Where are we?
Saturday, August 13, 2005 at 5:59AM ■"Minority groups breaking patterns: Census finds Hispanics fan out through USA, blacks cluster in South," by Paul Overberg, USA Today, 12 August 2005, p. 1A.
Fascinating bit on how Hispanics are spreading themselves around the country a lot more than previously, defying predictions of intense enclaving, a term that seems better applied to African-Americans, roughly half of whom now live in clumped areas in the 11 southern states that once made up the Confederacy. Weird, huh? I'm talking 17 million blacks in the old South, and the rest mostly spread in urban areas elsewhere.
Meanwhile, upticks in the percentage of Hispanics are being seen in counties all over the country, but mostly in the southern lower half of states (just not concentrated like African-Americans are now becoming in the southeast).
Sam Huntington asked, "Who are we?" in his recent book that focused intensely on the rising Hispanic population in America, but the bigger question would seem to be, Where are we? Are we seeing voluntary segregation of the oldest American sort? And given where it's occurring, are we seeing blacks become irrelevant politically by becoming so clustered in states that are overwhelmingly Republican?
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