This is a fascinating map created by your tax dollars. It shows county by county what the largest group of people is by their own self-identification. If you travel outside of your neighborhood or know American history, much of it makes sense, but it is still interesting. Eric Holder wants us to come to grips with ethnicity.
Observations:
- People who self-identify as Germans are by far the largest group in America. Every time a “Conservative” talk show host says “If we hadn’t won WW2, we would all be speaking German now”… a lot of your countrymen wouldn’t have a problem with that
- People in New England self-identify as English, which is not a surprise if you spend time in Boston or look at how strong the Anglican (aka Episcopalian) church is. Many people are content to believe we are still living the 1800s and should have Kings and Queens
- Mexicans are the dominant group in the South West and that isn’t new. Remember that Arizona only became a state in 1912.
- Most areas where slavery was prevalent continue to have significant black populations who never moved North during the Great Northern Migration. The 2010 census says that large numbers of blacks have returned “home” to the South in the last 10 years
- Whites in the South refuse to identify as some flavor of European. They’re Americans, and that is all there is to it.
- Finns and Norwegians like the cold
So what other things do you spot?
If you want to drill down into more detail, the original PDF document is here
Following up my German comment – the PDF has an amazing statistic – between the 1990 and 2000 census, the number of people who said their ancestors were German dropped from 57 million to 42 million. The table has a footnote that in 1990 “German” has listed in the examples, and in 2000 it was not… The number who answered “Just American” went up 7 million. 19% of people refused to answer the question.
The Politics of Identity showing up again.
The map suggests that the southeast’s majority population is African American. That’s simply not true. Except for certain inner-city districts and a handful of rural counties, the average percentage of “African Americans” in the old confederacy is still around 20-30% of the population.
What’s far more likely is that most southern whites refused to answer the census question regarding ethnicity. From the PDF link: “Another 19 percent did not report any ancestry at all, a substantial increase from 1990, when 10 percent of the population left the ancestry question blank”
We know how that game is being played and many of us refuse to participate. Constitutionally the census is supposed to be no more than a simple count. The idea that it’s an in-depth social survey that determines the reallocation of tax dollars managed by Federal bureaucrats is repugnant to most southerners.
The other observation from the detailed report is that the census bureau cleverly broke up the “United Kingdom” into separate identities of Irish (10.8%), English (8.7%), Scottish (1.7%), Scotch-Irish (1.5%), and Welsh (0.6%). The total comes to 23.3%. They can do that because descendants from the British isles usually know their ancestry will enough to be able to differentiate (when they choose to answer). And if you were to add in “American” (7.2%), “White” (1.4%), and refuse to answer (19%), you get a very different picture of the dominant ethnicity in the U.S. Imagine how the results would be changed if the census bureau had split and fragmented the other broad ancestry classifications such as Chinese and African.
I lived in North Carolina in the Piedmont area from 1970 to 1981 – as I got old enough to drive on my own, I headed toward the ocean and that’s when I learned that after you go down the hill to the coastal plain, you immediately feel the legacy of slavery. The land is pretty unusable for agriculture – it is mostly just sand – but that’s enough to grow peanuts – which is why George Washington Carver made it his life’s work to get the government to make peanuts a government subsidized crop, and included in the USDA agriculture programs. He didn’t “invent” the peanut, but he did know how to promote it.
The map is somewhat misleading in that it shows area, not population. Table 3 shows the top 5 groups by state (keeping in mind it is self-identification)
For North Carolina, the top 5 are:
– African Americans 16.6%
– Americans 13.7%
– English 9.5%
– German 8.5%
– Irish 7.4%
Another of the tidbits on my lifetime of curiousity is that during the height of slavery, the black population was a much larger percentage of the population than it is today. The influx of Europeans during the late 1800s significantly diluted the proportion of the people who made up the original country.
Another interesting thing to know is that during the time of the Revolutionary War, a very large portion of the country were indentured servants – from England, not Africa. The plantation owners of the South would have preferred Irish slaves, but they died too easily from the heat and tropical diseases like Malaria. Also, when the Industrial Revolution got into full swing in Europe, the supply of Europeans were more valuable working in the textile factories.
The triangular trade was: Slaves from Africa, Rum to America, Goods to Africa. The large bulk of Africans brought to the new world went to Cuba, the West Indies, Hispanola and South America. Legal Importation of slaves into the United States ended in 1808 after the 20 year provision in the Consitiution.
Happy Black History month!
“Another of the tidbits on my lifetime of curiosity is that during the height of slavery, the black population was a much larger percentage of the population than it is today. ”
I believe that absolutely to be true. I also think that’s why you had two groups in the south opting for succession in 1860 for fundamentally different reasons. One group was the anti-federalists states’ rights constitutionalists, but the other more insidious group were the powerful plantation owners and businessmen who rightly feared for their lives in the event of a widespread general slave uprising without force of law and military arms to put down the uprising.