My city of 15K people just outside of Washington DC:
40% White
41% Black
18% Hispanic
I’m white.
These numbers are based on the 2000 census. Wildly increasing property values in the last few years may have changed these figures a bit, but probably not much.
Here are several locations for me.
Madison, Wisconsin, where I’ve only lived for a short time now.
84% White
5.8% Black
5.8% Asian
4.1% Hispanic
A suburb of Dayton, Ohio, where I came from. Not exactly a diverse place.
93.4% White
1.4% Black
3.5% Asian
Finally, the city of Dayton, Ohio, which is pretty strongly segregated–blacks on the west side, whites on the east side.
53.4% White
43.1% Black
My city (well, the city my college is in) in PA (population about 70k):
81.8% white
3.6% black
18.2% Hispanic
I’m surprised by the low percentage of black people, because whenever I leave campus (my college is ridiculously white, as am I) more than 3.6% of the people I see are black. I don’t get out much, though, and I’m generally only on one or two streets.
Do raw figures tell us anything at all about integration? Surely any area could have an even numerical split, but if it’s divided between de facto segregated areas, then it’s not integrated.
According to the 2000 census:
68.37% White
19.65% African American
0.31% Native American
1.31% Asian
0.00% Pacific Islander
6.92% from other races
3.44% from two or more races
16.90% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race
So we’re cool with the blacks and the Spanish. But we don’t want the Samoans.
Other than my college years in DC, no place I have lived has ever been very integrated. And frankly the section of DC I lived in was as Upper Caucasia as you can get.
My current town outside Philly is suburban and about 90% white.
The city I grew up in outside Dayton was actually founded as a white flight city in the 50s and I don’t believe the overall demographics have changed much since I lived there 20 years ago. I would hope that the white trash factor has decreased since I lived there. When I worked at the pizza shop, there were areas that our black drivers wouldn’t deliver pies.
My town is 98% white. The other 2% are specimens from other groups kept at the town zoo so that local kids can see what they look like.
There was a thread a while back that showed demographics by ZIP code. Probably a better view than city or town, depending on the size of your community. Unfortunatley I can’t think of the thread or find a link. If I do I’ll post it here.
As of the census of 2000, there are 15,781 people, 4,947 households, and 4,328 families residing in the township.
There are 5,137 housing units at an average density of 110.4/km² (285.9/mi²). The racial makeup of the township is
80.20% White,
0.65% African American,
0.03% Native American,
17.45% Asian,
0.01% Pacific Islander,
0.52% from other races
1.15% from two or more races.
2.45% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.
I live in NYC which is pretty diverse. But my neighborhood is full of rich white liberals. I’d say at least 99% white.
My general neighborhood is very diverse. This part of town is known as the little “United Nations.” One local grocery store has signs out front in nine different languages.
For Nashville as a whole, the story is different:
Black or African American persons – 25.9%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons – 0.3%
Asian persons – 2.3%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander – 0.1%
Persons reporting some other race – 2.4%
Persons reporting two or more races – 1.1%
White persons, not of Hispanic/Latino origin – 65.1%
Since we have an Hispanic community, I don’t know why that’s not listed.
Honolulu, very. More then half of all marriages here are inter-ethnic.
Although when you boil everyone down to just 6 categories like the US Census Bureau does it doesn’t look like it. Still at 46.0% Asian (about half of which are Japanese) and 21.3% White as well as 8.9% Polynesian we’re very far along the melding.
Almost 20% claim 2 races. I don’t really have a feeling whether that’s high or low. Maybe it’s spot on?
Huh. I just searched for my “block” on the census site, and found it consists of 18 people. 100% white. Hmmm, wait. This is not at all accurate. They claim none of the 18 people are in my age range (or my retired neighbors’ age range for that matter). I guess I don’t exist in censusland. They claim there’s a woman over 85 living alone?! Um, no. Why is this data so sucky?
Well. In any case, on the town level we’re 97.9% white, 0.9% “two or more races”, 0.6% Asian, 0.2% American Indian, 0.2% “some other race”, 0.1% black, and <0.1% Pacific Islander. I really need to move.
Heh - someone came to my house recently and asked, “So… is this a pretty diverse neighborhood?”
I looked at them a bit crazy and said, “No, it’s predominantly black.” (I’m white.) A second later I realized that “diverse” means “not mostly white.” I swear, I wasn’t trying to be smarmy.
Out of the twenty or so neighbors on my block and the next that I’ve actually seen, all but two are black.
Oakland CA, a little over 400,000 people.
Black (35.7%)
White Non-Hispanic (23.5%)
Hispanic (21.9%)
Other race (11.7%)
Chinese (8.0%)
Two or more races (5.0%)
Vietnamese (2.2%)
Other Asian (2.1%)
American Indian (1.7%)
Filipino (1.6%)
Japanese (0.5%)
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (0.5%)
Oakland has a big reputation as a Black city, so it can be surprising how large the Asian precense it. Sadly, Oakland isn’t the most intergrated place, despite it’s gret diversity. Neighborhoods tend to be predominately Black or Asian or White or Latino. What these numbers don’t capture is the sheer variety of immigrants around- from Afghani women in full hijab to recent African immigrants to people with heavy German accents, you can find it all here.
I’m in a little, teensy town in Indiana of around MAYBE 250 people. We have all white people and a handful of Hispanics living here. I’d say the town is 99% white. We used to have an African-American family, who were VERY nice people, but some folks in town ran them out, by making their lives sheer hell all the time. The Hispanic families are NOT far behind (I must add that they are very nice people, too, since I’ve met them a few times). People in these small, rural towns are not very welcoming to anyone not lily-white and straight, and they don’t hide the fact. I think they need to either just die off, kill themselves off, or step back into reality. Idiots.
My beloved city
White 45.5%
Black 43.8%
Hispanic 8.6%
Asian 3.6%
That’s more than 100% isn’t it? Well, approximately. Those figures are 5 yrs. old. Probably both the Hispanic and Asian populations have increased.
Our own neighborhood, though majority white, is very diverse (in the dictionary sense of that word). I have looked out my window to see four little girls playing together, one white, one black, one Asian, one Hispanic, and thought, “hey, it’s like a politically correct children’s book”
Tokyo has a population of 12,342,000 mil (Oct. 2003) and 354,000 foreigners, so it’s 97.3% Japanese. However IIRC, more than 50% of the registered foreigners are ethnic Koreans, and there’s a significent percentage of other Asians, so the number of other races is less than 1%
County where I worked for the past 8 years:
White persons, percent, 14.0%
Black or African American persons, percent, 84.6%
County where I live:
White persons, percent, 73.5%
Black or African American persons, percent, 25.4%
My little town:
White persons, percent, 2000 (a) 75.5%
Black or African American persons, percent, 2000 (a) 6.5%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2000 (a) 0.6%
Asian persons, percent, 2000 (a) 7.1%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2000 (a) 1.9%
Persons reporting some other race, percent, 2000 (a) 5.4%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2000 3.0%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2000 (b) 13.3%
This kind of surprises me, because both in this neighborhood and where my apartment was, I was surrounded by Pakistanis, so I would have expected the Asian population to be a little higher. But compared to Texas as a whole we have far fewer blacks, far fewer Hispanics, but way more Asians so maybe it’s not so far off-base.
Not shown in this census info is the fact that we have the largest Tongan population in the US. 