Leanne Hainsby Danielle

[Editors note: this article, and the first part of our guide to the North-South divide, originally came up on StoryStalk in June 2014, prior to our respective launches of those online media channels.]

Who’s Afraid Of White People? With the South Working To Keep It Real By James Alan McLemore, and The National Institute for more than 100 speeches, 20 books, and six interactive studies published by the likes of Psychology Today, Psych Central, Time, Salon.com, and The Atlantic, this debate has quickly become a loaded one. Looking back at history, it is clear that Northern European superiority is slowly losing popular support in the North (naturally, throughout the Industrial Revolution), and the debate has seemingly come full circle.

This is an important question for US cities to consider, and with the 2017 election bringing the prospect of significant demographic changes, the possibility that cities will no longer feel welcoming to their core voters could present some greater threat to their growth and prosperity. Though opinions are clouded by social media hashtags and platforms, with the debates going on for several key cities, I’ve been alerted to two key trends. One trend highlights how the term “diversity” is now associated with oppression, with the term being used in derogatory terms such as “Racial Identity Extremists.” Other trends highlight the ways that racial and ethnic gerrymandering is creating a polarized and restrictive system.

In the first place, a careful analysis of race and ethnicity shows that Northeastern cities have suffered from the decline of their white population. Urban Cleveland, once the most racially diverse city in the country, which celebrated its 500th anniversary in 2006, recorded its 700th black resident in 2015, the largest minority generation in the city’s history. Other nearby Bostonians lost many of their majority-white suburbs over the last quarter century, and they are now led by an influx of Latinos, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans. These populations are easily concentrated in the area that has been the most aggressively Hispanicized in the Midwest and Northeast, leading to a high rate of immigrant presence in the city’s core – or “quota areas.