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Saturday, January 09, 2016

The Confederate Flag Is Conducive To Racial Harmony

A while back, we were at a dinner party with friends. One of them got pretty hammered and, as he always does when he's drunk, he started talking politics. He's an orthodox atheist progressive and his topics are pretty predictable. This time he went off on the Confederate flag and how racist Southern whites were. Not being drunk, I just smiled and nodded my head, grateful that he hadn't gone with his favorite topic, Watergate.

A day or so later, I stumbled across this page from the Census Bureau which gives a measure of racial integration by city. Here's their definition of the "Dissimilarity Index," their measure of integration.
The dissimilarity index is the most commonly used measure of segregation between two groups, reflecting their relative distributions across neighborhoods within a city or metropolitan area. It can range in value from 0, indicating complete integration, to 100, indicating complete segregation.
Looking at the data, I noticed something right away. All of the top 10 most segregated cities are in the Union. Looking farther down the table, only 2 of the worst 20 are in Dixie. Check it out.

Rank Metro Area Side Black Pop White Pop Total Pop Dissimilarity Index
1 Gary, IN Union 122,686 428,791 631,362 87.9
2 Detroit, MI Union 1,012,262 3,096,900 4,441,551 86.7
3 Milwaukee-Waukesha, WI Union 232,247 1,116,150 1,500,741 84.4
4 New York, NY Union 2,118,957 3,684,669 9,314,235 84.3
5 Chicago, IL Union 1,541,641 4,798,533 8,272,768 83.6
6 Newark, NJ Union 440,597 1,196,664 2,032,989 83.4
7 Flint, MI Union 88,356 323,136 436,141 81.2
8 Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY Union 134,645 965,233 1,170,111 80.4
9 Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria, OH Union 412,782 1,697,660 2,250,871 79.7
10 Saginaw-Bay City-Midland, MI Union 40,875 332,429 403,070 79.1
11 Nassau-Suffolk, NY Union 223,122 2,105,352 2,753,913 79
12 Johnstown, PA Union 5,492 223,066 232,621 78.8
13 St. Louis, MO-IL Union 474,549 2,014,776 2,603,607 78
14 Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN Union 212,452 1,375,267 1,646,395 78
15 Birmingham, AL Dixie 276,044 611,574 921,106 77.4
16 Kankakee, IL Union 15,942 80,829 103,833 77.3
17 Gadsden, AL Dixie 15,120 84,919 103,459 77.1
18 Philadelphia, PA-NJ Union 1,008,173 3,583,090 5,100,931 76.9
19 Bergen-Passaic, NJ Union 104,677 890,640 1,373,167 76.8
20 Benton Harbor, MI Union 25,729 126,798 162,453 76.6

Since the Stars and Bars are really only displayed in the old Confederacy, this would suggest that flying that flag leads to integration in some way. At the very least, there's a correlation.

Hmm.

Just doing my part to bring us all closer together.
at

5 comments:

  1. commoncents12:48 PM

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    http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2016/01/video-suspect-in-pa-cop-ambush-said-he.html

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    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:39 AM

    I grew up in the Midwest. I've lived in New York, New England, California, and now the South -- South Carolina. And i have to say that it is the least segregated of the places I have lived, by FAR.

    NYC was an interesting place -- it's VERY wealthy out VERY poor and not much in between. However, most of the Middle class there are black. If a young teen make held a door open for a lady, he was more likely to be black. If a young teen, male or female, said "Excuse me" they were very likely black. But blacks and whites rarely lived together or socialized together. (Most of my friends were black, mainly because of that middle class thing -- we were waaaay more alike. Or parents were teachers and so on; we had respect slapped into us; we knew our manners...)

    ReplyDelete
  3. K T Cat10:06 AM

    Great comment, anon. I've found the same thing in Charleston compared to northern cities that I've visited.

    Jason Riley has an excellent book out called, Please Stop Helping Us. The first section is touchingly, tragically autobiographical. It tells of his family's escape from the ghetto into the middle class and then, sadly, how his peers deliberately embraced the culture of the ghetto and many boomeranged back to failure. It's really worth a read.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ilíon10:46 AM

    From my sixth-grade year, we were the only white (*) kids for blocks and blocks. But then, my father was a Southerner.



    (*) whitish, since my family is "pink"

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ilíon10:51 AM

    Also, for a couple of years, we attended a "black church", as they ran a Sunday-bus through our area and our old church didn't


    Of course, as time went on, life in that neighborhood became less ideal as:
    1) the bureaucrats "redeveloped" the even more poor sections of the city, resulting in those people moving into our neighborhood;
    2) the increasingly openly expressed hatred of whites that many black have, and which is *encouraged* by the "liberals" who rarely have to live with the results themselves.

    ReplyDelete