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 level of “metropolitanization” by race in the USA (i.e., how rate at which each group lives in a metro area).

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 metropolitan areas with over one million inhabitants. Only 45.7% of Whites live in such large metro areas.

Detailed tables with this information separately 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 (22.6%) live in communities of less than 50,000 people.

— Blacks and Hispanics are thoroughly urbanized groups in today’s USA. Hispanics, especially, have a negligble presence in Rural-America, with only 7.5% (3.8 million) of them living in communities of less-than-50,000. I’d presume that most of these are concentrated in the Southwest.

— 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. Among young megalopolis-dwellers, Whites are certainly already a minority.

— 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 500,000 Asians (3.2% of their national population) live outside a 50,000-person metro area. I suspect that a large share of these 500,000 may be either foreign college students in smaller college towns or “GI-bridges”. The remainder may live in a smattering of communities in the far west. The actual ‘organized Asian’ presence in Rural-America, outside the west coast, is likely all-but Zero.

— 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 now live on reservations, which would make sense given this data.

To live in an urbanized region teeming with millions of people can be psychologically distressing, in certain ways — especially when those millions are of diverse ethnic-cultural-linguistic-religious origins. (Thus, ‘Bowling Alone’). Trust declines, civic activity declines. The feeling of special connection and pride in the region from which you come, your ‘Heimat’ feeling (as the Germans say), 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 (and consequently) with few opportunities. North-America was different.

After brushing aside the Indian, the early American inherited a vast and empty domain, which he began to settle, and imbue with a rural-soul. There was so much land, good land, in North-America that the early American could never even 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. 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. The solid majority of Americans still lived on farms when Lincoln was elected. (I suspect this knowledge is part of the drive behind Civil War interest, it is follk-nostalgia for the time when Americans were a rural-spirited, true nation [or nations, if you are a partisan of the CSA]).

To understand the USA — at least the historical USA, as well as the ‘Tea Party‘ and other implicitly-White social-political movements of today — one must understand the rural-nature of American Civilization. The frontier mentality is part of this, but not its entirety. 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 or later (My own great-grandfather took Uncle Sam up on the offer of free land in the western USA still on offer in the 1910s, though ended up not staying out west very long). Echoes of frontierism were able to be seen in the Dust Bowl migrations of the 1930s. 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 non-Ellis-Islander Whites still had at least some kind of memory or folk-memory of living ‘on the farm’, even if vicariously-so through parents or grandparents.

If you accept my premises, we can say that the USA was a rural-based society. The fact is, though, that most Americans now live in a metro area of over one million people. Does this imply 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 traditional American culture. Most now live in large metropolitan areas, in whose schools they are trained to idolize Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and so on. Few schoolchildren today know Nathaniel Greene, Daniel Morgan, John Paul Jones, John Dickinson, Richard Henry Lee, John Rutledge, or other early-American patriots. Instead, they perform skits about a truly marginal figure named Harriet Tubman.

Thus, the USA has morphed from its original Rural-Folk-Democracy (we could even say ‘Rural Voelkisch Democracy’) into an ugly mutant creature we could call Metropolitan-Multicultacracy. Perhaps, too, the USA has become another 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, outlined above, 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 all communities of under 50,000 outside metropolitan areas) is well over 90%-white.

This reminds me of the political theories 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 gradually lost him all his patrons in the 1990s and early 2000s, as pro-Multicultacracy enforcer groups pressured paper after paper to drop him. I believe his column was dropped by the last newspaper that was still running it in 2004, when he criticized a Superbowl ad in which a Black athlete embraced a White woman with obvious sexual overtones. He published receptive audience at VDare.com until his death.

In any case, Dr.Francis’ grand 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., [a] those living outside metropolises, and [b] To a certain extent, 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 eventually 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’, and prominent conservative commentator Lawrence Auster has similar ideas as myself, in his piece “MARS Rising?“, pointing to the Tea Party.

What would Middle-American Radicalism look like, politically? Is the Tea Party a true ‘MARS’ phenomenon? The Ron Paul candidacy?

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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.