Here is a fascinating article on the distribution of the black population in the US in 2010, and the implications.
The black population is not equally distributed across the United States: not equally across regions of the country, nor within metropolitan areas. This unequal distribution is in substantial part a result of historical event and policy decisions, many of them rooted in racism. As a result, policies that certain regions of the country more than others, or certain parts of metropolitan areas more than others, will inevitably have disparate racial effects.
Bradley L. Hardy, Trevon D. Logan, and John Parman lay out the evidence and arguments for these and related claims in “The Historical Role of Race and Policy for Regional Inequality,” which appears as a chapter in Place-Based Policies for Shared Economic Growth, edited by Jay Shambaugh and Ryan Nunn (Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, September 2018)
Here’s a map showing the share of the population that is black on a county-by-county basis across the United States. As the figure shows, most of the predominantly black counties are in the southeastern region.If you compare this map of counties with a high share of black residents with a map showing poverty rates by county, you find considerable overlap. If you compare this map of counties with a high share of black resident with a map showing “economic mobility” rates by county, you also find high overlap.
As a measure of economic mobility, the authors cite evidence on “the mean income rank of black children growing up in a household at the 25th income percentile.”
Fascinating article. Read more.