we’re asian americans and in the same class as southeast and east asians. this is a source of confusion for non-americans, but it’s how it is here. before 1980 we were classified as white for a while, but being an ethnic minority has some privileges re: small business loans, etc. so indian american businessmen pushed to have south asians reclassified as asian american. middle eastern people are classified as white, though some middle eastern activists want to change that. the big difference is many middle eastern people are basically white (e.g., ralph nader) in public perception, while very few south asians are because we’re too dark-skinned.

i have lived in portland, and have family in the seattle area. the black populations of these towns are so small that segregation has a qualitatively different feel. additionally, i’m skeptical of the index of segregation being high. the northeast section of portland, where the blacks lived traditionally, has been gentrifying and the locals have been dispersing into the suburbs.

I expect this self-segregation to continue. Most non-white americans will live amongst their own race.

I looked through most of the charts, and the thing that emerges most clearly is that whenever a substantial African-American presence exists in a city, it is segregated, often in the innermost sections of the city. But we knew that.

What I didn’t suspect was that the degree of segregation of the African-American population does not vary much across the country – I had always thought that cities in the Northwest – Portland and Seattle, for example, or towns like Minneapolis and Omaha for example, would be less segregated than cities in the South, the East Coast, and the Lower Midwest (Detroit/Chicago). But not noticeably less, by these maps.

And while Washington DC clearly segregates between NW and SE – the neighborhood-by-neighborhood segregation seemed clearest in New Orleans to me – where neighborhoods in a row will alternate between black and white – blue and red.

However, I found that cities that have substantial Latino and Asian presence seemed more mixed if they lacked a significant African-American presence – Honolulu, for example, which has a huge Asian presence; or cities like Corpus Christi or El Paso TX, Reno NV, Mesa AZ, Salt Lake City UT, Lincoln NE and to an extent Sacramento, Riverside, Stockton and Bakersfield CA – which have significant Latino and/or Asian populations (but not as many Af-Ams) are fairly well mixed.

I found that among cities which have significant minority populations, some of the least segregated seem to be in the ‘four-corner’ states – UT, CO, AZ, NM. And towns in the Northern NorthEast – Concord NH, Burlington VT, Portsmouth NH, are nearly 100% white – no gray, green, orange or blue dots at all.

Overall, orange seems to mix fairly well with red – not perfectly, but fairly well. Green and orange, and green and red can mix too. But not blue and red. To some extent this is also a visual thing – blue is furthest from red in the BGOR spectrum, but I wonder if the race-color mapping was also deliberately done – for example, having chosen red=white, he didn’t choose orange to be ‘Af-Am’.