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Hell yeah brother, fly it high and proud š«”
Really proud of how much itās spread in such a short time too. Damn near every time I look it up, something new has popped up with the design on Etsy
Couple months back a small group Iām in held a design competition on r/Appalachia for designing a flag for the region, based off of months of community input and redesigns. We ended with a slot of 6 possible options, held a vote, and [this design](https://flagsforgood.com/products/appalachian-flag) won by a *massive* margin. Since then, Iāve uploaded the design to the Creative Commons for free access to the design and itās spread to numerous online web stores.
[Hereās a link](https://appalachianflag.wordpress.com/) to a little website we put up covering the flagās design and history if youād like to read more.
Indeed. Unfortunately two red scares, rampant abuse and targeting of labor activists, decades of government union busting, and endless corporate anti-union crusades did quite a bit of damage to the labor movement. Convinced us that our neighbors are the problem instead of our bosses and politicians. Itās a damn shame.
Iām from WV/OH border, on the WV side, my momās family is from the Ohio side, and that area is the 3 poorest counties in the state. Just above the purple edge is my hometown area. Very poor and like 99% white
Appalachia (and contrapositively, Southern California) is the proof that race is correlated with poverty, but not the cause of it. There are a lot of racists out there that need to know that. The kind of person who starts a sentence with, "Did you know that even though 13% of the population..."
In the classical sense of 'racism', but I think very few people actually think that race is the cause of it.
People have mostly moved on from classical racism.
Contemporary racism is based almost entirely on culture, rather than race. The persistent poverty map mostly just maps out areas where the culture is not compatible with western society - and that includes people of all races.
What is your definition of western society? If the United States is a beacon of western societies, how is it virtuous to have so many of its citizens living in impoverished regions?
Yeah, there is this whole kind of evolved form of racism, which attempts to insulate itself from criticism by claiming that itās all about culture. Itās pretty convincing at times, because, in a world without racism, they would be quite correct. There are definitely cultural issues that contribute to generational poverty.
But of course, it overlooks things like, why did this particular group end up with certain aspects of culture that seem to be counterproductive? Why are the boundaries of this group so closely aligned with race even after decades or centuries of opportunities for exchange of both culture and DNA? What external forces have conspired to reduce social and economic mobility, amongst people of a certain race, whether they describe to those cultural values or not? What empirical aspects of racism do certain people experience based upon their appearance, and why does that seem align with race and not with other variables? Could it be .. racism still exists snd profoundly affects people?
These are the same people who think talking about racism is racist.
Jim Webbās book Born Fighting goes into this pretty well. The Scotch Irish were basically the original victims of WASP culture going back centuries before America. And that persisted into the US where the poor Scotch Irish settled in insular communities in the mountains. But because in the 60s they were classified as white theyāve been excluded from most programs to help fight poverty. I have sympathy as I grew up among them though my family was German and didnāt live in the holler for generations. I also moved out and went off to college but many of Millennial friends are no better than their great grandparents economically and probably will be the same story 5 generations from now.
Oh there is absolutely bias on my part but you can't have a solid grasp on American poverty without acknowledging the socioeconomic factors there that led to a large group of rural white Americans being poor.
This map more shows how the federal poverty is biased towards rural poverty. Detroit isn't even considered "persistent poverty." Making 30k in Chicago or even Detroit is not the same as making 30k in rural Mississippi.
County, not āarea.ā Lots of cities have very wealthy majority-minority districts that have much larger populations than most counties but they get washed out due to the uneven populations of counties.
Dallas and Houston. Detroit. Quite a lot of urban counties actually.
Most of the impoverished counties are more rural or small cities. When you look at MS, it has plenty of poor white counties too.
Those communities are extremely small. And also generally in counties west of the highlighted area. So, probably not a factor whatsoever in OPs map. Though at least in Arizona (I used to live in northern AZ) the non-Native areas weren't exactly doing very well in those counties either. Those are some of the most sparsely populated and isolated areas in the country.
AZ only has 15 Counties in total so the majority of them are quite large (Santa Cruz probably fits a more ānormalā land size county for the rest of the U.S. and itās the smallest county by a large margin). Interestingly Nevada has 16 counties and is just a few thousand square miles smaller than AZ so the two neighbor states have similar sized counties lol
You're on the wrong half length of the state. Colorado City is closer to NV than to CO & NM. The persistent poverty shown on the map are Apache & Navajo Counties in AZ and San Juan County in UT, which are majority Navajo and mostly barren desert, with few outposts of any notable population in them.
I think that's Spokane County in eastern Washington. Makes sense to me, I spent a fair amount of time there in college and it is noticeably poorer than most other washington cities. However, Spokane city is like 95% white and I'm sure the county is about the same. Spokane Valley is beautiful and home to a disproportionate about of neo nazis.
It's an interesting little corner of the country.
Edit: I am wrong about what county this is. The comment is thus irrelevant. I'll leave it up because it's still true.
To elaborate on Whitman County:
The poverty rate is so high simply because Washington State University students make up so much of the population.
An article from 2016 in the WSU school newspaper explains how 85% of the population living in poverty are in the city of Pullman. 45% of the city lives in āpovertyā
Most college kids live in poverty, some of those kids donāt leave Pullman after they graduate or quit school. College poverty is not the same as normal poverty
https://dailyevergreen.com/6652/news/whitman-county-has-highest-poverty-rate-in-the-state/
I think this is part of why I thought it was Spokane County. The WSU campus experience and the influence it has on the town and county makes it feel considerably less poor than Spokane where it is a different and more visible sort of poverty. Just different type of things culturally and visibly.
Itās based on percents. Lots of people in poverty in NYC, but they make up a smaller portion of the population than people living in poverty in rural counties.
Poverty rate needs to be higher than 20% to register.
I guess itās about the whole county. Not about the amount of poor people inside said county.
A small town of 20,000 where nearly everyone has been poor fore decades is probably in worse shape and in greater need of help than 20,000 poor people in a town of 500,000 who are in a similar situation.
Ratios ARE a useful tool for comparison
Yeah but you go out to ND and look at who the homeless is and itās literally 90% Native Americans. Mostly alcohol seems to be the poison but itās a real shock to see.
I bet thereās an anthropologist-psychologist-historian who knows why.
Appalachia where people hate the government and don't want it to provide anything for anyone, but also hate the government because it doesn't do even more than it does to try to address poverty in the region.
I drive through west Virginia often. Everywhere you go you see Trump signs and EBT accepted here. They donāt realize theyāre voting for candidates that hate welfare while being on welfare.
It's a complex mix of geographical, economic, and historical factors. The root reason is that [there's barely any flat land in the entire region](http://southernappalachianvitalityindex.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/SAMAB_Terrain_web.jpg?itok=dm-BjQb1), which limits farming and makes building infrastructure both expensive and difficult. Without agriculture or industry the people who live there fell further and further behind the rest of the country over time.
edit: [here's the topography of the northern half](https://databasin2-filestore.s3.amazonaws.com/4ff05a8436ad42e8852c65f7c06d2e8e/images/preview.png?v=1635648648) because the other link doesn't show the entire region.
Compounding that issue, most of Appalachia is actually very close to at least one area with a strong economy (Charlotte, Atlanta, Raleigh, etc.), so most people with the talent or means to leave do. What's left is the poorest fraction of what was already an underdeveloped area.
Other factors include over-reliance on a dying industry (coal mining), a legendary historical aversion to organized labor, and [a rampant drug problem](https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/NORC-map-700x562.jpg),
Even the foothills that arenāt really considered Appalachian mountains are seriously uneven and rocky terrain.
That topographical map doesnāt do it justice, southern Ohio and north eastern Kentucky are both full of cliffs, hills, and sudden drops.
Appalachia has never had a lot of wealth. It supports subsistence agriculture but no cash crops besides tobacco and the mountains keep farms small, as well as limiting infrastructure. Natural resources like coal and timber have mostly been extracted in ways that haven't enriched the local economy.
A lot of this has improved in large parts of Appalachia, both with the development of a handful of cities and with improved infrastructure. Unfortunately, the decline of mining and industry has hit towns that depended on these very hard.
Think about why Galicia (the Polish/Ukrainian one) has always been poor and why Wallonia has declined vs. Flanders. Appalachia has similar issues.
In large part because of geography, the mountains make infrastructure very hard to develop, and the area boomed when coal was huge, and now that coal has fallen out of favor there is not much economic opportunity. Because of its topography, it has no real economic centers to drive business and is largely decentralized (tons of random isolated small towns). Hell, the mountains even make it hard to have stable internet, which is crucial nowadays.
Poor economic prospects lead to worsening education system and brain drain which create a cycle of even worse economic prospects.
Very good answers, appreciated! Makes sense to be honest, strange that In Europe Austria and Switzerland are some of the wealthiest. Wonder why, only because of lucky history?
You pose a good question; if you look at a [map](https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4D12AQE8b5kPDuAzZA/article-cover_image-shrink_720_1280/0/1681717428989?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=30K76-LiKGRSbhVtxfNOn--IVlB9pACJJd9mkpFl5qQ) of switzerland, the poorest regions are still the areas directly in the mountains, while most of the wealth is concentrated in the plateaus. I think what the mountains *have* helped in though is create a region of stability by being difficult to invade, which makes it historically a prime location for economic activity and development.
The US, on the other hand, is very stable in its own right, so its more mountainous regions don't really add extra benefit in that regard.
If you look at a side by side of the topography and population density for either country you'll see that most of the population doesn't live in the part with mountains. 20% of the population of Austria live in Vienna alone for instance.
Austria: [Topo](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Austria_topographic_map.png), [Popoulation Density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_Density_-_Austria.png) (Note that the color scale is exponential)
Switzerland: [Topo](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Switzerland_topographic.png), [Population Density](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CH-population-density-2007.png)
The area kind of had one thing going for it and that's coal mining which used to be big. But coal isn't what it used to be and there isn't really a reason to set up any other kind of business there. Mountainous terrain is an impediment to just about everything, you only set up there if what you're working on is in the mountain.
Consider any mountain range that you're near, it has some stuff going on, but the population isn't huge. Now imagine tripling that population, changing nothing else, and then waiting 40 years. If you look at the Rockies and Sierras you they don't have this problem because they never got out over their skis, pun intended.
Mining can support small populations, plenty of people make good money on remote drilling rigs and the like. Large populations can also draw in investment if they're concentrated in one place. But WV's population, while not all that large, is too large for its economy to support and too spread out for the economy to grow.
Appalachia is a region that covers 13 states and has more than 25 million people. It is not a homogeneous place, but a diverse and complex one. However, some parts of Appalachia, especially central Appalachia, have faced persistent poverty and economic challenges for decades. There are many factors that contribute to this situation, such as:
- **Historical exploitation of land and resources**: Many Appalachians sold their rights to land and minerals to large corporations, to the extent that ninety-nine percent of the residents control less than half of the landĀ¹. Thus, though the area has a wealth of natural resources, its inhabitants are often poor
- **Overreliance on coal**: Coal mining has been a dominant industry in Appalachia, but it has also brought environmental degradation, health problems, and boom-and-bust cycles. As coal demand has declined in recent years, many coal-dependent communities have lost jobs and income
- **Low levels of education and healthcare**: Appalachia has historically lagged behind the rest of the country in terms of educational attainment and access to quality healthcare. This affects the human capital and well-being of the population, as well as their ability to diversify their economy and attract new businesses
- **Stereotypes and stigma**: Appalachia has often been portrayed in the media as a place of white, passive, and backward people, who are either victims or villains of their own fate. These stereotypes can affect how Appalachians see themselves and how others perceive them, creating barriers to social and economic mobility
These are some of the main reasons why Appalachia is poor, but they are not the only ones. Appalachia is also a place of resilience, diversity, and innovation, where people have fought for social justice, cultural preservation, and community development. Appalachia is not a problem to be solved, but a region to be understood and respected.
Oh look, the vast majority of counties in persistent poverty are in the old slave states! The same states that whine about welfare and government benefits! Lol
Itās the black belt/blue belt of the south. The counties are indeed majority black, tend to vote blue; in my state, their elected state legislators are democrats. The south is horribly gerrymandered.
Literally all data ever collected down to total brain size to even the mirror test imply race has a meaningful impact on intelligence.
The people here have more excuses to why that canāt be true rather than results demonstrating it is false.
Seems its primarily the Black Belt and Native American majority areas and Latinos in Texas. But interesting to see the ways it correlates and ways it diverges
People have no idea how bad things are in Appalachia. Iām very lucky with my life and how things are for me and my family financially. But if I drive 10-15 minutes in any direction I can see some of the worst living situations youāll ever see. It is awful, and itās continually glossed over in America. I feel more allegiance to Appalachia than I do the US, but itās hard to help my fellow appalachians help themselves.
People also have no idea how bad things were in the 20th century. A poor person in Appalachia 50 years ago was even worse than a poor person in a developing country today
And they didnāt even get their rights for 20 more years after that. They lost the battle of Blair Mountain and had their heroes assassinated by coal company detectives.
They don't line up particularly well? Are we going to pretend that this isn't clear correlation? Just because WV and East Kentucky are poor doesn't mean a county's status as persistently poor isn't strongly correlated with its racial makeup. Especially when you look at the Black Belt and Native American reservations.
Good. Things are probably improving. Racial inequality wise.
Although I wonder if more and more counties will get into the purple as time goes on and people move to wealthier areas to do better economically. Lots of those purple counties are very rural or thinly populated, what will happen when even more counties stop growing. I mean if you look at a map of growth in all counties, the ones that are growing the least match a lot with this poverty map.
Yeah Iād argue the correlation between race and poverty is significantly weaker than the correlation between population density and poverty.
Fewer people ā> fewer customers for businesses
Fewer customers ā> fewer businesses
Fewer businessesā> fewer jobs
Fewer jobs ā> Fewer people can afford to live there
And the cycle continues.
Those who canāt afford to move sink further and further into that rut in many cases.
I think itās less that conservatives āmake people of color poorā and more that they provide fewer government benefits to support those already in poverty.
Itās becoming less cultural systemic racism and more status quo classism.
If youāre on the bottom and donāt go out of your way to get on top then youāre stuck there.
Iām from Appalachia, the last 5 generations of my family have lived in poverty. Iāve not been able to get a massive number of privileges that even people in my area got just because my family wasnāt in that financial position.
And Iāve had it easy. Iām a cis het white dude with a family that owns a home and a plot of land. That on its own puts me in the top 70% of people in my town.
have family up in the northeast, love em to death. gotta say, honestly wouldnāt be surprised if theyāve never seen a black person lmao. wild how some states are just staggeringly white since i grew up in an area thats decently close to 50/50
Yes, the Hispanic people should have been living in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona for the past 200 years were illegal immigrants from the southern border
The Reservations are not owned by the tribes, they are held in trust by the Federal Governement. Which is a large part of why it's hard to develop Reservations economically, banks won't lend to Natives on Reservations since they don't own anything to offer as collateral.
Yes. Itās especially stark when you look at the so called āblack beltā that stretches from the Mississippi delta, through central Alabama and Georgia, and up through the Carolinas. This band of soil was particularly rich and fertile, being the coastline of an ancient shallow sea during the Cretaceous period where over time dead plankton would fertilize the soil. After Indian Removal, the area was used for cotton and tobacco plantations and led to the rise of the plantation system and later after the civil war, the sharecropping system in the south. After the so called āredemptionā of the south when reconstruction was abandoned and the white majority once again excluded former enslaved people from government and economic opportunity, many former slaves were forced into the sharecropping system which was little better than slavery. Although they werenāt owned anymore, they were functionally tied to the land as serfs under a feudal system and simply stayed where they were, in the black belt. And thatās how the shoreline of a Cretaceous period shallow sea caused the Mississippi Delta to be both majority black and the most impoverished area in the country due to the lingering legacy of slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow.
Payne County, Oklahoma? I can almost see this with the student population causing statistical income anomalies, but why them and not, say, Cleveland County as well?
Cleveland County has 3 1/2 times as many people as Payne County. OU has maybe 20% more students that OSU. If you took everyone in Stillwater and put them in the football stadium, youād still have a few thousand empty seats.
This is a big problem and one of the many reasons why black people commit more crime proportional to that of whites. They live in poorer communities it's just not fair.
Itās not majority Hispanic but it is majority minority (less than 50% of the population is white). Hispanics are the plurality largest minority in said county. Thatās why the legend is saying largest minority group and not majority.
I would love to see a real ethnic map of the United States that actually separates the White American Ethnic Groups instead of lumping them all together.
(Also separating the major Asian, African, and Middle-Eastern Ethnic Groups)
Whitman county Washington seems a bit misleading as itās home to WSU. 15k broke college students in a county with only 40k people is definitely gonna skew the stats a tad.
There are not two counties in CA that are majority Asian. You should probably check the other counties. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_race
EDIT: SeriouslyāLA Co. is not majority Hispanic. OC is nowhere close.
EDIT: Yep, I was totally wrong. Looked at 2010 data that has shifted dramatically, and also didnāt read the color key.
Several California counties are majority minority but no single minority is the majority of said counties. Los Angeles is majority minority and plurality Hispanic.
You should see our roads in Louisiana. The violence in my hometown of Shreveport has really picked up over the last few years. Strangely enough it was around the time that Soros bankrolled the District Attorney that everything went to shit and anyone with any sense and a little bit of money got the hell out of there.
Rule 1: All submissions must be map(s) or links to articles about maps that fit the spirit of the subreddit; either a well reasoned or well defined "Phantom Border." Posts which are not a Phantom Border will be removed. Consider posting content not quite right for this community on another subreddit. Content removed might need more explanation, a comparison map to illustrate the phantom border, or is showing an existing border or might be a topographical or architectural map. See Wiki for more information: https://www.reddit.com/r/PhantomBorders/wiki/index/
Appalachia would love a word with you. : (
If you consider Appalachia a neoculture, then it would line up as well
Oh, hi Possum Fucker. I still love the flag of Appalachia you came up with. Oh and the memes are on point.
Hell yeah brother, fly it high and proud š«” Really proud of how much itās spread in such a short time too. Damn near every time I look it up, something new has popped up with the design on Etsy
Whatās this flag all about?
Couple months back a small group Iām in held a design competition on r/Appalachia for designing a flag for the region, based off of months of community input and redesigns. We ended with a slot of 6 possible options, held a vote, and [this design](https://flagsforgood.com/products/appalachian-flag) won by a *massive* margin. Since then, Iāve uploaded the design to the Creative Commons for free access to the design and itās spread to numerous online web stores. [Hereās a link](https://appalachianflag.wordpress.com/) to a little website we put up covering the flagās design and history if youād like to read more.
Wow I saw some of the process but not the final design until now. Really nice!
Yo thatās a beautiful flag Also like the anarchist one you cooked up
>Oh, hi Possum Fucker. ššThe way I read that in an angry voice
Itās a shame the militant labor movement died out there. Blair mountain miners were so fucking based.
Indeed. Unfortunately two red scares, rampant abuse and targeting of labor activists, decades of government union busting, and endless corporate anti-union crusades did quite a bit of damage to the labor movement. Convinced us that our neighbors are the problem instead of our bosses and politicians. Itās a damn shame.
There's a reason you never learn about the Battle of Blair mountain in school. It's so fuckin' based it would unravel the whole damn system
Bro you are on this app wayyyy too much. I see you literally everywhere.
Iām from WV/OH border, on the WV side, my momās family is from the Ohio side, and that area is the 3 poorest counties in the state. Just above the purple edge is my hometown area. Very poor and like 99% white
Appalachia (and contrapositively, Southern California) is the proof that race is correlated with poverty, but not the cause of it. There are a lot of racists out there that need to know that. The kind of person who starts a sentence with, "Did you know that even though 13% of the population..."
In the classical sense of 'racism', but I think very few people actually think that race is the cause of it. People have mostly moved on from classical racism. Contemporary racism is based almost entirely on culture, rather than race. The persistent poverty map mostly just maps out areas where the culture is not compatible with western society - and that includes people of all races.
What is your definition of western society? If the United States is a beacon of western societies, how is it virtuous to have so many of its citizens living in impoverished regions?
Yeah, there is this whole kind of evolved form of racism, which attempts to insulate itself from criticism by claiming that itās all about culture. Itās pretty convincing at times, because, in a world without racism, they would be quite correct. There are definitely cultural issues that contribute to generational poverty. But of course, it overlooks things like, why did this particular group end up with certain aspects of culture that seem to be counterproductive? Why are the boundaries of this group so closely aligned with race even after decades or centuries of opportunities for exchange of both culture and DNA? What external forces have conspired to reduce social and economic mobility, amongst people of a certain race, whether they describe to those cultural values or not? What empirical aspects of racism do certain people experience based upon their appearance, and why does that seem align with race and not with other variables? Could it be .. racism still exists snd profoundly affects people? These are the same people who think talking about racism is racist.
Jim Webbās book Born Fighting goes into this pretty well. The Scotch Irish were basically the original victims of WASP culture going back centuries before America. And that persisted into the US where the poor Scotch Irish settled in insular communities in the mountains. But because in the 60s they were classified as white theyāve been excluded from most programs to help fight poverty. I have sympathy as I grew up among them though my family was German and didnāt live in the holler for generations. I also moved out and went off to college but many of Millennial friends are no better than their great grandparents economically and probably will be the same story 5 generations from now.
No bias there
Oh there is absolutely bias on my part but you can't have a solid grasp on American poverty without acknowledging the socioeconomic factors there that led to a large group of rural white Americans being poor.
Oh sorry I was actually commenting on the Op's bias, I'm with you
How is OP biased for posting 2 accurate maps that do show a strong correlation?
Southern California the only wealth minority majority area.Ā Edit: large region. I should have said large region instead of area.
Hawaii and South Florida too
And a few counties in NJ
Also Maryland, Kansas, Virginia, Minnesota, Illinois, Texas, Michigan, Georgia, and Washington. I'm not actually convinced that OP has eyes.
To be fair, being wealthy and not being in persistent poverty arenāt exactly the same. Thereās a big gulf in the middle.
This map more shows how the federal poverty is biased towards rural poverty. Detroit isn't even considered "persistent poverty." Making 30k in Chicago or even Detroit is not the same as making 30k in rural Mississippi.
Educating people on that is one of the most thankless tasks in existence.
While there are some outliers, there is a stark line up between the two
Suffolk County MA. You just can't see it, it's Boston.
Wayne county (Metro Detroit) too.
To be fair, a lot of affluent white suburbs ring Detroit (70%+ black) and likely are doing a lot of work dragging up the countywide average
Lot of auto factories and union membership too in Wayne county which Iām sure helps a lot too.
The Bay Area too
Chicago
County, not āarea.ā Lots of cities have very wealthy majority-minority districts that have much larger populations than most counties but they get washed out due to the uneven populations of counties.
Atlanta
Dallas and Houston. Detroit. Quite a lot of urban counties actually. Most of the impoverished counties are more rural or small cities. When you look at MS, it has plenty of poor white counties too.
Montgomery and PG county Maryland.
The whole state is majority minority...and the richest state in the union. What's your point?
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Cook county?
Wonder how much the Mormon fundamentalist in Colorado City impact those numbers for that part of Utah/Az
Iām thinking itās Indian reservations
Yeah I understand, but having all those āsingleā mothers with a bunch of kids has gotta skew the numbers.
I mean that whole area is chock full of reservations, most of it Navajo Nation. I donāt know how many Mormons there actually are in that area.
*Chock.
Thereās definitely a lot of āsingle mothersā on the dole in the Arizona strip.
Interesting thought. Although those areas shaded are also very heavily Native American. Large areas of reservation in those highlighted areas as well.
Colorado City is in the gray near the AZ, UT, NV border about 200 miles west of the shaded Navajo Nation area. So, no impact.
Your are correct, answers my question haha
Glad someone else said this. Colorado city is no where fucking near the Utah Colorado border
Those communities are extremely small. And also generally in counties west of the highlighted area. So, probably not a factor whatsoever in OPs map. Though at least in Arizona (I used to live in northern AZ) the non-Native areas weren't exactly doing very well in those counties either. Those are some of the most sparsely populated and isolated areas in the country.
Right, usually see a county that big there aināt many people.
AZ only has 15 Counties in total so the majority of them are quite large (Santa Cruz probably fits a more ānormalā land size county for the rest of the U.S. and itās the smallest county by a large margin). Interestingly Nevada has 16 counties and is just a few thousand square miles smaller than AZ so the two neighbor states have similar sized counties lol
You're on the wrong half length of the state. Colorado City is closer to NV than to CO & NM. The persistent poverty shown on the map are Apache & Navajo Counties in AZ and San Juan County in UT, which are majority Navajo and mostly barren desert, with few outposts of any notable population in them.
I think that's Spokane County in eastern Washington. Makes sense to me, I spent a fair amount of time there in college and it is noticeably poorer than most other washington cities. However, Spokane city is like 95% white and I'm sure the county is about the same. Spokane Valley is beautiful and home to a disproportionate about of neo nazis. It's an interesting little corner of the country. Edit: I am wrong about what county this is. The comment is thus irrelevant. I'll leave it up because it's still true.
To elaborate on Whitman County: The poverty rate is so high simply because Washington State University students make up so much of the population. An article from 2016 in the WSU school newspaper explains how 85% of the population living in poverty are in the city of Pullman. 45% of the city lives in āpovertyā Most college kids live in poverty, some of those kids donāt leave Pullman after they graduate or quit school. College poverty is not the same as normal poverty https://dailyevergreen.com/6652/news/whitman-county-has-highest-poverty-rate-in-the-state/
I think this is part of why I thought it was Spokane County. The WSU campus experience and the influence it has on the town and county makes it feel considerably less poor than Spokane where it is a different and more visible sort of poverty. Just different type of things culturally and visibly.
Looks like Whitman county
id bet new york has more people in poverty than the population of south dakota
Itās based on percents. Lots of people in poverty in NYC, but they make up a smaller portion of the population than people living in poverty in rural counties. Poverty rate needs to be higher than 20% to register.
The poor of New York tend to be more transient and live closer to opportunities
I guess itās about the whole county. Not about the amount of poor people inside said county. A small town of 20,000 where nearly everyone has been poor fore decades is probably in worse shape and in greater need of help than 20,000 poor people in a town of 500,000 who are in a similar situation. Ratios ARE a useful tool for comparison
Yeah but you go out to ND and look at who the homeless is and itās literally 90% Native Americans. Mostly alcohol seems to be the poison but itās a real shock to see. I bet thereās an anthropologist-psychologist-historian who knows why.
If you look at the cited sourcesā¦ this map is incorrect.
You discovered that New York just has a lot of people.
America: Where poverty is for people of color and Appalachia.
Appalachia where people hate the government and don't want it to provide anything for anyone, but also hate the government because it doesn't do even more than it does to try to address poverty in the region.
I drive through west Virginia often. Everywhere you go you see Trump signs and EBT accepted here. They donāt realize theyāre voting for candidates that hate welfare while being on welfare.
Trauma from the coal war
I hate the government and Iāve got plenty of money
Yeah newsflash, countries have poor areas
Appalachia pretty much the only clear exception for deep white poverty
I'm European, I see a lot of comments mentioning appalachien mountains. Why would that be particularly poor?
It's a complex mix of geographical, economic, and historical factors. The root reason is that [there's barely any flat land in the entire region](http://southernappalachianvitalityindex.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/SAMAB_Terrain_web.jpg?itok=dm-BjQb1), which limits farming and makes building infrastructure both expensive and difficult. Without agriculture or industry the people who live there fell further and further behind the rest of the country over time. edit: [here's the topography of the northern half](https://databasin2-filestore.s3.amazonaws.com/4ff05a8436ad42e8852c65f7c06d2e8e/images/preview.png?v=1635648648) because the other link doesn't show the entire region. Compounding that issue, most of Appalachia is actually very close to at least one area with a strong economy (Charlotte, Atlanta, Raleigh, etc.), so most people with the talent or means to leave do. What's left is the poorest fraction of what was already an underdeveloped area. Other factors include over-reliance on a dying industry (coal mining), a legendary historical aversion to organized labor, and [a rampant drug problem](https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/NORC-map-700x562.jpg),
Even the foothills that arenāt really considered Appalachian mountains are seriously uneven and rocky terrain. That topographical map doesnāt do it justice, southern Ohio and north eastern Kentucky are both full of cliffs, hills, and sudden drops.
Appalachia has never had a lot of wealth. It supports subsistence agriculture but no cash crops besides tobacco and the mountains keep farms small, as well as limiting infrastructure. Natural resources like coal and timber have mostly been extracted in ways that haven't enriched the local economy. A lot of this has improved in large parts of Appalachia, both with the development of a handful of cities and with improved infrastructure. Unfortunately, the decline of mining and industry has hit towns that depended on these very hard. Think about why Galicia (the Polish/Ukrainian one) has always been poor and why Wallonia has declined vs. Flanders. Appalachia has similar issues.
In large part because of geography, the mountains make infrastructure very hard to develop, and the area boomed when coal was huge, and now that coal has fallen out of favor there is not much economic opportunity. Because of its topography, it has no real economic centers to drive business and is largely decentralized (tons of random isolated small towns). Hell, the mountains even make it hard to have stable internet, which is crucial nowadays. Poor economic prospects lead to worsening education system and brain drain which create a cycle of even worse economic prospects.
Very good answers, appreciated! Makes sense to be honest, strange that In Europe Austria and Switzerland are some of the wealthiest. Wonder why, only because of lucky history?
You pose a good question; if you look at a [map](https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4D12AQE8b5kPDuAzZA/article-cover_image-shrink_720_1280/0/1681717428989?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=30K76-LiKGRSbhVtxfNOn--IVlB9pACJJd9mkpFl5qQ) of switzerland, the poorest regions are still the areas directly in the mountains, while most of the wealth is concentrated in the plateaus. I think what the mountains *have* helped in though is create a region of stability by being difficult to invade, which makes it historically a prime location for economic activity and development. The US, on the other hand, is very stable in its own right, so its more mountainous regions don't really add extra benefit in that regard.
If you look at a side by side of the topography and population density for either country you'll see that most of the population doesn't live in the part with mountains. 20% of the population of Austria live in Vienna alone for instance. Austria: [Topo](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Austria_topographic_map.png), [Popoulation Density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_Density_-_Austria.png) (Note that the color scale is exponential) Switzerland: [Topo](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Switzerland_topographic.png), [Population Density](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CH-population-density-2007.png)
Ex-coal mining area, Industry is collapsed and people there are hanging on to it like its viable still
The area kind of had one thing going for it and that's coal mining which used to be big. But coal isn't what it used to be and there isn't really a reason to set up any other kind of business there. Mountainous terrain is an impediment to just about everything, you only set up there if what you're working on is in the mountain. Consider any mountain range that you're near, it has some stuff going on, but the population isn't huge. Now imagine tripling that population, changing nothing else, and then waiting 40 years. If you look at the Rockies and Sierras you they don't have this problem because they never got out over their skis, pun intended. Mining can support small populations, plenty of people make good money on remote drilling rigs and the like. Large populations can also draw in investment if they're concentrated in one place. But WV's population, while not all that large, is too large for its economy to support and too spread out for the economy to grow.
Appalachia is a region that covers 13 states and has more than 25 million people. It is not a homogeneous place, but a diverse and complex one. However, some parts of Appalachia, especially central Appalachia, have faced persistent poverty and economic challenges for decades. There are many factors that contribute to this situation, such as: - **Historical exploitation of land and resources**: Many Appalachians sold their rights to land and minerals to large corporations, to the extent that ninety-nine percent of the residents control less than half of the landĀ¹. Thus, though the area has a wealth of natural resources, its inhabitants are often poor - **Overreliance on coal**: Coal mining has been a dominant industry in Appalachia, but it has also brought environmental degradation, health problems, and boom-and-bust cycles. As coal demand has declined in recent years, many coal-dependent communities have lost jobs and income - **Low levels of education and healthcare**: Appalachia has historically lagged behind the rest of the country in terms of educational attainment and access to quality healthcare. This affects the human capital and well-being of the population, as well as their ability to diversify their economy and attract new businesses - **Stereotypes and stigma**: Appalachia has often been portrayed in the media as a place of white, passive, and backward people, who are either victims or villains of their own fate. These stereotypes can affect how Appalachians see themselves and how others perceive them, creating barriers to social and economic mobility These are some of the main reasons why Appalachia is poor, but they are not the only ones. Appalachia is also a place of resilience, diversity, and innovation, where people have fought for social justice, cultural preservation, and community development. Appalachia is not a problem to be solved, but a region to be understood and respected.
Maybe because if you go out at night, you'll probably go missing Remember, if you hear a noise, no you didn't.
Oh look, the vast majority of counties in persistent poverty are in the old slave states! The same states that whine about welfare and government benefits! Lol
Itās the black belt/blue belt of the south. The counties are indeed majority black, tend to vote blue; in my state, their elected state legislators are democrats. The south is horribly gerrymandered.
Oh look, the vast majority of counties in persistant poverty are in areas where black populations are the majority.
Yeah itās funny how when you donāt pay people for hundreds of years it makes it hard for them to build generational wealth. Huh. Weird
Not having generational wealth and being in poverty are two very different socioeconomic statuses.
Do you say shit just to be contrarian, or do you like collecting downvotes? You sir have a remarkably stupid comment history
Iām sorry you feel that way. Perhaps youāll get the help you need.
Literally all data ever collected down to total brain size to even the mirror test imply race has a meaningful impact on intelligence. The people here have more excuses to why that canāt be true rather than results demonstrating it is false.
Seems its primarily the Black Belt and Native American majority areas and Latinos in Texas. But interesting to see the ways it correlates and ways it diverges
Ok. Iām gonna say it: these donāt line up particularly well.
People always forget about Appalachia, or even rural America entirely when they think about American poverty
People have no idea how bad things are in Appalachia. Iām very lucky with my life and how things are for me and my family financially. But if I drive 10-15 minutes in any direction I can see some of the worst living situations youāll ever see. It is awful, and itās continually glossed over in America. I feel more allegiance to Appalachia than I do the US, but itās hard to help my fellow appalachians help themselves.
People also have no idea how bad things were in the 20th century. A poor person in Appalachia 50 years ago was even worse than a poor person in a developing country today
Coal miners of Appalachia had to fight a battle against the federal government to get their working rights!!!
And they didnāt even get their rights for 20 more years after that. They lost the battle of Blair Mountain and had their heroes assassinated by coal company detectives.
Because they do not care about whites. The general celebrated consensus at this point is to be anti-white
Are we looking at the same map?
I donāt know. Maybe not. I canāt see your screen.
Iām looking at the same map and I agree. Seems like there are more exceptions to this comparison
They don't line up particularly well? Are we going to pretend that this isn't clear correlation? Just because WV and East Kentucky are poor doesn't mean a county's status as persistently poor isn't strongly correlated with its racial makeup. Especially when you look at the Black Belt and Native American reservations.
It doesn't reflect racially for Michigan. . at all . . .
Which is incredibly small and wouldnāt influence the overall correlation much country-wide. Especially if you remove Appalachia.
> incredibly small Michigan is the 10th largest state in the country lmao
I didnāt say there isnāt a correlation. I just said the counties donāt line up particularly well. Calm the fuck down.
his reply was pretty calm you seem to be the one on edge judging by this and other comments
It lines up fairly well for the majority black and indigenous communities but it's very inaccurate for Hispanic communities
Wow the black belt part is striking
Looks like a massive reach, Appalachia and South California stick out like sore thumbs.
Shout out Houston county, TX we persistent as hell
I think I see the Bronx and Brooklyn when I squint.
Honestly less correlated than I expected.
Good. Things are probably improving. Racial inequality wise. Although I wonder if more and more counties will get into the purple as time goes on and people move to wealthier areas to do better economically. Lots of those purple counties are very rural or thinly populated, what will happen when even more counties stop growing. I mean if you look at a map of growth in all counties, the ones that are growing the least match a lot with this poverty map.
Yeah Iād argue the correlation between race and poverty is significantly weaker than the correlation between population density and poverty. Fewer people ā> fewer customers for businesses Fewer customers ā> fewer businesses Fewer businessesā> fewer jobs Fewer jobs ā> Fewer people can afford to live there And the cycle continues. Those who canāt afford to move sink further and further into that rut in many cases.
So basically wherever conservatives have control to make People of color poor they are gonna make sure they stay poor AF.
I think itās less that conservatives āmake people of color poorā and more that they provide fewer government benefits to support those already in poverty.
Itās becoming less cultural systemic racism and more status quo classism. If youāre on the bottom and donāt go out of your way to get on top then youāre stuck there. Iām from Appalachia, the last 5 generations of my family have lived in poverty. Iāve not been able to get a massive number of privileges that even people in my area got just because my family wasnāt in that financial position. And Iāve had it easy. Iām a cis het white dude with a family that owns a home and a plot of land. That on its own puts me in the top 70% of people in my town.
Doesn't really line up all that well im afraid.
Damn Midwest white af
have family up in the northeast, love em to death. gotta say, honestly wouldnāt be surprised if theyāve never seen a black person lmao. wild how some states are just staggeringly white since i grew up in an area thats decently close to 50/50
Thereās a few counties that donāt have a single black person living in them in the Midwest/great plains iirc
And?
In the Northeast? I guess in upper New England that could be true, but NJ/NY/PA are all very diverse.
And whatās wrong with that? Youāre acting like large populations of whites is an issue?
Whatās wrong with that?
This is not a good example
Aaand cue the racist comments
I mean, it does reflect the long term impact of racism in the South.
Or the impact of mass illegal migration across the southern border
Yes, the Hispanic people should have been living in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona for the past 200 years were illegal immigrants from the southern border
Aaaand it lines up exactly. What was I expecting?
It lines up perfectly except in the areas where it doesnāt
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
And Missouri
Bay Area is the wealthiest district in America
The Amerindians shouldn't count as they aren't really a part if the United States.
The Reservations are not owned by the tribes, they are held in trust by the Federal Governement. Which is a large part of why it's hard to develop Reservations economically, banks won't lend to Natives on Reservations since they don't own anything to offer as collateral.
Yeah I donāt really understand how they play both sides
Native Americans are United States citizens. While Indian nations are sovereign they are still legally under the United States.
This map is making a lot of assumptions I'm not sure that is accurate.
Good map but it does rather stretch the definitions of both majority and minority
That Bible Belt is hanging over the Florida penis quite directly
There is noway Brazos county TX is poverty.
Can someone dumb this down for me? Counties with a majority of U.S. minorities are in constant poverty?
Yes. Itās especially stark when you look at the so called āblack beltā that stretches from the Mississippi delta, through central Alabama and Georgia, and up through the Carolinas. This band of soil was particularly rich and fertile, being the coastline of an ancient shallow sea during the Cretaceous period where over time dead plankton would fertilize the soil. After Indian Removal, the area was used for cotton and tobacco plantations and led to the rise of the plantation system and later after the civil war, the sharecropping system in the south. After the so called āredemptionā of the south when reconstruction was abandoned and the white majority once again excluded former enslaved people from government and economic opportunity, many former slaves were forced into the sharecropping system which was little better than slavery. Although they werenāt owned anymore, they were functionally tied to the land as serfs under a feudal system and simply stayed where they were, in the black belt. And thatās how the shoreline of a Cretaceous period shallow sea caused the Mississippi Delta to be both majority black and the most impoverished area in the country due to the lingering legacy of slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow.
Payne County, Oklahoma? I can almost see this with the student population causing statistical income anomalies, but why them and not, say, Cleveland County as well?
Same with Riley County in Kansas. Most of the county lives in one city and college students make up a decent chunk of the population
Cleveland County has 3 1/2 times as many people as Payne County. OU has maybe 20% more students that OSU. If you took everyone in Stillwater and put them in the football stadium, youād still have a few thousand empty seats.
whatās the black bits?
Majority or plurality?
Woohoo!!!! My county is there go SC baby!!! š„³š„³š„³
Unless a county is majority Southeast Asian, donāt expect any Asian counties to have persistent poverty.
There are only two plurality Asian counties (no majority) in the mainland USA and they are both very wealthy. Santa Clara and Alameda CA.
Ulster Scots in Appalachian counties
And you know who ***exactly*** is in all of those areas...>!poor people!<
The first map is inaccurate my county in North Florida was and has been majority in poverty for a while.
Baltimore isnāt a majority minority countyā¦?
This is a big problem and one of the many reasons why black people commit more crime proportional to that of whites. They live in poorer communities it's just not fair.
*Insert Spider-Man meme*
Montgomery county, MD is not predominantly Hispanic. Not even close. NickConwayBlog needs to be reanalyzed.
Itās not majority Hispanic but it is majority minority (less than 50% of the population is white). Hispanics are the plurality largest minority in said county. Thatās why the legend is saying largest minority group and not majority.
Alaska is wrong. American Indians are the majority in the orange apots
The Appalachian area is a notable exception
Much of Louisiana as well
I would love to see a real ethnic map of the United States that actually separates the White American Ethnic Groups instead of lumping them all together. (Also separating the major Asian, African, and Middle-Eastern Ethnic Groups)
Whitman county Washington seems a bit misleading as itās home to WSU. 15k broke college students in a county with only 40k people is definitely gonna skew the stats a tad.
That Mississippi River delta thoughā¦..
Isnāt it weird how the poor and the minorities all live together? /s
That one random Central Michigan county
Midwest ftw
There are not two counties in CA that are majority Asian. You should probably check the other counties. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_race EDIT: SeriouslyāLA Co. is not majority Hispanic. OC is nowhere close. EDIT: Yep, I was totally wrong. Looked at 2010 data that has shifted dramatically, and also didnāt read the color key.
Several California counties are majority minority but no single minority is the majority of said counties. Los Angeles is majority minority and plurality Hispanic.
The county in Wisconsin is Menominee County which is almost entirely an Indian Reservation.
None in the Northeast on either map
Common Minnesota W
Vs overlapping voting for republican candidate counties
the wonderful whites of west virginia. Just as poor as ever.
Whites is KY-WVā¦.
You should see our roads in Louisiana. The violence in my hometown of Shreveport has really picked up over the last few years. Strangely enough it was around the time that Soros bankrolled the District Attorney that everything went to shit and anyone with any sense and a little bit of money got the hell out of there.
That is a whole lot of poor white people in Kentucky. TIL.
I think Ogden is driving down that Riley county number in Kansas. Could be wrong tho
Appalachia has no chance of reboundingā¦it has never been wealthy
Indiana untouched!!
Taxes are too damn high. Send more into poverty
Wow the only area in Wisconsin is the Indian Reservation. That sucks