USA Metropolitanization by Race: White Ruralism Lives On

Recent posts and discussions by Jehu and Steve Sailer inspired me to look into the Census-2010 data on the metropolitanization by race in the USA.

What I find: In 2010, 167 million people lived in one of the 51 ‘metropolitan statistical areas’ that had over one million residents. There was a total USA population of 309 million, meaning that ‘large metropolitan area dwellers’ (1-million+) were 54% of the USA population.

Racial Disparity
68.5% of Nonwhite residents of the USA live in a metropolitan area with over one million people in it. Only 45.7% of Whites live in such large metro areas.

Detailed tables with this information for Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American-Indians follow. I extracted the data from Census 2010. (The final column shows what percentage of the given racial group’s national population lives in a metropolitan area of that size.) Analysis and commentary follows below. Comments are invited.

Whites	.	.	.
. Size of Metro	# of Metros	# of Whites (Non-Hispanic)	% of Race’s Total Pop. In This Size Metro
5-million+	9	33.4 million	17.0%
2-million+	29	70.0 million	35.6%
1-million+	51	90.0 million	45.7%
500,000+	102	112.7 million	57.3%
250,000+	184	132.4 million	67.3%
50,000+	366	152.4 million	77.4%
Rural (<50k)	–	44.4 million	22.6%
All	–	196.8 million	100%

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Blacks	.	.	.
. Size of Metro	# of Metros	. # of Blacks	% of Race’s Total Pop. In This Size Metro
5-million+	9	13.5 million	34.6%
2-million+	29	19.9 million	51.0%
1-million+	51	25.2 million	64.8%
500,000+	102	29.0 million	74.4%
250,000+	184	32.0 million	82.3%
50,000+	366	34.7 million	89.1%
Rural (<50k)	–	4.2 million	10.9%
All	–	38.9 million	100%

Data for Hispanics, Asians, and American-Indians follows, as does analysis and commentary .

Hispanics	.	.	.
. Size of Metro	# of Metros	. # of Hispanics	% of Group’s Total Pop. In This Size Metro
5-million+	9	19.9 million	39.5%
2-million+	29	30.1 million	59.6%
1-million+	51	33.7 million	66.7%
500,000+	102	39.9 million	79.0%
250,000+	184	43.9 million	87.0%
50,000+	366	46.7 million	92.5%
Rural (<50k)	–	3.8 million	7.5%
All	–	50.5 million	100%

.

Asians	.	.	.
. Size of Metro	# of Metros	. # of Asians	% of Race’s Total Pop. In This Size Metro
5-million+	9	6.2 million	42.3%
2-million+	29	10.0 million	68.2%
1-million+	51	11.6 million	78.8%
500,000+	102	13.0 million	88.3%
250,000+	184	13.7 million	93.5%
50,000+	366	14.2 million	96.7%
Rural (<50k)	–	0.5 million	3.2%
All	–	14.7 million	100%

.

Am.-Indian	.	.	.
. Size of Metro	# of Metros	. # Am-Indians	% of Race’s Total Pop. In This Size Metro
5-million+	9	0.4 million	12.8%
2-million+	29	0.8 million	27.2%
1-million+	51	1.0 million	33.9%
500,000+	102	1.3 million	45.1%
250,000+	184	1.6 million	53.3%
50,000+	366	1.9 million	64.5%
Rural (<50k)	–	1.0 million	35.5%
All	–	2.9 million	100%

Analysis
–Whites are the only major racial group that is not near-totally-urbanized. A respectable share of American-Whites (22.3%) live in communities of less than 50,000 people.
– Blacks and Hispanics are totally-urbanized. Hispanics, especially, have a negligble presence in Rural-America, with only 7.5% of them living in communities of less-than-50,000. I’d presume that most of these are concentrated in the Southwest, too.
–There are now an equal number of Blacks/Hispanics as Whites in the USA’s nine 5-million+ ‘megalopolises’ — NYC, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington, Miami, Atlanta. Combined, these megalopolises are home to 33.4 million Blacks/Hispanics and 33.5 million Whites.
– Asians are the most urbanized group in the USA, which follows what we would expect from the densities with which they seem to be comfortable in their own societies. A negligible 3.2% of Asians live outside a 50,000-person metro area.
– American-Indians are the most rural racial group, with nearly half living in communities of less than 250,000. I presume this reflects the reservation system. Some Internet sources claim that 800,000 Indians live on reservations, which would make sense given this data.

To live in an urbanized region teeming with millions of people can be a negative thing, in certain ways — especially when those millions are of diverse ethnic-cultural-linguistic-religious origins. (‘Bowling Alone‘). Trust declines, civic activity declines, the feeling of a special connection and pride in the region from which you come, your ‘Heimat’ (as the Germans say) feeling, is unable to properly develop. And how can anyone or any group know where it is going if it does not know from whence it comes?

Commentary:
From Yeoman to Metropolitan
The American, historically, had always set himself apart from his cousin in Europe, even from his closest of ethnoreligious kin back on the old continent, in large part because Europe was so long-settled, so densely-populated, often with few opportunities. North-America was different.

After brushing aside the Indian, the American had inherited a vast and empty domain, which he began to settle, and imbue with a rural-soul. There was so much good land in North-America that no one could imagine it ever becoming as densely-populated as Europe.

In the colonial days of the 1600s and 1700s, and in the ‘westward-march’ days of the 1800s, American population density was minimal, and those who so-desired could always move on to the empty frontier to settle the vast stretches of empty land. A place like Iowa saw its first permanent white settlers only in the 1820s. Most Americans lived on farms when Lincoln was elected.

To understand the USA — at least the historical USA, as well as certain implicitly-White social-political movements of today such as the ‘Tea Party‘ — one must understand the the rural-nature of American Civilization, and the frontier mentality. For centuries, the American had been busy-at-work creating this rural civilization. The frontier ‘closed’ in the late 1800s, but lingered on in a sense through the WWI era. My own great-grandfather took Uncle Sam up on the offer of free land in the western USA still on offer in the 1910s. It’s true that urbanization started to weaken the rural character of the USA in the early 20th century, but on through the mid to late 1900s, most people still had at least some kind of memory or folk-memory of living ‘on the farm’, even if vicariously-so through parents or grandparents.

To the extent that the USA was a rural-based society, can we say that the fact that most Americans now live in a metro area of over one million people implies that the USA, as we knew it or as we imagine(d) it, has passed away? Most children coming of age in the USA today — the vast majority of nonwhites, and a good share of the whites — have lost the folk-connection to the land that is so important to American culture. Most live in large metropolitan areas, in whose schools they are trained to idolize Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and so on. Thus, the USA has morphed from its original Rural-Folk-Democracy (we could even say ‘Rural Voelkisch Democracy’) into an ugly mutant cousin, Metropolitan-Multicultacracy.

Perhaps too, in a sense, the USA has become Europe: a densely-populated pessmistic place burdened by internal problems.

‘Middle-American’ Revival and Dr. Sam Francis
Census-2010′s data on metropolitanization by race shows us that Whites are still the only group of importance in Rural-America. If we discount reservations and certain border areas, the Rural-USA (defined here as communities of under 50,000) is well over 90%-white.

This reminds me of Dr. Sam Francis (d.2005). He was an American syndicated columnist whose radical-voelkisch sympathies lost him his job at the Washington-Times, and lost him all his patrons in the 1990s and early 2000s. I believe his column was dropped by the last newspaper left running it in 2004, when he criticized a Superbowl ad in which a Black athlete embraced a White woman with obvious sexual overtones. In any case, Dr.Francis’ idea was that an American ‘voelkisch revival’ would inevitably occur through the agent of what he called the ‘Middle-American Radical‘, by which he meant persons drawn from the bottom rows of the ‘White’ table above, either in fact or in spirit (i.e., those living outside metropolises. And, to a certain extent, also those who think of themselves as rural-in-spirit, regardless of the size of their present community of residence). Middle-American Whites’ racialist sympathies would lead them to reject the USA’s current ruling system, the Multicultacracy (and its de rigueur anti-white discrimination), itself, in Dr.Francis’ estimation. (I see that Pat Buchanan has apropriated the term in his article from 2009: ‘Middle American Radicals‘).

Perhaps we have seen this Middle-American Radicalism in the Tea Party, and perhaps are seeing it in the success of the Ron Paul candidacies.

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Notes
Data is from the Census Bureau’s 2010 “Table 23: Metropolitan Statistical Areas–Population by Race and Hispanic or Latino Origin”. There is no data for Black non-Hispanics, with Black-Hispanics being counted as part of the Black group, so there is marginal overlap between the Black and Hispanic categories.

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