I don’t know the West Coast and I don’t know much about Michigan except that they used to make cars there, but I sure recognize my part of the world. The "Black Belt" runs from Southern Virginia through North and South Carolina, across lower Gerorgia and Alabama, the up through North Mississippi and West Tennessee along the Mississippi River on both sides [Arkansas]. "Appalachia" runs from North Georgia where we live up through East Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Southwestern Pennsylvania. It’s a "Scotch-Irish Belt" of early settlers that hid in these mountains and are still there. Some play dulcimers and some handle snakes in their churches. Some still make their own whiskey.
This is an ethnicity map showing the dominant ethnicity – Purple is African, Yellow are people who just put "American."
Here’s the 2008 Presidential Vote showing Red Appalachia and the Blue Black Belt of Democrats. I could go on and on. Maps showing poverty would light up these two areas – Appalachia and the Black Belt. Low performance in education would hit the same spots. And like that top graph shows, those are the people out of work right now.
I feel a lot of ambivalence about these graphs. I love these places. I live in them, listen to their music, travel around their back roads, read their history. I’m proud of how they persist through times like these ,sometimes not even aware that things are different. But it’s also sad, because a lot of the people in these timeless pockets of America can’t really leave, even if they want to. And as things get worse, in this Recession/Depression, these will be the places that will take the hardest hits. The people here are as far from the world of Wall Street, Hedge Funds, and Credit Default Swaps as you can get in this country, and they’re going to feel the pinch more than anyone.
Doesn’t seem right…
I wanna see the big size so I can read all the keys. Are the light blue people in the middle graph just “white”?
“German”