loans were in some ways predatory on minority neighborhoods in a way that was disconcertingly reminiscent of the old segregation-era practices. As the Times says:

Black buyers often enter a separate lending universe: A dozen banks and mortgage companies, almost all of which turned big profits making subprime loans, accounted for half the loans given to the region’s black middle-income borrowers in 2005 and 2006, according to The Times’s analysis. The N.A.A.C.P. has filed a class-action suit against many of the nation’s largest banks, charging that such lending practices amount to reverse redlining.

“This was not only a problem of regulation on the mortgage front, but also a targeted scourge on minority communities,” said Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in a speech this year at New York University. Roughly 33 percent of the subprime mortgages given out in New York City in 2007, Mr. Donovan said, went to borrowers with credit scores that should have qualified them for conventional prevailing-rate loans.

For anyone taking out a $350,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — a typical spread between conventional and subprime loans — tacks on $272,000 in additional interest over the life of a 30-year loan.

“There’s a huge worry that this will exacerbate historic disparities between the wealth of black and white families,” said Ingrid Ellen, co-director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

But at least the article ends on a happy note:

But few in 1965 would have predicted the South Bronx devastation of 1979. At the very least, tens of thousands of people will lose their homes, their savings and their dreams.

“Rather than helping to narrow the wealth and home ownership gap between black and white,” Mr. Grannum said, “we’ve managed in the last few years to strip a lot of equity out of black neighborhoods.”

I suckered you, didn't I? That's not a happy ending at all. Well, now you know how it feels. Except not really.

Anti-Miscegenation Laws: A Precursor to Gay Marriage Bans?

So I was thinking about this map of the future of gay marriage, and wondering about what sort of precedents there might be in American social history for the sort of change involved in allowing gay couples to marry. And the best parallel to the legalization of gay marriage I can think of is the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws. Here's a map of the history of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws.



There are obviously a ton of differences between the social acceptance of interracial marriages and the social acceptance of same-sex marriages. For one thing, the history of relations between races varies considerably between different regions of the country. But the basic shift in perceptions that undergird both expansions of social acceptance is pretty much the same: in both cases, the institution of marriage expands to include relationships that had once been seen as taboo. And the maps of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws and the predicted failure of gay marriage bans (shown below) show a lot of correlation. In both cases, the socially progressive view takes hold first in the Northeast, and the South is the last holdout. In fact, every single state in the South continued to ban inter-racial marriage until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if a lot of Southern states continue to hold out against same-sex marriage until a comparable future Supreme Court decision.

But there are differences, too. The Western states - hypothetical early adopters of the legalization of gay marriage - were relatively slow to sanction interracial marriage. And the Midwest, especially the "prairie populism" states of the Upper Midwest, were early in sanctioning interracial marriage, but are predicted to be slower on the same-sex marriage front. (Of course, Iowa has already become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage - before any Western state - so history may yet repeat itself.)

And, of course, the time scales are radically different: it took nearly 200 years between the first state ban on interracial marriage to be lifted (Pennsylvania, in 1780) and the Supreme Court decision that ended such bans once and for all. And the progress was very fitful. After Pennsylvania, no marriage ban was lifted until 1843; 44 years later, ever Northern Union state other than Indiana had lifted their bans. But then - nothing, literally for generations. The post-Reconstruction period of racist retrenchment, aka Jim Crow, saw a total lack of progress in the states on interracial marriage. It wasn't until the modern Civil Rights era that interracial marriage bans again started to be overturned. And even by the time of the Loving decision, the country was still deeply bifurcated: every single non-Southern or border state had repealed their marriage bans, and every single Southern state still had a ban on the books.

Are there lessons to be drawn here about the future of same-sex marriage? One would seem to be that progressive change is not inexorable; or if it is, it can still be delayed by quite a lot, as the 1887 to 1948 lacuna in repealing marriage bans shows. And, though the generational divide on gay marriage is really stark, according to polls like this one, which found that 41% of people under 45 support same-sex marriage, as opposed to 18% of people over 65, even young people are only split on the issue, so it would seem wrong to view the inexorable spread of marriage equality as a fait accompli.

Nonetheless, I think there are good reasons to think that an outcome in which same-sex marriage becomes broadly accepted within a generation is likely. In particular, that same poll shows 60-35% support for either same-sex marriage or civil unions. That seems to suggest that, despite some lingering apprehension about what some people see as a re-definition of marriage, there is broad support for the principle of equality for gay couples. There's no reason to expect that support to reverse itself. The taboo on gay relationships is on the way out the door, and I can't help but think that it's only a matter of time before the law reflects this reality.

Here, by the way, are the dates when anti-miscegenation laws were repealed, according to Wikipedia.

Pennsylvania - 1780
Massachusetts - 1843
Iowa - 1851
Kansas - 1859
New Mexico - 1866
Washington - 1868
Illinois - 1874
Rhode Island - 1881
Maine - 1883
Michigan - 1883
Ohio - 1887

California - 1948
Oregon - 1951
Montana - 1953
North Dakota - 1955
Colorado - 1957
South Dakota - 1957
Idaho - 1959
Nevada - 1959
Arizona - 1962
Nebraska - 1963
Utah - 1963
Indiana - 1965
Wyoming - 1965
Maryland - 1967

Alabama - June 12, 1967
Arkansas - June 12, 1967
Delaware - June 12, 1967
Florida - June 12, 1967
Georgia - June 12, 1967
Kentucky - June 12, 1967
Louisiana - June 12, 1967
Mississippi - June 12, 1967
Missouri - June 12, 1967
North Carolina - June 12, 1967
Oklahome - June 12, 1967
South Carolina - June 12, 1967
Tennessee - June 12, 1967
Texas - June 12, 1967
Virginia - June 12, 1967
West Virginia - June 12, 1967

Visualizing Segregation

That Mondrianesque image on the right there is, believe it or not, a sort of "map." It comes from some folks at Dartmouth who were interested in studying patterns of segregation in cities - not Jim Crow-era forced segregation, but the de facto kind that exists today in most American cities, where the phenomena of "black" neighborhoods and "white" neighborhoods are common. This map is going to need a bit of explaining, but bear with me, because I think it's really interesting.

The map is of a simulated city of "reds" and "blues." As the site describes it:

This segregation applet simulates the movement of people between houses within a "city." The city is divided into 10 x 10 "tracts" which are in turn divided into a grid of smaller squares. Each small square in the city represents a house that can be vacant (white) or occupied by a red or blue or, in three-color mode, a green square.

So the whole grid represents a city made up of people of two races. By pressing the start button on the applet you can set time in motion and let people move around, just as they do in real cities.

However, they're not moving around randomly. See those little boxes on the left that say "minimum # of like neighbors" and "maximum # of unlike neighbors"? Those determine where a given "family" will move to. In the image above there are no preferences, so any family will move anywhere. When you set time in motion, there will just be random movement of blues and reds around the grid. But suppose we change the settings to this:

Now we've set it so that a red family will only move to a neighborhood where it has a minimum of 4 red neighbors and a maximum of 6 blue neighbors; likewise, a blue family will only move to a neighborhood that has a minimum of 4 blue neighbors and a maximum of 6 red neighbors. And what's the result? After about 2,000 "moves," we get a city that looks something like this:

Now almost everyone in the city lives in a neighborhood that is completely homogeneous. This is sort of remarkable: remember, it's not the individual preference of anyone in this city to live in an all-red or all-blue neighborhood; everyone just wants to live in an area where at least half of the neighbors are the same race as themselves. But the end result is that nearly everyone ends up living in an almost totally segregated neighborhood.

Here's another scenario. In this case, the preferences are set quite liberally: every red only wants to have at least 2 red neighbors and no more than 6 blue neighbors, and every blue wants at least 2 blue neighbors and no more than 6 red neighbors. In this case, you can imagine, we have a city with low levels of racism and racial resentment and fear, but people just want to feel like they have at least a couple of neighbors who come from a similar culture or background as themselves. And here's what happens:

Shocking, right? Even though we've posited a city with very little racial animus, and just a seemingly reasonable desire of most people to feel like they share a similar identity or culture or background with just a couple of their neighbors, we still end up with a city where most people live in a generally homogeneous neighborhood. It's a fascinating result. There's a bit more mixing than in the scenario above, but still not as much as you might expect; maybe this comes closest to resembling an actual typical American city.

On one hand, this is sort of reassuring. It means that, even though many cities are still quite segregated, even in the 21st century, that doesn't mean different races are irreconcilably hostile towards each other; people just have a reasonable desire to be around at least a few people similar to themselves. On the other hand, if the end result of this desire is such a significant degree of segregation, then the odds that people would become more comfortable with other races through familiarity with them would seem not to improve over time.

By the way, the site also provides specific stats - those "segregation indices" on the left - for the more quantificationally adept (though that ain't me). You can also play around with different scenarios by changing the relative population sizes of the reds and blues, adding a third race ("greens"), or even instituting 1950s-style policies of restricting races from a particular area. For a certain sort of brain, it can be a bit addictive.

The Skin Color Map

Do this, says NPR's Robert Krulwich:

point your elbow to the ceiling.

Then imagine yourself naked.

Then look at the patch of skin on the inside of your upper arm, the part of you that almost never sees the sun.

Whatever color you see there is what experts call your basic skin color, according to professor Nina Jablonski, head of the Penn State Department of Anthropology.

This map shows skin colors across the globe - the average colors that indigenous people would see if they did the upper arm test:



Humans tend to evolve towards lighter skin when they move toward the poles, and towards darker skin when they move towards the equator. Obviously, the process takes many generations - but apparently not as many generations as once thought:

Skin has changed color in human lineages much faster than scientists had previously supposed, even without intermarriage, Jablonski says. Recent developments in comparative genomics allow scientists to sample the DNA in modern humans.

By creating genetic "clocks," scientists can make fairly careful guesses about when particular groups became the color they are today. And with the help of paleontologists and anthropologists, scientists can go further: They can wind the clock back and see what colors these populations were going back tens of thousands of years, says Jablonski.

She says that for many families on the planet, if we look back only 100 or 200 generations (that's as few as 2,500 years), "almost all of us were in a different place and we had a different color."

That's kind of amazing. That's like going from black to white in the time between Socrates and ourselves. Evolutionarily? That's really fast. (It's interesting that every new finding about human evolutionary change seems to point towards it occurring faster than previously thought.)

Here's the link to the audio of the NPR story. Thanks to loyal reader camella and&also& kt for the tip.

The 2008 Election and Southern Whites

Two maps:



This one shows how Obama and Clinton did in the primaries. The redder the county, the better Clinton did; the bluer the county, the better Obama did. (Ignore Michigan and Florida; they didn't have real primaries.) You can see Clinton had an obvious region of strength from her home state of NY, down the spine of the Appalachians and through the Ozark states. This region is also known as the Upland South, or Appalachia.



And this one shows the voting shifts from 2004 to 2008. Bluer areas shifted towards the Democrats; redder areas shifted towrds the Republicans.

Notice anything about these two maps? There sure seems to be a strong correlation between the red areas in both of them, huh? In other words, it sure looks like Obama was unpopular in Appalachia. Indeed, that was a common theme in political commentary, during the primaries and right through the aftermath of the general election.

This analysis was wrong, though. It's true Obama underperformed in Appalachia. But another way to characterize Appalachia is as the area of the South which has few blacks. Now consider this map:



It shows the percentage of blacks in every county. And as you can see, they're concentrated in much of the south - much of the south outside Appalachia, that is. Of course, Obama did really well among blacks, boosting both the Democratic percentage of their vote and raising turnout among that demographic. So he actually did comparatively well in parts of the south with large black populations. In the remainder of the south - not so much.

But what the conventional wisdom sometimes missed was that Obama did just as poorly among southern whites in areas with lots of blacks, if not more so. A final map, from dreaminonempty, to drive the point home:



Obama's worst states among whites were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia (all of which, along with South Carolina, went for Goldwater in 1964, incidentally: the only states besides Goldwater's home state of Arizona to do so). He did slightly better in those states overall, though, thanks to his huge margins among blacks. So Obama didn't have an "Appalachia problem," as some have alleged. He had a southern whites problem. (Though the better way to say it, probably, is that Southern whites had an Obama problem.)

Of course, not every region in the south was so hostile. He actually won Virginia and North Carolina, for instance. These are all areas where the New South has taken hold - areas which are more urbane, cosmopolitan, wealthier and more educated. He didn't win whites in these states, but he did do better among them than he did in the more rural and economically stagnant areas of the south.

It's fair to say that race has something to do with this pattern. But obviously, despite this obstacle (which was limited mostly just to the South), Obama won anyway. And this is progress. What will be interesting to see is what the results will be in 2012. Obama may or may not win, but here's a bet: those areas of the south will not diverge from the rest of the country as much as they did in 2008. They're among the most conservative parts of the US, of course, and I don't expect that to change. But I don't think they'll be quite so divergent. I think four years of an African American president will have an effect in these areas; I think whites will get used to the idea. And in so doing, the country may actually be able to make even more racial progress than was made in electing the first black president in the first place.

Social Cohesion in the UK

Here's another map on the social health of England:



Mark Easton gives a description of the map:

The map colours range between bright green (where 100% of the population think that "people from different backgrounds get on well") to bright red (where 40% or fewer believe the same). Broadly, green means good race relations while brown/red suggests tension.

As with the anomie map, I'd be interested to see a version of this for the US. In both the UK and the US, my educated guess - and it's not more than that - is that you'd see better reported relations between races in areas that either have very low minority populations, or a very high degree of diversity. In the former sorts of places, minority groups aren't sufficiently prominent to pose a threat to the local majority group. In the latter sorts of places, there may be no majority group (as is the case where I live), and so members of diverse groups are pretty much forced to live and work together (and are liable to find that the world does not come crashing down upon doing so). In between, however, are communities where a majority of the population has historically been empowered (whites, in England), but where a significant minority population seems to represent a threat to their erstwhile hegemonic control.

Of course, tons of other factors, especially historical and economic ones, contribute to the nature of race relations. (I'm sure you'd find different attitudes on race in Vermont compared with southern Appalachia, even though both regions are almost entirely white.) But it would be very interesting to compare this cohesion map with a map of ethnic population by county in the UK. (I've been looking - I can't find one, but I'll post if I do.)