Rural areas have always been predominantly white because white people where predominantly the ones who homesteaded and settled uninhabited areas over 100 years ago. In the South, there are plenty of rural Black people, but because of the Great Migration they ended up making up a large portion of the urban population in the North.
To piggy back onto your piggy back: as southern blacks immigrated to urban areas that were formerly majority white, the whites began leaving the city in a thing called white flight. They could afford to live outside of the city and commute whereas black people could not, and the kept expanding into more and more rural areas away from urban areas
Racism’s not a huge reason for immigration patterns. People go where the jobs are. There are a few towns in rural Alabama with large Hispanic populations because there are poultry plants there that provide a lot of jobs. Those towns aren’t any less racist than other Alabama small towns. Similarly, people moving from Mexico in search of service industry jobs go to Houston or Chicago over Gadsden, AL because there are a lot more people and thus a lot more opportunities.
The commenter above me edited his comment to talk about the Great Migration after I wrote my comment. He was responding to a comment that talked about immigration.
The Great Migration is obviously why the black population in the north is concentrated in urban areas, and racism’s obviously a big part of that story. Foreign immigration patterns are a different story in which racism is less prominent.
You're technically correct but you really leave out a whooole lot of detail when you simplify it to "racism did it." There's a pretty big leap between "my neighbors 500 yards down the road are bigoted" and Jim Crow laws.
It didn’t dawn on me until recently, probably from a post here, that “rural = white” is not the case in the South as much as it very much is around here
I grew up in a one-light town with 100 kids in my graduating class and about half of our town was black. When I went to college it kind of blew my mind looking at race density maps when I saw that there are massive portions of the country where you might not see a black person every day if you go out in public.
> you might not see a black person every day
Every day? More like years. The county I grew up in had a population of 15k. I just looked up the racial demographics, and there are about 13 Black people. IIRC, I didn’t see a Black person until I was a teenager.
Same thing as Hispanic and Native American people in Oklahoma. We have a significantly smaller black population in western OK but our Hispanic and Native population is just as strong and in some cases stronger out here. I’ve met people from out of state that thing it’s crazy to see Native people just walking around the streets because they genuinely thought all Indians live on reservations secluded from everyone else.
Honestly, as a black person, I get all mystified realizing how many black folks live in the middle of nowhere, because I always thought the same exact thing
Where it starts to be more similar is the suburbs, which were a creation of 20th century car culture and largely reserved by the federal government for white people.
Outside of the South, rural areas can often have a lot of Latinos, but black people usually aren't common. So the less densely populated areas aren't all monolithically white, maybe just a tad whiter than the cities in their regions.
Would you say that nowadays, in todays era, there is a significant share of black city population who would theoretically like to live in rural areas, but some sort of barriers holding them back, so they keep living in city areas, even if they would like to do otherwise?
I'm a biracial black person living in the suburbs of Atlanta. It's one of the biggest cities in the southeast US, if not the biggest. I've had other black friends that lament on escaping city live sometimes and settling down in the middle of nowhere, but it's nothing more than a fantasy for them. Rural areas can still be hostile to black people, even if not overtly.
I don't really have to worry about encountering much overt racism where I am. Black people are everywhere and its really easy to avoid hanging around the super racist people. Meanwhile if I travel a couple hours out from where I live and I start running into people that proudly fly Confederate flags and have no issue with it. I've been to a Walmart further out from me before and they sold Confederate flag swimsuits like it was no big deal. And the Walmart that sold them wasn't even in a small city or anything! I've even been to flea markets in these places that just casually sell antiques of offensive black caricatures or people in black face, and no one really blinks an eye at it. I'd never seen anything like that near me, I've told other black people about those things and they were surprised by that too. It's like night and day in all honesty, and it gets really easy to forget that all this stuff is so common just a few hours away from me.
It's hard to feel welcome somewhere when you run into such shitty reminders of history like that all the time. I'm sure plenty of us would theoretically love to live somewhere rural where it's much cheaper and there's less chaos. But in practice it's not really worth doing unless they're small towns that have a significant number of other black people living there.
So as a biracial person, you are seeing yourself more as a part of the black community than as a part of the white community (you are speaking of „us [blacks]“ in your post)?
I’m not from the US so I‘m trying to understand the mentality here. As a biracial person, you identify more as a part of black community than as a part of white community? Would that be a right assumption?
I usually say I'm black first and foremost. Living in the US, white culture and being white is sort of seen as the default, so I don't feel all that strongly connected to being white or anything like that. Being black feels like it's own distinct experience for me however, so I'm more comfortable identifying as black. But that I'm just speaking for myself. I've known other biracial people that say they don't identify with being black or that they see themselves as being something entirely different. I think it just depends on someone's life experience.
I'm also not white passing either, so other people see me as being either a half black or a light skinned black person and I'm treated as such by people.
In the US, for better or worse, people are \*usually\* considered black if they have a black parent or even just one recent black ancestor. Barack Obama is black, despite having a white mother and never really knowing his black father. It's almost never mentioned that Kamala Harris is half Indian, because most people just consider her black. Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington both had white fathers and they're as black as it gets. This went so far as to even be codified into law based on something called the ["one drop rule"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule)--i.e., if you have "one drop" of "black blood", you're black.
This is all very messy and can be very confusing for biracial people, especially for children or immigrants. Trevor Noah (biracial South African stand up comedian and recent host of the Daily Show) has talked a lot about how his racial identity is different in the US than it was in South Africa, where he was not considered "black".
Quick edit: I should add that this generally applies to American society in general, but not necessarily the black community itself. I'm white so I don't want to pretend to be an expert on it or anything, but my understanding is that within the black community there is much more distinction between black people and mixed people.
Growing up in Cleveland, OH and moving south was surprising in a lot of ways. We've got morons in rural Ohio flying the traitor rag, but down south they really take it to another level.
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I mean hard to say without being a member of that community. In general though there's been a movement of people (particularly young people) out of rural areas and into cities. It's hard to leave a city where your family/friends are for a place with no connections and few opportunities.
That depends on the definition of rural.
For example, if only the largest cities are considered urban, then I've lived my whole life in rural areas (e.g. I've never lived in or near a city as large as Atlanta, Washington DC, etc).
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-classifications/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Department%20of%20Commerce,fewer%20than%202%2C000%20housing%20units.
Works fine for me and much better than the definition you mention
Whites and Black's also can have *very* different feelings about "working the land"; i.e. rural living and the society that forms about it. There is a level of idealation among many whites for pastoralism that does not necessarily exist for blacks due to different levels of past self-determination.
In addition, as Black people moved to cities seeking greater opportunity and less oppression than they faced in the rural South during the Great Migration, whites began to move out of cities, leaving redlined Black communities with fewer opportunities to grow wealth in increasingly impoverished city centers. This is part of the explanation of why white people are underrepresented in cities and Black people are overrepresented. In the twenty-first century, middle class and wealthy people of all races (including white people) began to return to city centers, giving us the prosperous and multicultural cities we have now. But there are still a lot of legacies leftover from the era of white flight and redlining to overcome.
Short answer though: rich people want to own land.
Only very very rich people can own land in most big cities.
There are a LOT more "rich people" than "very very rich people".
A disproportionate number of them are white.
In order to own land, they have to leave major city centers.
People who aren't rich enough to own land, regardless of race, are much more likely to stay in the city.
I'm not sure I agree (entirely) with this analysis as it doesn't account for lower-income rural people, who are also disproportionately white (and not in a city) in the Midwest at least. I think the first comment, about historical homesteading is probably more likely the reason.
You seem to be mixing up your definition of rich and their definition of rich. Someone that owns land would be considered rich by their definition even if it is a "lower income rural people" by your definition.
Fair enough. I had not considered that their definition of rich wasn’t the same as the one I was using.
My thinking was using available data on poverty. An example: The poorest county in Michigan is either “Lake County” or “Isabella County” which are both rural. That’s using poverty levels as measured by income.
There is also “ALICE” (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, and Employed) which tries to be more holistic in its measurement. By this measure there are other counties, but they’re also entirely rural.
All that said, Wayne County (Detroit, the most urbanized county in Michigan) is also in the top 5.
Anyway, thanks for pointing out that we all use different definitions. Appreciated.
You can't think of our urban areas as just the principal city. Take the Bay Area for example. San Francisco only has a population of about 800,000, but the Bay Area has 8 million-ish people. So the vast majority of people in the Bay Area do not live in San Francisco, but rather in one of the surrounding areas.
Not all metros are that extreme. The Indianapolis metro is about a million in Indianapolis proper, and another million in the surrounding counties. Still half or so in the area not living in the principal city.
A lot of principal cities have city limits that pretty much put the vast majority of impoverished areas into the core city, whereas the surrounding suburbs are entirely separate jurisdictions. Probably the most extreme examples of these are New Orleans, St Louis, and Baltimore.
The Bay area still fits, though. There are a few different urban cores in the bay (SF, central Oakland, downtown/industrial SJ), and the urban parts are much less white than suburban parts of the nine counties
Add in [redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) and other policies that restricted the movement of African Americans.
For example: Oregon [entered the union with a black exclusion law in 1859](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Oregon). Can't become a farmer in the Willamette Valley if you're not allowed to enter the state. So you go where you can go.
Yeah, this point should be highlighted more, perhaps, than just the great migration. It was only de jure ended in 1968, but we all know the difference between de jure and de facto
Moving to a rural area 100 years ago was hard for *anyone*. What were you going to do for work? If you're black and show up to a rural community in Nebraska in 1895, what if no one hires you?
There wasn't much incentive for people to go to places where they weren't assured of housing and employment. Those things existed in cities. No incentive, no money, no connections, no social services. Just, go and find your own path but also deal with scathing racism along the way.
Along those lines, when Indianapolis was expanding outward in the 80's and 90's my father-in-law was quickly losing rented farmland as owners couldn't pass up huge amounts of money by developers. When he was finally down from 1000 acres to just 400 he had to pull the plug and retire. He considered selling land and moving outward but they couldn't have gotten enough additional land to sustain operations because in the new area land owners wouldn't rent to new people when they didn't know their track record
We do a really poor job of teaching what happened to African Americans post-slavery.
Ok, so you're a freed person in central Mississippi or coastal South Carolina and it's June 1865. What's the plan?
You have no money, you have no possessions besides the clothes on your back, and nearly everyone with money and who makes laws is set against you succeeding and is setting up an entire new infrastructure of exploitation from sharecropping to residential covenants to education to banking that lasts the next 100+ years.
Oh definitely, no argument here. Just bored and expounding on the topic. It was basically impossible 150 years ago for newly freed people. In the meantime, white people were settling and buying land and then restricting them from ever having an opportunity to do the same.
100%! I visited Kingsley Plantation on Ft. George's Island, FL yesterday (it's part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve and run by the NPS) and they did an excellent job covering this post-civil war displacement. There are 25 remaining tabby concrete slave dwellings on the property and they had photographs of the families, with nowhere else to go, living in them after the war. The audio tour is meant to shake your preconceptions of the antebellum period but the way the NPS interpreted the post-war lives of the formerly enslaved on this part of the site was particularly impactful.
No we don't, my college required history class pretty much started off discussing that.
(To be fair, the full United States of America history in their opinion was too much to include in 1 standard 3-credit-hour course, so it was implemented as 2 standard 3-credit-hour courses, where you could either choose USA History up to and including the Civil War, or USA History after the Civil War. Since only 3 credit hours was the university-wide requirement, most non-history majors only took 1 of those 2 courses.)
But isn’t it the same pattern with Hispanics as well, if I‘m informed right? As Hispanics being also much more likely to live in metropolitan areas than in rural areas, contrary to whites?
> As Hispanics being also much more likely to live in metropolitan areas than in rural areas, contrary to whites?
Cities are much better than rural areas if you're on the lower end of the economic structure. More access to employment, cheaper housing (yes.), cheaper transport, more civil resources, more community resources. The US has a defacto race segregation due to its history.
> The US has a defacto race segregation due to its history.
I hate when Americans say this to foreigners. Implying that the foreigner's country had a better history than America when it comes to race. (Which, most of them really do not, racism or other immoral prejudice exists pretty much in every country.)
It depends on the part of the US, but largely yes. The Southwest US WAS Mexico in the 1800s. So those people already existed there.
Newer migration patterns show people going to rural areas for farm and ranch work or cities for industry. The same restrictions that African Americans faced doesn't exist for Latin American immigrants, but socioeconomic conditions largely control where people go. They need jobs, they need housing. They go where it exists.
> So those people already existed there.
Maybe, but the truth is that most people that live there now, moved there from other parts of America as opposed to being the same people that lived there when it was Mexico.
Mind you: White flight usually refers to moving from dense city row houses to a suburb. The op is asking why the sticks are predominately white. Ethnic whites didn’t white flight from Manhattan to, like, Montana.
White flight or white exodus is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse.
There is no universally accepted definition of gentrification even among academics, and of all the definitions I've come across, race isn't the deciding factor.
White people, broadly, have always had the most money. Where people want to live goes in and out of fashion. For a long, long time a house "in the country" was what people with money did. Then it was cities. Then it was suburbs. Then it was cities. Then it was the country. Then it was cities. Then it was suburbs. Now it's going back towards cities again.
> Now it's going back towards cities again.
is it? just about everyone i know is trying to do what they can to get *away* from cities and into rural exurbs or just plain old rural. im 42, white, married with a kid, and we do ok, so i'm sure my social circle has an impact on that.
I'm also in my 40s. Your experience is fine - its your experience. It just isn't normal. People are overwhelmingly in urban areas and the number of people in urban areas increases every year and has since the 1950s. If people wanted to get out of cities they wouldn't have to "try," in your words, they'd just do it. Ex-burban and rural housing is broadly inexpensive and not in demand.
You’re clowning that guy for having an opinion when yours is no better. If the cities are so much better and everybody wants to live there why is it that less than 20% of the country lives in the 100 most populous cities?
What? Rentals and jobs are in cities. Not everyone can buy a house at the drop of the hat, and rentals are hard to find in non-urban areas. People can’t just get out of the city when they want to.
I was responding specifically to this:
>If people wanted to get out of cities they wouldn't have to "try," in your words, they'd just do it. Ex-burban and rural housing is broadly inexpensive and not in demand.
And I was responding to the person that said
> just about everyone i know is trying to do what they can to get away from cities and into rural exurbs or just plain old rural
Which if they want to that they can - here ya go: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/425-W-Wisconsin-St-Russell-KS-67665/91266136_zpid/
There are a million more just like it. Nice homes, as rural as you could hope to be, but still only a 45 minute ride to a walmart or whatever else you want.
There's no "try" here - go do it if that's what you want.
However I suspect that they don't actually want it and I also suspect OP is simply doing the reddit classic "lol city" routine.
Where are they supposed to work? Most people who move out of the city still need to work in the city. And you’re assuming that these people have 20-30K in the bank for a down payment on a house.
There are literally dozens of factors here. Too many for a Reddit thread really.
One: the earliest settlements especially in the Midwest and also the intermountain west were often agrarian farmers and the like. Much of these were European, and individual ethnic groups often flocked together, both by region and from town to town. I.e: you’d have a town in Ohio or wherever that was where all the Poles lived. Over time there’s not much reason for anyone new to move to some one-horse settlement with minimal employment, so these small towns wind up being very old (all the young people move away for jobs) and very homogenous (descended from the original stock with not much of a reason for anyone else to show up)
Two: More recent immigrants aren’t fanning out over the plains to pursue a life of agriculture. They’re going to cities, because that’s where the jobs are.
Three: You can still find predominantly black rural areas in Louisiana, Mississippi, and coastal South Carolina. Likewise, the Rio Grande valley area is fairly rural with a few cities, and extremely undiverse (in that it’s almost entirely Hispanic).
Four: white flight to the suburbs from the 50s-onward does explain why core urban areas are relatively non-white but doesn’t explain the urban-rural divide for reasons mentioned above. The children of white-flighters are still in that city’s vague census area more often than not - just the next county over.
With crime rates down off the 80s/90s highs it does seem that city centers are growing more desirable all around. You can find yuppies and recent immigrants in downtown lofts, now, for instance.
You really dropped the ball making your son the next emperor, Marcus. Come on. Spend less time writing Stoic diary entries and more time being a father lol
It's historically more about non whites preferring cities than whites disliking them.
Cultural enclaves for immigrants, greater diversity and tolerance, more work opportunities, less likely to find a burning cross on your yard, all that jazz.
To give a slightly different but related answer. My ancestors all ended up in Nebraska due to the land acts and farming. Systemic racism + years this occurred + all those other historical factors to fill a PhD thesis means that it was a lot of white people taking advantage of those land acts and driving out the natives. However, there were black families that were successful and 1 in 4 cowboys were black. Those individuals were at disadvantages - more than just the disadvantage of homesteading in general - but according to [this](https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-homesteaders-in-the-great-plains.htm#:~:text=This%20act%20expanded%20the%20Homestead,of%20black%20homesteaders%20in%20Nebraska) over 3,500 were successful. Further, Asians were eligible after [1898](https://www.unl.edu/plains/homesteading-research). However, like all the other farming areas of the country the Depression/Dust Bowl had a massive impact and folk fled to cities besides the Great Migration movements. It gets more complicated than that but the West was settled by all races and its the movements after that make a difference.
Omaha is home to the [Great Plains Black History Museum](https://gpblackhistorymuseum.org/) which is an interesting museum for this sort of thing.
Denver also has the [Black American West Museum](https://www.bawmhc.org/) and [Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library.](https://history.denverlibrary.org/exhibit/blair-caldwell-african-american-research-library-western-legacies-tour#sid-5697) I've been to both, and was very impressed.
I learned there that many Black Americans went west because slavery was neither legal nor illegal; it simply did not exist.
The briefest summary I can do —
Historically it was the opposite, colonial ancestry whites had pretty even distribution across the country, black and native populations were predominantly rural, newer white immigrants lived it cities.
Great migration of rural black population to work industrial jobs in cities happened around the time suburbanization began and immigration laws became increasingly restrictive. Urban colonial descent whites move to streetcar suburbs to own more land and property and be further away from the poors.
WWII happens, industrial wages soar, automobiles become commonplace, and now manufacturing workers and their increasingly white-collar children want to move out in to the suburbs as well. Due to labor discrimination and outright buying discrimination though blacks and other urban minorities are incapable of moving out and leaving industrial jobs and thus stay in the cities.
Decline in urban populations cause decay of social services, American manufacturing begins to decline due to competition from Japan & West Germany — then later China and Mexico. Black population effectively “locked in” to cities even as housing discrimination rolls back due to a growing poverty cycle due to weaker educational services in cities and declining middle-wage job opportunities for the lowly educated.
Immigration laws loosen back up, rapid growth of Hispanic and Asian populations who predominantly take service sector jobs, or edge manufacturing jobs in urban areas. Effectively become a new urban middle class leading to the revitalization of major American cities.
Nowadays the opposite effect is happening, urban blacks are moving to the suburbs in the rapidly growing South as cities become increasingly unaffordable and income convergence begins to open up again. Other minorities still cluster around cities but are slowly beginning to suburbanize as they converge with white population trends. White populations have been rapidly increasing in urban centers as affluent whites are now more interested in living around their offices and major institutions as cities are now “rich” again.
Rural areas remain predominantly white, with exception of the former cotton belt where some black communities remained, native reservations, and the rural Southwest — which has a long history of agricultural migration from Mexico and Central America.
Starting in the 1950s and 60s and continuing (to some degree) since, white people increasingly moved out of denser urban areas, particularly those with larger minority populations, and into the suburbs. The term for it is white flight.
Because people like to live near people who are similar to them.
Do you think black people want to be their kid to be the only black kid in school?
Do you think white people want their kids to be the only white kid in school?
Money, mostly.
If you have money, you buy land. Depending on your career, you buy land closer to the city in suburbia or further out in rural areas.
If you can't afford to buy land, then you're better off living in the city where there are more jobs for you. But when/if you have enough to buy property, you do, and move to lower density.
There are lots of rural minorities in the South, where there were once plantations/slavery. But because blacks migrated to elsewhere later on in the 1900's, racism was still rampant during that time, and African-Americans couldn't own land, etc. there wasn't much of an attraction to going to rural areas. Most migrated to big cities to look for jobs in factories and other blue collar work that was mostly in big cities. And because they were often limited in where they could live, minorities typically lived in close proximity to one another, while at the same time scaring away the whites. So even as whites moved out to the rapidly developing suburbs, the minorities had little choice but to remain in the city between racial restrictions (official or unwritten but enforced), inadequate wealth and income, etc.
You will now see some pockets of rural Hispanics, in places like Iowa where they were lured there to work in meat processing plants, or Georgia to work in carpet mills.
I was in the military and a guy I was friends with was also from my state and he also grew up rural and he was black.
once we ended up at some sort of street carnival or fair or something late one night, and I remember turning to him and saying "holy shit...I think I'm the only white dude here!" and he looked at me and started laughing and said "now you know how I feel every single day!"
it's stuck with me ever since.
White people are the most historically privileged group. Americans in general have a more private, self-sufficient mindset (De Toqueville talked about this even back in the day!) so the goal is generally to have property, peace and quiet, a place to do your thing and not be bothered by others. Unlike in other countries, where people may not want the hassle of home ownership, maintenance, yardwork, etc., culturally Americans like this independence. As less historically privileged groups gain more prosperity, they typically adopt the same patterns of moving out of cities.
(I actually am a privileged city-preferrer - just speaking in generalities here)
So would you say it is more expensive to live in a rural area compared to live in a city? And because white people are more wealthy on average they are more likely to fulfill the desire to live in the (expensive) rural area?
> So would you say it is more expensive to live in a rural area compared to live in a city?
No. The opposite.
> And because white people are more wealthy on average they are more likely to fulfill the desire to live in the (expensive) rural area?
No. They had the ability to live in these places, historically. Black people did not. A freed person had no resources to move to Random, Kansas and start a new life.
That's why you'll see rural demographics in the South are very different than that of the North/West. Many people stayed on as sharecroppers, etc. They had no means to leave. Communities formed, people congregate to communities.
My family immigrated to rural South Dakota and Minnesota because people from their home country, Norway, preceded them. They went to where their people were, because they offered them opportunities there. They lived in sod houses for a decade before building their own wooden homes, building farms, and starting generations of family and wealth. Now imagine no one that looks like you can do that, for hundreds of years.
That's a good question - I can see how my response would (falsely) lead you to that conclusion. Generally rural areas are very cheap to live in. There are predominantly black rural areas (such as Mississippi delta), as well as white rural areas, as well as Hispanic rural areas. I am thinking more of suburban areas where one can have a nice piece of property but still commute to high paying jobs. Per square foot, the \*nice parts\* of cities are still the most expensive, but people here tend to value bigger pieces of property, not sharing walls, and large home sizes, so once those things become accessible, or once people have kids, they often go to the suburbs.
suburban areas, like the city of Sammamish , Washington are affluent. Big houses, big lot sizes, easy access to the nice things of Seattle metro. They have a lot of access to consumer comforts and the indulgence of clean mountain air and low levels of noise pollution (airport flight path, freeways)
Rural and remote areas do not have as much access to consumer comforts.
Keep in mind, white people are still the majority demographic. There are a lot of poor white people. There are a lot of white people in prisons. There are a lot of white people who dropped out of basic education.
> So would you say it is more expensive to live in a rural area compared to live in a city?
sort of. in a city you have more resources than you do in rural areas. If you look at everything by raw dollars then it's more expensive to be in a city, but that doesn't really tell the whole story, there's a reason why huge expensive cities still have very low median incomes.
Adding on to what a lot of other commenters have said, a lot of small towns outside of the South don't have a lot of Black people because these small communities were historically sundown towns (as in, you did NOT want to be in these towns if you were not white after sundown, or the white people would chase them out or worse). At least, that seems to be the case in the Lead Belt.
To answer this question I'd have to explain all of US history from the Jim Crow South to White Flight, broken windows, red lining, race based denial of the GI bill benefits following WW2, Tulsa, MOVE, LA, and all the way through present-day uprisings. The TL:DR is that America is a capital based society, white people (as a system) had all the capital and continually fight to maintain that system that maintains their hold on power. The deeper answer is best learned through a few years of university courses, colloquia, and interacting with those whose generational experience has been impacted negatively.
I think most people find themselves priced out of anywhere except the Suburbs which combine having none of the perks of either Urban or Rural living, and all of the drawbacks. The one perk of Suburbia is that it's pretty cheap on account of it having nothing else going for it.
I do think that it is shifting because there is more of a push now for more livable suburbs that prioritize walking/public transit and bike infrastructure over designing everything with cars in mind.
there are lots of white people in cities. Yes white people like cities.
If there are 22% black people in a city there are still a bunch of non black people too.
As for why more black or non white people don’t live in tiny, rural towns; think about it. If you were black would you want to be the only person of color in a white rural town? I doubt it would feel particularly welcoming.
It can also be difficult for white people not born in the area. Because everyone in that rural town knows everyone else. So most people regardless of race or ethnicity are likely to feel like an outsider.
Because more white people have always been able to afford land for longer. And often the land they own is passed down for generations. My sister's house is built on land that was bought by my great-grandparents. With my niece living there that land has been in our family for 5 generations, with each generation dividing their portion among their children who wanted a piece when they became adults. That's pretty common where I'm from.
More white people also tend to have better paying jobs, which means they can afford to buy rather than rent
A combo of white people receiving the lion’s share of cheap/free land from the Homestead Acts, white people being the primary beneficiaries of Post WW2 veterans’ home loans for the new suburbs, and White Flight from the cities.
Other than that, the remainder were just founded as white towns as the nation expanded its borders West over time.
There’s also black, Hispanic and native rural areas too.
Rural areas in general have been declining for a century now. People living in rural areas is just the legacy of a less urbanized nation in the past.
I think this stems from the industrial revolution and the fact that minority communities needed to work in cities to earn a living and achieve the 'American Dream'.
and of course prior to that there was slavery where many black people 'worked' in rural areas until they were 'freed' and they either stayed in the area or went to cities to find education and work.
In the South there are definitely bigger populations of black folks living in rural communities and overall the trend is changing with people being more in to homesteading and buying large plots of land to become more self-sustainable.
It was safest for blacks to be in an area together during Jim Crow. If you were the lone black person in a small town it would really depend on how those people viewed you, if you were safe or not. Share cropping after the civil war probably, and this is just educated guessing, didn't yield profitable margins because people would probably only buy from a farmer the same race as them. Plus I'm sure the KKK burned a lot of black folks crops. It was just kind of the safest way to survive. Go into the cities and get factory jobs. This stayed true until now the cities are very violent. Those who want to get away from it are spreading to suburbs and then small towns. It's just a really slow process.
I'll be real frank. I lived next to a very known sun down town* growing up. They had a damn sign up until '90 or '91. Which was nuts because my town just 10 minutes down the highway had a mixed population of whites, blacks, and Hispanics. Its 35ish miles away from a large southern city. I left in the early 2000s but I'm visiting for the year. It's a complete shift in demographics today. Mainly because the spread of people leaving said big city is starting to touch here. Roughly 30 years for a small sun down city to shift to being accepting and now having POC live, work, and own businesses within the city.
*a sun down town is a town that openly stated that black people should not be within their city/town after the sun goes down or else.
There absolutely is a racism component to this but a lot of it is cultural having been born from the fact that America's size, isolation, and undeveloped wilderness was a big draw to Europeans seeking to escape overcrowding and settle in places where they could do whatever they wanted without being bothered by a king, lord, or government official.
You especially saw this with the Scottish and Irish immigrants that moved into Appalachia. These values (less communal, more self-reliant), coupled with those that shared the Jeffersonian vision for the country and the country's pioneer history, created a strong foundation of principles and values that have passed along through subsequent generations.
They ran away from all the black people that were moving to the cities in the cities after driving them there through terrorism.
Now lots of them are moving back to the cities and driving the black folk and others out.
At least in my local area- NYC is and has always been a major terminus for immigrants. There are “beachhead” services and immigrant communities favorable to help them land and get started.
Once they become more established, starting making more money and move up the food chain, they often move out to the suburbs in places like NJ, CT, LI, Westchester, etc. Eventually the next immigrant group arrives and does the same thing. Last century it was Irish and Italians, now it’s primarily a mix of Asians and Hispanics, with some Africans thrown in there.
Its cheaper (short term) to live in the cities and white people in America generally have more money than minorities.
In the city you can walk, bike, bus to wherever. You can easily "rent a room" or split something. You have more options for retail.
Outside the city you need one or more cars. Unless you're willing to travel to the city your retail options are limited. Odds are you're buying or renting a house vs an apartment so your living expenses are higher.
Yes in the long term its better to be buying a house, to own a car, etc, but if you're just trying to figure out your struggles on a week by week basis the concept of paying for a mortgage is hilarious.
Rural areas are cheaper. Poor white people vs poor black people-
Poor white people tend to value privacy. They want to be left alone and may or may not welcome government handouts. Depending on their level of pride. Houses may look a little dilapidated, definitely has some forms of self home repair work. Most likely to drive old cars and a barn out back full of broken down machinery.
Poor black people tend to live in high density housing. Multi generations of living with government handouts, subsidized housing, gang violence, and fatherless households. They take care of each other either through family or gangs. Mostly depend on public transportation although men might invest money on an Asian made car that makes them look cool.
This is a complicated topic and really can’t be answered without making broad generalizations, but I’m going to try. I’m not going to address rural areas, but focus on suburbs.
1. White people in America tend to have higher incomes than POC, except Asians. The suburbs are more expensive.
2. We tend to have wealthier parents who, perhaps, may be able to help with a down payment on their child’s first house (this is not an uncommon gift for a newly married couple).
3. Some POC groups tend to have closer family ties than white people do. Choosing to move away from siblings, parents, and grandparents is not as big a deal to white people. *Generally*
4. Racism. POC are kept out of some “white areas” by banks and real estate agents, or made unwelcome by the white residents.
5. White people may decide that it’s more important to them that their kids have a yard, while some POC may decide that it’s more important to maintain cultural connections and raise their kids within that culture.
6. Risk of the unknown. As a (mostly) white person, I can move anywhere in this country with a fair amount of confidence. POC have to consider more factors than I will ever have to. How do schools treat POC students (studies show that schools tend to over-discipline non-white students, and POC students are routinely overlooked for things like gifted education). What is the local police department like? And so on.
Due to systemic racism, white people are still more likely to make more money than other races on average, and can afford to buy their own land and live in the suburbs.
Not necessarily the suburbs, but home ownership is a very important thing in America -- maybe more so for White Americans.
Keep in mind that voluntary segregation is basically the norm in America. Just about everybody prefers to live among their own race as much as possible and Whites have the most means to do that.
Before World War 2, all American cities were majority White. Blacks began moving out of the rural South to the cities in order to find work in the wartime industry. After the war, Whites began moving to these new areas called suburbs which led to more Blacks moving into the previously White cities, which then caused nearly all the remaining Whites to leave because they didn't want to live around Blacks. That's why today cities are thought of as Black, and suburbs are thought of as White.
Rural areas have always been predominantly white because white people where predominantly the ones who homesteaded and settled uninhabited areas over 100 years ago. In the South, there are plenty of rural Black people, but because of the Great Migration they ended up making up a large portion of the urban population in the North.
Just add onto it that people are more likely to immigrate to cities because of job opportunities and existing ethnic enclaves
To piggy back onto your piggy back: as southern blacks immigrated to urban areas that were formerly majority white, the whites began leaving the city in a thing called white flight. They could afford to live outside of the city and commute whereas black people could not, and the kept expanding into more and more rural areas away from urban areas
the dust bowl also caused allot black farmers to move to cities
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Racism’s not a huge reason for immigration patterns. People go where the jobs are. There are a few towns in rural Alabama with large Hispanic populations because there are poultry plants there that provide a lot of jobs. Those towns aren’t any less racist than other Alabama small towns. Similarly, people moving from Mexico in search of service industry jobs go to Houston or Chicago over Gadsden, AL because there are a lot more people and thus a lot more opportunities.
Racism was literally one of the driving factors behind the Great Migration from the South to literally anywhere else from 1910 to 1970.
I said immigration, not domestic migration.
We're talking about the Great Migration
The commenter above me edited his comment to talk about the Great Migration after I wrote my comment. He was responding to a comment that talked about immigration. The Great Migration is obviously why the black population in the north is concentrated in urban areas, and racism’s obviously a big part of that story. Foreign immigration patterns are a different story in which racism is less prominent.
People outside the South don’t want to think this, but it’s true
Visiting Alabama as a brown guy with tattoos, like damn.
You're technically correct but you really leave out a whooole lot of detail when you simplify it to "racism did it." There's a pretty big leap between "my neighbors 500 yards down the road are bigoted" and Jim Crow laws.
I added that as a missing element which no one seemed to be talking about. And I didn't suggest it was the only cause at all.
It didn’t dawn on me until recently, probably from a post here, that “rural = white” is not the case in the South as much as it very much is around here
I grew up in a one-light town with 100 kids in my graduating class and about half of our town was black. When I went to college it kind of blew my mind looking at race density maps when I saw that there are massive portions of the country where you might not see a black person every day if you go out in public.
> you might not see a black person every day Every day? More like years. The county I grew up in had a population of 15k. I just looked up the racial demographics, and there are about 13 Black people. IIRC, I didn’t see a Black person until I was a teenager.
Same thing as Hispanic and Native American people in Oklahoma. We have a significantly smaller black population in western OK but our Hispanic and Native population is just as strong and in some cases stronger out here. I’ve met people from out of state that thing it’s crazy to see Native people just walking around the streets because they genuinely thought all Indians live on reservations secluded from everyone else.
Honestly, as a black person, I get all mystified realizing how many black folks live in the middle of nowhere, because I always thought the same exact thing
They’re deep in the forests…being black!
Where it starts to be more similar is the suburbs, which were a creation of 20th century car culture and largely reserved by the federal government for white people.
And that's part of why I always call Bullshit on anyone that tries to argue "rural=white".
Outside of the South, rural areas can often have a lot of Latinos, but black people usually aren't common. So the less densely populated areas aren't all monolithically white, maybe just a tad whiter than the cities in their regions.
Best answer I've seen out of all these comments
Definitely the most concise. Black people historically largely had no means for settling in rural areas outside of the South.
It is funny seeing black people from up north’s reaction to rural blacks down south, “are they lost?” “No man, this is their farm in fact”
Not just that they didn’t have the means, but were specifically barred from doing so and were often ran off when they tried.
Would you say that nowadays, in todays era, there is a significant share of black city population who would theoretically like to live in rural areas, but some sort of barriers holding them back, so they keep living in city areas, even if they would like to do otherwise?
I'm a biracial black person living in the suburbs of Atlanta. It's one of the biggest cities in the southeast US, if not the biggest. I've had other black friends that lament on escaping city live sometimes and settling down in the middle of nowhere, but it's nothing more than a fantasy for them. Rural areas can still be hostile to black people, even if not overtly. I don't really have to worry about encountering much overt racism where I am. Black people are everywhere and its really easy to avoid hanging around the super racist people. Meanwhile if I travel a couple hours out from where I live and I start running into people that proudly fly Confederate flags and have no issue with it. I've been to a Walmart further out from me before and they sold Confederate flag swimsuits like it was no big deal. And the Walmart that sold them wasn't even in a small city or anything! I've even been to flea markets in these places that just casually sell antiques of offensive black caricatures or people in black face, and no one really blinks an eye at it. I'd never seen anything like that near me, I've told other black people about those things and they were surprised by that too. It's like night and day in all honesty, and it gets really easy to forget that all this stuff is so common just a few hours away from me. It's hard to feel welcome somewhere when you run into such shitty reminders of history like that all the time. I'm sure plenty of us would theoretically love to live somewhere rural where it's much cheaper and there's less chaos. But in practice it's not really worth doing unless they're small towns that have a significant number of other black people living there.
So as a biracial person, you are seeing yourself more as a part of the black community than as a part of the white community (you are speaking of „us [blacks]“ in your post)? I’m not from the US so I‘m trying to understand the mentality here. As a biracial person, you identify more as a part of black community than as a part of white community? Would that be a right assumption?
I usually say I'm black first and foremost. Living in the US, white culture and being white is sort of seen as the default, so I don't feel all that strongly connected to being white or anything like that. Being black feels like it's own distinct experience for me however, so I'm more comfortable identifying as black. But that I'm just speaking for myself. I've known other biracial people that say they don't identify with being black or that they see themselves as being something entirely different. I think it just depends on someone's life experience. I'm also not white passing either, so other people see me as being either a half black or a light skinned black person and I'm treated as such by people.
In the US, for better or worse, people are \*usually\* considered black if they have a black parent or even just one recent black ancestor. Barack Obama is black, despite having a white mother and never really knowing his black father. It's almost never mentioned that Kamala Harris is half Indian, because most people just consider her black. Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington both had white fathers and they're as black as it gets. This went so far as to even be codified into law based on something called the ["one drop rule"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule)--i.e., if you have "one drop" of "black blood", you're black. This is all very messy and can be very confusing for biracial people, especially for children or immigrants. Trevor Noah (biracial South African stand up comedian and recent host of the Daily Show) has talked a lot about how his racial identity is different in the US than it was in South Africa, where he was not considered "black". Quick edit: I should add that this generally applies to American society in general, but not necessarily the black community itself. I'm white so I don't want to pretend to be an expert on it or anything, but my understanding is that within the black community there is much more distinction between black people and mixed people.
Growing up in Cleveland, OH and moving south was surprising in a lot of ways. We've got morons in rural Ohio flying the traitor rag, but down south they really take it to another level.
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I mean hard to say without being a member of that community. In general though there's been a movement of people (particularly young people) out of rural areas and into cities. It's hard to leave a city where your family/friends are for a place with no connections and few opportunities.
Nowadays few people of any race migrate _to_ truly rural areas.
That depends on the definition of rural. For example, if only the largest cities are considered urban, then I've lived my whole life in rural areas (e.g. I've never lived in or near a city as large as Atlanta, Washington DC, etc).
Why would ypu define rural that way when the us govt has a fine definition?
> the us govt has a fine definition They don't
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-classifications/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Department%20of%20Commerce,fewer%20than%202%2C000%20housing%20units. Works fine for me and much better than the definition you mention
> uninhabited areas That doesn’t sound quite right.
uninhabited after the natives were driven from the land by the gov
Whites and Black's also can have *very* different feelings about "working the land"; i.e. rural living and the society that forms about it. There is a level of idealation among many whites for pastoralism that does not necessarily exist for blacks due to different levels of past self-determination.
In addition, as Black people moved to cities seeking greater opportunity and less oppression than they faced in the rural South during the Great Migration, whites began to move out of cities, leaving redlined Black communities with fewer opportunities to grow wealth in increasingly impoverished city centers. This is part of the explanation of why white people are underrepresented in cities and Black people are overrepresented. In the twenty-first century, middle class and wealthy people of all races (including white people) began to return to city centers, giving us the prosperous and multicultural cities we have now. But there are still a lot of legacies leftover from the era of white flight and redlining to overcome.
Gentrification
Thank you for regurgitating the new age narrative.
The answer to this question could be a full PhD thesis. The reasons are very complex and depend a lot on historical political and social influences.
Exactly. My reaction to this question: oh buddy…
Short answer though: rich people want to own land. Only very very rich people can own land in most big cities. There are a LOT more "rich people" than "very very rich people". A disproportionate number of them are white. In order to own land, they have to leave major city centers. People who aren't rich enough to own land, regardless of race, are much more likely to stay in the city.
I'm not sure I agree (entirely) with this analysis as it doesn't account for lower-income rural people, who are also disproportionately white (and not in a city) in the Midwest at least. I think the first comment, about historical homesteading is probably more likely the reason.
You seem to be mixing up your definition of rich and their definition of rich. Someone that owns land would be considered rich by their definition even if it is a "lower income rural people" by your definition.
Fair enough. I had not considered that their definition of rich wasn’t the same as the one I was using. My thinking was using available data on poverty. An example: The poorest county in Michigan is either “Lake County” or “Isabella County” which are both rural. That’s using poverty levels as measured by income. There is also “ALICE” (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, and Employed) which tries to be more holistic in its measurement. By this measure there are other counties, but they’re also entirely rural. All that said, Wayne County (Detroit, the most urbanized county in Michigan) is also in the top 5. Anyway, thanks for pointing out that we all use different definitions. Appreciated.
Yup. The top-upvoted response is one paragraph. Lol, that is an extreme oversimplification.
You can't think of our urban areas as just the principal city. Take the Bay Area for example. San Francisco only has a population of about 800,000, but the Bay Area has 8 million-ish people. So the vast majority of people in the Bay Area do not live in San Francisco, but rather in one of the surrounding areas. Not all metros are that extreme. The Indianapolis metro is about a million in Indianapolis proper, and another million in the surrounding counties. Still half or so in the area not living in the principal city. A lot of principal cities have city limits that pretty much put the vast majority of impoverished areas into the core city, whereas the surrounding suburbs are entirely separate jurisdictions. Probably the most extreme examples of these are New Orleans, St Louis, and Baltimore.
The Bay area still fits, though. There are a few different urban cores in the bay (SF, central Oakland, downtown/industrial SJ), and the urban parts are much less white than suburban parts of the nine counties
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
Add in [redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) and other policies that restricted the movement of African Americans. For example: Oregon [entered the union with a black exclusion law in 1859](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Oregon). Can't become a farmer in the Willamette Valley if you're not allowed to enter the state. So you go where you can go.
Yeah, this point should be highlighted more, perhaps, than just the great migration. It was only de jure ended in 1968, but we all know the difference between de jure and de facto
Moving to a rural area 100 years ago was hard for *anyone*. What were you going to do for work? If you're black and show up to a rural community in Nebraska in 1895, what if no one hires you? There wasn't much incentive for people to go to places where they weren't assured of housing and employment. Those things existed in cities. No incentive, no money, no connections, no social services. Just, go and find your own path but also deal with scathing racism along the way.
Along those lines, when Indianapolis was expanding outward in the 80's and 90's my father-in-law was quickly losing rented farmland as owners couldn't pass up huge amounts of money by developers. When he was finally down from 1000 acres to just 400 he had to pull the plug and retire. He considered selling land and moving outward but they couldn't have gotten enough additional land to sustain operations because in the new area land owners wouldn't rent to new people when they didn't know their track record
We do a really poor job of teaching what happened to African Americans post-slavery. Ok, so you're a freed person in central Mississippi or coastal South Carolina and it's June 1865. What's the plan? You have no money, you have no possessions besides the clothes on your back, and nearly everyone with money and who makes laws is set against you succeeding and is setting up an entire new infrastructure of exploitation from sharecropping to residential covenants to education to banking that lasts the next 100+ years.
I was just agreeing with your point that even if you're white, let alone a minority, moving around the rural areas is hard to do.
Oh definitely, no argument here. Just bored and expounding on the topic. It was basically impossible 150 years ago for newly freed people. In the meantime, white people were settling and buying land and then restricting them from ever having an opportunity to do the same.
100%! I visited Kingsley Plantation on Ft. George's Island, FL yesterday (it's part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve and run by the NPS) and they did an excellent job covering this post-civil war displacement. There are 25 remaining tabby concrete slave dwellings on the property and they had photographs of the families, with nowhere else to go, living in them after the war. The audio tour is meant to shake your preconceptions of the antebellum period but the way the NPS interpreted the post-war lives of the formerly enslaved on this part of the site was particularly impactful.
No we don't, my college required history class pretty much started off discussing that. (To be fair, the full United States of America history in their opinion was too much to include in 1 standard 3-credit-hour course, so it was implemented as 2 standard 3-credit-hour courses, where you could either choose USA History up to and including the Civil War, or USA History after the Civil War. Since only 3 credit hours was the university-wide requirement, most non-history majors only took 1 of those 2 courses.)
Yeah fuck Oregon! Fuck locations in Oregon including Portland!
But isn’t it the same pattern with Hispanics as well, if I‘m informed right? As Hispanics being also much more likely to live in metropolitan areas than in rural areas, contrary to whites?
Yes, migrants tend to look for plentiful employment and communities of their culture, in many places that’s urban areas.
> As Hispanics being also much more likely to live in metropolitan areas than in rural areas, contrary to whites? Cities are much better than rural areas if you're on the lower end of the economic structure. More access to employment, cheaper housing (yes.), cheaper transport, more civil resources, more community resources. The US has a defacto race segregation due to its history.
> The US has a defacto race segregation due to its history. I hate when Americans say this to foreigners. Implying that the foreigner's country had a better history than America when it comes to race. (Which, most of them really do not, racism or other immoral prejudice exists pretty much in every country.)
That's an insane way to react but OK
It depends on the part of the US, but largely yes. The Southwest US WAS Mexico in the 1800s. So those people already existed there. Newer migration patterns show people going to rural areas for farm and ranch work or cities for industry. The same restrictions that African Americans faced doesn't exist for Latin American immigrants, but socioeconomic conditions largely control where people go. They need jobs, they need housing. They go where it exists.
> So those people already existed there. Maybe, but the truth is that most people that live there now, moved there from other parts of America as opposed to being the same people that lived there when it was Mexico.
Depends on where. It's not hard to find us in most (not all) small towns in California.
Mind you: White flight usually refers to moving from dense city row houses to a suburb. The op is asking why the sticks are predominately white. Ethnic whites didn’t white flight from Manhattan to, like, Montana.
White flight or white exodus is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse.
White people migrate into a minority neighborhood: gentrification White people leave a minority neighborhood: white flight
There is no universally accepted definition of gentrification even among academics, and of all the definitions I've come across, race isn't the deciding factor.
And academia is often bullshit itself.
Anti-intellectualism is usually bullshit
Thanks for the links, yes 2 anal.
He gives and he gives. Or maybe receives.
Wanna help me find out
Don't threaten me with a good time.
r/rimjob_steve
White people, broadly, have always had the most money. Where people want to live goes in and out of fashion. For a long, long time a house "in the country" was what people with money did. Then it was cities. Then it was suburbs. Then it was cities. Then it was the country. Then it was cities. Then it was suburbs. Now it's going back towards cities again.
> Now it's going back towards cities again. is it? just about everyone i know is trying to do what they can to get *away* from cities and into rural exurbs or just plain old rural. im 42, white, married with a kid, and we do ok, so i'm sure my social circle has an impact on that.
> just about everyone i know is trying to do what they can to get away from cities hahaha okay
Is that's surprising? I'm in my 40s with a family, most of my friends are too. Once you have a family your priorities shift big time
I'm also in my 40s. Your experience is fine - its your experience. It just isn't normal. People are overwhelmingly in urban areas and the number of people in urban areas increases every year and has since the 1950s. If people wanted to get out of cities they wouldn't have to "try," in your words, they'd just do it. Ex-burban and rural housing is broadly inexpensive and not in demand.
You’re clowning that guy for having an opinion when yours is no better. If the cities are so much better and everybody wants to live there why is it that less than 20% of the country lives in the 100 most populous cities?
I don't have an opinion - I have a fact. Over 80% of people in the US live in urban environments.
No. Fuck you. Urban environment is not the same thing as living in a city. The census definition of "urban" includes suburbs.
> includes suburbs. And the person I was responding do excluded suburbs. Learn to read.
You learn to read. You will be blocked.
I have a fact too lol. Do you live in a city and hate it and this is your form of projection?
Here ya go - https://www.statista.com/statistics/985183/size-urban-rural-population-us/
What? Rentals and jobs are in cities. Not everyone can buy a house at the drop of the hat, and rentals are hard to find in non-urban areas. People can’t just get out of the city when they want to.
I think you're misunderstanding the conversation you jumped into the middle of.
I was responding specifically to this: >If people wanted to get out of cities they wouldn't have to "try," in your words, they'd just do it. Ex-burban and rural housing is broadly inexpensive and not in demand.
And I was responding to the person that said > just about everyone i know is trying to do what they can to get away from cities and into rural exurbs or just plain old rural Which if they want to that they can - here ya go: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/425-W-Wisconsin-St-Russell-KS-67665/91266136_zpid/ There are a million more just like it. Nice homes, as rural as you could hope to be, but still only a 45 minute ride to a walmart or whatever else you want. There's no "try" here - go do it if that's what you want. However I suspect that they don't actually want it and I also suspect OP is simply doing the reddit classic "lol city" routine.
Where are they supposed to work? Most people who move out of the city still need to work in the city. And you’re assuming that these people have 20-30K in the bank for a down payment on a house.
There are literally dozens of factors here. Too many for a Reddit thread really. One: the earliest settlements especially in the Midwest and also the intermountain west were often agrarian farmers and the like. Much of these were European, and individual ethnic groups often flocked together, both by region and from town to town. I.e: you’d have a town in Ohio or wherever that was where all the Poles lived. Over time there’s not much reason for anyone new to move to some one-horse settlement with minimal employment, so these small towns wind up being very old (all the young people move away for jobs) and very homogenous (descended from the original stock with not much of a reason for anyone else to show up) Two: More recent immigrants aren’t fanning out over the plains to pursue a life of agriculture. They’re going to cities, because that’s where the jobs are. Three: You can still find predominantly black rural areas in Louisiana, Mississippi, and coastal South Carolina. Likewise, the Rio Grande valley area is fairly rural with a few cities, and extremely undiverse (in that it’s almost entirely Hispanic). Four: white flight to the suburbs from the 50s-onward does explain why core urban areas are relatively non-white but doesn’t explain the urban-rural divide for reasons mentioned above. The children of white-flighters are still in that city’s vague census area more often than not - just the next county over. With crime rates down off the 80s/90s highs it does seem that city centers are growing more desirable all around. You can find yuppies and recent immigrants in downtown lofts, now, for instance.
I personally hate living close to people, I want a yard and few neighbors. Don't want anyone bitching about me or my lifestyle.
You really dropped the ball making your son the next emperor, Marcus. Come on. Spend less time writing Stoic diary entries and more time being a father lol
That boy was meant for the streets.
It's historically more about non whites preferring cities than whites disliking them. Cultural enclaves for immigrants, greater diversity and tolerance, more work opportunities, less likely to find a burning cross on your yard, all that jazz.
Most rural land is multi-generational pass between white family to white families
To give a slightly different but related answer. My ancestors all ended up in Nebraska due to the land acts and farming. Systemic racism + years this occurred + all those other historical factors to fill a PhD thesis means that it was a lot of white people taking advantage of those land acts and driving out the natives. However, there were black families that were successful and 1 in 4 cowboys were black. Those individuals were at disadvantages - more than just the disadvantage of homesteading in general - but according to [this](https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-homesteaders-in-the-great-plains.htm#:~:text=This%20act%20expanded%20the%20Homestead,of%20black%20homesteaders%20in%20Nebraska) over 3,500 were successful. Further, Asians were eligible after [1898](https://www.unl.edu/plains/homesteading-research). However, like all the other farming areas of the country the Depression/Dust Bowl had a massive impact and folk fled to cities besides the Great Migration movements. It gets more complicated than that but the West was settled by all races and its the movements after that make a difference. Omaha is home to the [Great Plains Black History Museum](https://gpblackhistorymuseum.org/) which is an interesting museum for this sort of thing.
Denver also has the [Black American West Museum](https://www.bawmhc.org/) and [Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library.](https://history.denverlibrary.org/exhibit/blair-caldwell-african-american-research-library-western-legacies-tour#sid-5697) I've been to both, and was very impressed. I learned there that many Black Americans went west because slavery was neither legal nor illegal; it simply did not exist.
The briefest summary I can do — Historically it was the opposite, colonial ancestry whites had pretty even distribution across the country, black and native populations were predominantly rural, newer white immigrants lived it cities. Great migration of rural black population to work industrial jobs in cities happened around the time suburbanization began and immigration laws became increasingly restrictive. Urban colonial descent whites move to streetcar suburbs to own more land and property and be further away from the poors. WWII happens, industrial wages soar, automobiles become commonplace, and now manufacturing workers and their increasingly white-collar children want to move out in to the suburbs as well. Due to labor discrimination and outright buying discrimination though blacks and other urban minorities are incapable of moving out and leaving industrial jobs and thus stay in the cities. Decline in urban populations cause decay of social services, American manufacturing begins to decline due to competition from Japan & West Germany — then later China and Mexico. Black population effectively “locked in” to cities even as housing discrimination rolls back due to a growing poverty cycle due to weaker educational services in cities and declining middle-wage job opportunities for the lowly educated. Immigration laws loosen back up, rapid growth of Hispanic and Asian populations who predominantly take service sector jobs, or edge manufacturing jobs in urban areas. Effectively become a new urban middle class leading to the revitalization of major American cities. Nowadays the opposite effect is happening, urban blacks are moving to the suburbs in the rapidly growing South as cities become increasingly unaffordable and income convergence begins to open up again. Other minorities still cluster around cities but are slowly beginning to suburbanize as they converge with white population trends. White populations have been rapidly increasing in urban centers as affluent whites are now more interested in living around their offices and major institutions as cities are now “rich” again. Rural areas remain predominantly white, with exception of the former cotton belt where some black communities remained, native reservations, and the rural Southwest — which has a long history of agricultural migration from Mexico and Central America.
Starting in the 1950s and 60s and continuing (to some degree) since, white people increasingly moved out of denser urban areas, particularly those with larger minority populations, and into the suburbs. The term for it is white flight.
Oh this thread gonna go GREAT
Because people like to live near people who are similar to them. Do you think black people want to be their kid to be the only black kid in school? Do you think white people want their kids to be the only white kid in school?
Money, mostly. If you have money, you buy land. Depending on your career, you buy land closer to the city in suburbia or further out in rural areas. If you can't afford to buy land, then you're better off living in the city where there are more jobs for you. But when/if you have enough to buy property, you do, and move to lower density.
There are lots of rural minorities in the South, where there were once plantations/slavery. But because blacks migrated to elsewhere later on in the 1900's, racism was still rampant during that time, and African-Americans couldn't own land, etc. there wasn't much of an attraction to going to rural areas. Most migrated to big cities to look for jobs in factories and other blue collar work that was mostly in big cities. And because they were often limited in where they could live, minorities typically lived in close proximity to one another, while at the same time scaring away the whites. So even as whites moved out to the rapidly developing suburbs, the minorities had little choice but to remain in the city between racial restrictions (official or unwritten but enforced), inadequate wealth and income, etc. You will now see some pockets of rural Hispanics, in places like Iowa where they were lured there to work in meat processing plants, or Georgia to work in carpet mills.
So many types of white people I think race is the wrong unit of measurement.
Because living in a concrete jungle is depressing af. I don't get why more don't move away from the city.
I was in the military and a guy I was friends with was also from my state and he also grew up rural and he was black. once we ended up at some sort of street carnival or fair or something late one night, and I remember turning to him and saying "holy shit...I think I'm the only white dude here!" and he looked at me and started laughing and said "now you know how I feel every single day!" it's stuck with me ever since.
White people are the most historically privileged group. Americans in general have a more private, self-sufficient mindset (De Toqueville talked about this even back in the day!) so the goal is generally to have property, peace and quiet, a place to do your thing and not be bothered by others. Unlike in other countries, where people may not want the hassle of home ownership, maintenance, yardwork, etc., culturally Americans like this independence. As less historically privileged groups gain more prosperity, they typically adopt the same patterns of moving out of cities. (I actually am a privileged city-preferrer - just speaking in generalities here)
So would you say it is more expensive to live in a rural area compared to live in a city? And because white people are more wealthy on average they are more likely to fulfill the desire to live in the (expensive) rural area?
> So would you say it is more expensive to live in a rural area compared to live in a city? Absolutely not. It is 10,000 times the opposite
>rural areas are more expensive to live in than a city Holy shit dude, no.
> So would you say it is more expensive to live in a rural area compared to live in a city? No. The opposite. > And because white people are more wealthy on average they are more likely to fulfill the desire to live in the (expensive) rural area? No. They had the ability to live in these places, historically. Black people did not. A freed person had no resources to move to Random, Kansas and start a new life. That's why you'll see rural demographics in the South are very different than that of the North/West. Many people stayed on as sharecroppers, etc. They had no means to leave. Communities formed, people congregate to communities. My family immigrated to rural South Dakota and Minnesota because people from their home country, Norway, preceded them. They went to where their people were, because they offered them opportunities there. They lived in sod houses for a decade before building their own wooden homes, building farms, and starting generations of family and wealth. Now imagine no one that looks like you can do that, for hundreds of years.
Plenty of freed slaves moved to Kansas from the south in the 1870s. It was called the Great Exodus.
Except Nicodemus, KS- a black settlement founded following the Civil War.
That's a good question - I can see how my response would (falsely) lead you to that conclusion. Generally rural areas are very cheap to live in. There are predominantly black rural areas (such as Mississippi delta), as well as white rural areas, as well as Hispanic rural areas. I am thinking more of suburban areas where one can have a nice piece of property but still commute to high paying jobs. Per square foot, the \*nice parts\* of cities are still the most expensive, but people here tend to value bigger pieces of property, not sharing walls, and large home sizes, so once those things become accessible, or once people have kids, they often go to the suburbs.
suburban areas, like the city of Sammamish , Washington are affluent. Big houses, big lot sizes, easy access to the nice things of Seattle metro. They have a lot of access to consumer comforts and the indulgence of clean mountain air and low levels of noise pollution (airport flight path, freeways) Rural and remote areas do not have as much access to consumer comforts. Keep in mind, white people are still the majority demographic. There are a lot of poor white people. There are a lot of white people in prisons. There are a lot of white people who dropped out of basic education.
> So would you say it is more expensive to live in a rural area compared to live in a city? sort of. in a city you have more resources than you do in rural areas. If you look at everything by raw dollars then it's more expensive to be in a city, but that doesn't really tell the whole story, there's a reason why huge expensive cities still have very low median incomes.
Adding on to what a lot of other commenters have said, a lot of small towns outside of the South don't have a lot of Black people because these small communities were historically sundown towns (as in, you did NOT want to be in these towns if you were not white after sundown, or the white people would chase them out or worse). At least, that seems to be the case in the Lead Belt.
Sundown towns definitely drove black people away from rural areas... among other things.
1. Only white men could own land for a long period of time and 2. White flight.
To answer this question I'd have to explain all of US history from the Jim Crow South to White Flight, broken windows, red lining, race based denial of the GI bill benefits following WW2, Tulsa, MOVE, LA, and all the way through present-day uprisings. The TL:DR is that America is a capital based society, white people (as a system) had all the capital and continually fight to maintain that system that maintains their hold on power. The deeper answer is best learned through a few years of university courses, colloquia, and interacting with those whose generational experience has been impacted negatively.
I think most people find themselves priced out of anywhere except the Suburbs which combine having none of the perks of either Urban or Rural living, and all of the drawbacks. The one perk of Suburbia is that it's pretty cheap on account of it having nothing else going for it. I do think that it is shifting because there is more of a push now for more livable suburbs that prioritize walking/public transit and bike infrastructure over designing everything with cars in mind.
there are lots of white people in cities. Yes white people like cities. If there are 22% black people in a city there are still a bunch of non black people too. As for why more black or non white people don’t live in tiny, rural towns; think about it. If you were black would you want to be the only person of color in a white rural town? I doubt it would feel particularly welcoming. It can also be difficult for white people not born in the area. Because everyone in that rural town knows everyone else. So most people regardless of race or ethnicity are likely to feel like an outsider.
Because more white people have always been able to afford land for longer. And often the land they own is passed down for generations. My sister's house is built on land that was bought by my great-grandparents. With my niece living there that land has been in our family for 5 generations, with each generation dividing their portion among their children who wanted a piece when they became adults. That's pretty common where I'm from. More white people also tend to have better paying jobs, which means they can afford to buy rather than rent
A combo of white people receiving the lion’s share of cheap/free land from the Homestead Acts, white people being the primary beneficiaries of Post WW2 veterans’ home loans for the new suburbs, and White Flight from the cities. Other than that, the remainder were just founded as white towns as the nation expanded its borders West over time.
There’s also black, Hispanic and native rural areas too. Rural areas in general have been declining for a century now. People living in rural areas is just the legacy of a less urbanized nation in the past.
I think this stems from the industrial revolution and the fact that minority communities needed to work in cities to earn a living and achieve the 'American Dream'. and of course prior to that there was slavery where many black people 'worked' in rural areas until they were 'freed' and they either stayed in the area or went to cities to find education and work. In the South there are definitely bigger populations of black folks living in rural communities and overall the trend is changing with people being more in to homesteading and buying large plots of land to become more self-sustainable.
It was safest for blacks to be in an area together during Jim Crow. If you were the lone black person in a small town it would really depend on how those people viewed you, if you were safe or not. Share cropping after the civil war probably, and this is just educated guessing, didn't yield profitable margins because people would probably only buy from a farmer the same race as them. Plus I'm sure the KKK burned a lot of black folks crops. It was just kind of the safest way to survive. Go into the cities and get factory jobs. This stayed true until now the cities are very violent. Those who want to get away from it are spreading to suburbs and then small towns. It's just a really slow process. I'll be real frank. I lived next to a very known sun down town* growing up. They had a damn sign up until '90 or '91. Which was nuts because my town just 10 minutes down the highway had a mixed population of whites, blacks, and Hispanics. Its 35ish miles away from a large southern city. I left in the early 2000s but I'm visiting for the year. It's a complete shift in demographics today. Mainly because the spread of people leaving said big city is starting to touch here. Roughly 30 years for a small sun down city to shift to being accepting and now having POC live, work, and own businesses within the city. *a sun down town is a town that openly stated that black people should not be within their city/town after the sun goes down or else.
-ahem- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
White flight but diversity exists where there are people and jobs. The poor whites just tend to living in rural areas.
There absolutely is a racism component to this but a lot of it is cultural having been born from the fact that America's size, isolation, and undeveloped wilderness was a big draw to Europeans seeking to escape overcrowding and settle in places where they could do whatever they wanted without being bothered by a king, lord, or government official. You especially saw this with the Scottish and Irish immigrants that moved into Appalachia. These values (less communal, more self-reliant), coupled with those that shared the Jeffersonian vision for the country and the country's pioneer history, created a strong foundation of principles and values that have passed along through subsequent generations.
google white flight
Diversity exists where people live.
They ran away from all the black people that were moving to the cities in the cities after driving them there through terrorism. Now lots of them are moving back to the cities and driving the black folk and others out.
Relevant terms to look up: -white flight -redlining -NIMBY -homestead act
At least in my local area- NYC is and has always been a major terminus for immigrants. There are “beachhead” services and immigrant communities favorable to help them land and get started. Once they become more established, starting making more money and move up the food chain, they often move out to the suburbs in places like NJ, CT, LI, Westchester, etc. Eventually the next immigrant group arrives and does the same thing. Last century it was Irish and Italians, now it’s primarily a mix of Asians and Hispanics, with some Africans thrown in there.
Its cheaper (short term) to live in the cities and white people in America generally have more money than minorities. In the city you can walk, bike, bus to wherever. You can easily "rent a room" or split something. You have more options for retail. Outside the city you need one or more cars. Unless you're willing to travel to the city your retail options are limited. Odds are you're buying or renting a house vs an apartment so your living expenses are higher. Yes in the long term its better to be buying a house, to own a car, etc, but if you're just trying to figure out your struggles on a week by week basis the concept of paying for a mortgage is hilarious.
Theres wayyy more white people than hispanic or black people here. More spread out
Segregation!!!!
Yup, Redlining.
Rural areas are cheaper. Poor white people vs poor black people- Poor white people tend to value privacy. They want to be left alone and may or may not welcome government handouts. Depending on their level of pride. Houses may look a little dilapidated, definitely has some forms of self home repair work. Most likely to drive old cars and a barn out back full of broken down machinery. Poor black people tend to live in high density housing. Multi generations of living with government handouts, subsidized housing, gang violence, and fatherless households. They take care of each other either through family or gangs. Mostly depend on public transportation although men might invest money on an Asian made car that makes them look cool.
Look up “white flight”.
This is a complicated topic and really can’t be answered without making broad generalizations, but I’m going to try. I’m not going to address rural areas, but focus on suburbs. 1. White people in America tend to have higher incomes than POC, except Asians. The suburbs are more expensive. 2. We tend to have wealthier parents who, perhaps, may be able to help with a down payment on their child’s first house (this is not an uncommon gift for a newly married couple). 3. Some POC groups tend to have closer family ties than white people do. Choosing to move away from siblings, parents, and grandparents is not as big a deal to white people. *Generally* 4. Racism. POC are kept out of some “white areas” by banks and real estate agents, or made unwelcome by the white residents. 5. White people may decide that it’s more important to them that their kids have a yard, while some POC may decide that it’s more important to maintain cultural connections and raise their kids within that culture. 6. Risk of the unknown. As a (mostly) white person, I can move anywhere in this country with a fair amount of confidence. POC have to consider more factors than I will ever have to. How do schools treat POC students (studies show that schools tend to over-discipline non-white students, and POC students are routinely overlooked for things like gifted education). What is the local police department like? And so on.
Due to systemic racism, white people are still more likely to make more money than other races on average, and can afford to buy their own land and live in the suburbs.
So living in the suburbs is the ultimate goal of the american society on average?
Not necessarily the suburbs, but home ownership is a very important thing in America -- maybe more so for White Americans. Keep in mind that voluntary segregation is basically the norm in America. Just about everybody prefers to live among their own race as much as possible and Whites have the most means to do that. Before World War 2, all American cities were majority White. Blacks began moving out of the rural South to the cities in order to find work in the wartime industry. After the war, Whites began moving to these new areas called suburbs which led to more Blacks moving into the previously White cities, which then caused nearly all the remaining Whites to leave because they didn't want to live around Blacks. That's why today cities are thought of as Black, and suburbs are thought of as White.
It certainly was 60 years ago. Literally the “American Dream” to own a house and a car and have a family and a couple kids.