The most and least diverse states in the USA

The most and least diverse states in the USA

The identity of the least diverse state is kind of a surprise to me. (I guess because I know almost nothing about this state.) I would have guessed New Hampshire, Vermont or Maine to be the least diverse. They are all in the running, to be sure, but not the very least.

Interesting note from the comments section:

By one measure, the most diverse neighborhood in the USA is the Mountain View section of Anchorage, AK. It’s a hodgepodge of Whites, Filipinos, Native Alaskans, resettled Sudanese refugees and Anchorage’s Little Samoa district. (Samoans like moving to Alaska. No, I don’t know why.)

Scoop’s comment:

I lived in the northern suburbs of Austin, Texas, and played volleyball every day near my house. I was the only white person in the group of 30-40 people. The others were Mexicans, South Americans, Vietnamese, a couple other Asians, one Native American, and various dark-skinned people of assorted origins (African-Americans and people from the Caribbean). Of course, those people were all in their 20s and I was the only old fart in the group. The older people I knew were all white. That contrast is an exaggerated microcosm of America.

In 1960, America was 85% non-Hispanic white. As of now, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites is about 60-62%. The implication there is that old America and young America are quite different. The percentage of non-Hispanic whites among Americans less than 18 years old is hovering around 50 and declining steadily, but the group aged 60 or more is still more than 80% white, reflecting the demographics of the era when they were born. The new diversity scares a lot of older people, as change always does.

It was the New America that elected Barack Obama. Some pundits have pointed to Obama’s election as a sign of greatly diminished racism in the USA, but that’s a conclusion drawn from a superficial view of the stats. If white people had their way, Obama would have lost re-election in a landslide. Whites voted for Romney 59-39. Obama won because non-whites voted for him by the astounding margin of 83-17. Back in the old days that massive white margin would have been enough to steamroll over even that vast surge of non-white support for Obama. The way the math works out, Romney would have won if whites had comprised 77% of the voters. Unfortunately for him, whites were only 72% of the voters. But here’s the shocking deal: as recently as 2004, when Dubya won re-election, whites WERE 77% of the voters. If the ethnic composition of 2004 had held steady until 2012, Obama would not have been re-elected, and President Romney would have been running for a second term in 2016. There would have been no President Trump. America’s changing demographics mean that political power has been altered rapidly, just in those 8 years from 2004 to 2012, and we have already seen the impact of that.

As I noted above, any change frightens people. Rapid change terrifies them.

FYI, Obama also lost the white vote in 2008, and he lost convincingly (55-43), albeit not as dramatically as in 2012.

15 thoughts on “The most and least diverse states in the USA

  1. I’m from Canada, and it always make me cringe when I have to fill out an on-line form or a survey originating from the States and the first question asks what race I am, and it’s a choose-one question, and it’s required, and has no “refuse to answer” option. In Canada, the closest you might be asked is “What is your first language?”, or “Which languages do you speak at home?”. So when I see “white people” and “black people” used extensively, it has a certain visceral effect.

    Slaves were brought in by the Pilgrims just a few years after they settled, and this master-slave relationship persisted for hundreds of years. The end result is that it’s ingrained in the common American psyche: ni–er (or any derivation: negro, coloured, African American, person of colour, black person, etc.) equates to slave which equates to a lesser human.

    In Northern Africa, a lot of languages have the same word for a Sub-Saharan African as they do for slave. The word for person might translate to a non-slave. So this might be thousands of years of history. You can’t even talk equality, because you’re basically saying: “Slaves shouldn’t be slaves.” It makes no sense to them. You would have to say something like: “Those who originate from south of the large desert, usually having very dark skin, wide noses, and curly hair, and who have traditionally had a certain role in your culture, should be given the same opportunities as everyone else.” Most of the time they’ll look at you like you’re from Mars: “Oh, you mean slaves? You’re saying slaves shouldn’t be slaves? But they are! Are you stupid? Have some tea.”

    This baggage is what ni–er and its derivatives carry, and changing it still ends up carrying the same baggage. Whenever a new term is created to replace the existing one, it’s perpetuating the same mindset: we are now using this term for people who have slave origins. This mindset is what need changing.

    I’m long past telling people what they should or shouldn’t do, but if you, as Americans, can refuse to answer race-related questions whenever possible, then maybe there won’t as much race-related data to correlate, which might mean fewer race-related results to publish. Maybe that might help.

    1. There is logic to that, but many analysts, not just in the political sphere, but in the commercial as well, find that data useful for marketing. If I am running a retail store in a neighborhood, I really want to know the racial and ethnic composition to determine my product assortment, because whites, blacks and Hispanics eat different foods, drink different beers and sodas, read different magazines, smoke different tobacco products, use different grooming products, etc. That is very helpful in tailoring a menu or product assortment to the needs of the local community. It is even very helpful in determining whether to locate a certain type of business there at all.

      When I did strategic planning for a retail corporation, we even found that there were ideal age and ethnic compositions for our offering. In convenience marketing, the age and income data are more important than racial/ethic info in determining where to build stores, but racial/ethnic data are significant for tailoring the specific product mix for any given store.

      1. I guess one can argue that if a shop in a “hispanic neighbourhood” carries mostly bananas, rice and beans, then you’re eating bananas, rice, and beans, and thus perpetuating the stereotype.

        Funny thing, I just finished, like minutes ago, taking to task someone in my organization for proposing race-based questions in a survey. American client interested in Canadian consumer spending.

        1. That’s not how it works. Stores in Hispanic neighborhoods don’t carry ONLY rice and beans, because no ethnic group is some kind of monolith. They do, however, give much more shelf space to rice and beans than the stores elsewhere, in order to meet consumer demand. (After all, that’s what will be carried in the small markets run by Hispanics, and a professional retailer doesn’t want to lose business to a hole-in-the-wall storefront by failing to meet the demands of the neighborhood.)

          More broadly, let’s imagine a store that does only carry rice and beans. The first thing a retail chain wants to know is “Where should I build those stores?” The answer is (perhaps) in Hispanic neighborhoods. (I don’t know if that is true. I’m just assuming it for illustration.)

          If you want a real-life illustration, check out the location of Church’s Fried Chicken outlets. They have found that low-income, non-white consumers have a far greater appetite for their offering, and locate their outlets accordingly. This is not perpetuating a stereotype, but simply working to match their product offering to consumer demand. If you place deep-fried food places in tony, lily-white neighborhoods, their selling proposition simply has insufficient appeal.

    1. I have some sympathy for that position, despite the fact that I am an old, white moderate Republican.

  2. I am very tired at the moment, so this may be a stupid post. But I have never understood the big deal about treating Hispanics as non-white. They are about as non-white as Italians. To me, Hispanics now are the Italians of 80-90 years ago, or the Eastern Europeans of 110-120 years ago, or the Irish of 160 years ago.

    1. What annoys me is that they are not treated consistently. In some surveys they are treated as either white or black, while in others there are categories like “non-Hispanic whites” and “non-Hispanic blacks.” I think the logic in keeping them out of the “white” section is that Hispanics in general tend to vote and shop in a separate pattern from “non-Hispanic whites,” so it is more useful to analyze the behavior of that bloc separate from the “non-Hispanic whites.”

      I have to say, though, that your comment is right on when it comes to young Hispanics who are in the second generation born in America. My guess is that they just shop and vote like their white peers, or very similarly, and it makes little sense to segregate them with “Hispanics” just because they have a Hispanic last name. They are about as Hispanic as I am Polish.

      And finally, lumping all Hispanics together as a group probably mixes groups that are totally unlike. It may make some sense to lump together all South and Central Americans (I dunno), but the island Hispanics are often very different from that group, especially the Cubans, who tend to be conservative and Republican. I think Dubya got more than 3/4 of the Cuban vote, but only about 1/3 of the remaining Hispanics.

      1. I used to teach in a South Bronx high school. I had a student with the last name Lopez, whose skin color was about as black as skin color gets. I forget how the discussion originated, but I distinctly remember her standing up and exclaiming very loudly “I’m not black, I’m hispanic!” What I told my students was that race only matters in two situations. First, your race matters if it matters to you (ethnic pride perhaps). Second, it matters if someone else is going to treat you differently because of it. Other then that, aside from little things like me getting sunburnt faster than many of them, race didn’t matter. What matters is culture. Still, that second category encompasses quite a bit, historically and otherwise.

        My brother-in-law was born in CA, but his parents were born in Mexico. When my sister took his last name, Reyes, people she had worked with for years suddenly began assuming she spoke spanish (she doesn’t). I had always thought my nieces would be bilingual and good in math (my sister and her husband are engineers). But while they speak more spanish than their mother, they aren’t really fluent. Spanish isn’t spoken at home and they only spend so much time with their grandparents. My oldest niece will be turning 12 soon and I asked my sister if they were going to throw her a quinceanera when she turned 15. My sister said maybe, but she didn’t think my niece would want one because she didn’t really have many hispanic friends. Most of the kids she goes to school with are Asian.

        My nieces are growing up in LA, with an hispanic last name in a basically white upper middle class home. I don’t think there is much difference between their situation and the situation of other children born to an Irish-American married to an Italian-American. The biggest difference is that society is somewhat determined to consider “hispanic” as being more important and a more indelible ethnic characteristic than being German or Italian.

        It matters if it matters to you or if someone is going to treat you differently because of it.

  3. The voting analysis on Obama is way off. Many white voters, including me, stayed home in 2012. The GOP by that point had converted into the neocon, big government batch of idiots they are now. I couldn’t bring myself to vote Obama, but I stayed home.

    (2016 I voted Johnson in the thinking that he’d reach the 5% needed to get matching campaign funds next time…no such luck.)

    1. First of all, everyone stayed home in 2012, not just whites. For example, while white voter turnout dropped 3.4 points, Hispanic turnout dropped by the exact same amount. Black turnout didn’t drop quite as dramatically – 1.7 points – but black voters still felt they had a horse in the race.

      Second, the reason Obama won is that whites were a diminishing percentage of eligible voters. Turnout accounts for only a miniscule part of the decline. The real culprit is demographics. In 2008, white people represented 73.9% of eligible voters, and that dropped to 71.2% in 2012. In 2008, they represented 76.6% of actual voters, and that dropped to 74.1% in 2012. So demographics alone accounted for the majority of the decline. If white turnout had been equal to 2008, it would have increased the white percentage of total voters by only one point. It needed to increase by about 5 points for Romney to win, so turnout would only have gotten him a fifth of the way there. So white turnout was actually not a meaningful factor in the election.

      (Remember Romney lost by a LOT – about 5 million votes. He lost the non-white vote by about 23 million, but won the white vote by about 18 million. If the white turnout % had been the same as 2008, that would only have brought 5 million more white voters to the polls, meaning he wouldn’t have won unless 100% of them voted for him, which is never going to happen of course. Assuming he held the same 59-39 ratio among the additional voters, he would have picked up only a million votes at the 2008 turnout rate, still leaving him far short. In order to pick up five million votes at the 59-39 ratio, he would have needed 25 million more white voters, so once again he would only have gotten a fifth of the way there if white turnout would have been as high as in 2008. There were about 148 million eligible white voters and 91 million of them actually voted. In order to get 25 million more, he needed something like a 78% turnout among white voters. I think the all-time high is 65% among white voters, so no reasonable amount of turnout among whites was going to overcome that crazy plurality that non-white America gave Obama. Remember there were only about 35-36 million non-white voters in 2012, and nearly 30 million of them voted for Obama!)

      Third, to reinforce that demographic point, white voters again diminished as a percentage of actual voters in 2016, albeit only slightly from 2012, despite the fact that white turnout increased and black turnout decreased. How can that be? It’s because whites as a percentage of eligible voters again declined substantially, to 68.8%. That percentage is dropping between 2 and 3 points in every presidential election.

    2. “I couldn’t bring myself to vote Obama, but I stayed home.”

      And by your absence, you essentially voted for Obama. By not coming out to vote for someone else, even yourself as a write-in.

      This is a perfect example of why voting in EVERY Presidential election is vital. In 2008, it was the white people, like Mr. Dark here, who elected Obama; by not preventing his election.

  4. It’s not just racial diversity, but a lot of other factors that are measured in this survey. An interesting way of doing it, but the “survey” is done by some random guy at a website that offers free credit reports, so I take it with a grain of salt.

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