Abstract
Research examining regional variation in the impact of racial concentration on Black–White economic inequality assumes that the American South is distinct from the non-South because of its slavery history. However, slavery’s influence on the relationship has not been directly examined nor has it been adequately theorized within the economic inequality literature. We assess whether the link between contemporary Black concentration and poverty disparities is structured by historical racial context. We find that while there is contemporary racial inequality throughout the United States, inequality-generating processes vary spatially and in ways that are tied to the local historical racial context.
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Notes
It is possible that the decline in the slope is due to increased political power that might accompany a numerically larger oppressed population. However, this explanation for the declining slope is inconsistent with the observed relationship between Black population concentration and economic disadvantage; we observe a decline in the slope well before the black population reaches a majority, roughly around 5 and 10 percent (see Fig. 3). Related, we note that Blalock (1967) proposed a political threat model, which suggests that black disadvantage would be increasingly positively related to black population concentration. Based on this specification, we would expect discrimination to be increasingly present precisely because of the larger relative size of the oppressed group and the political threat that their size represents to the dominant group. Although political threat and power are theoretically important, we maintain focus on the economic threat hypothesis given our interest in economic inequality and in the structure of economic institutions.
While Black action is not the focus of the racial threat or exploitation thesis, the Black population is not without agency. However, there is structural inequality in the particular set of choices and the power to pursue preferences, which informs the role of Black agency.
An alternative view of the legacy of slavery is from an individual-level perspective. This conceptualization suggests legacy resides within individuals and can spread across regions via the individual through migration. Given internal migration patterns within the South and from the South to the North and West, one could expect no spatial differentiation in the concentration–inequality relationship since not all individuals are geographically rooted. The migration of southerners, both Black and White, to the non-South may have contributed to the reduction of cultural differences across US regions (Gregory 2005). However, the ultimate impact of migration on northern racial attitudes in particular was limited because a backlash reduced the initial impact of southern dispersion on anti-Black attitudes outside of the South.
Our methodological strategy is conceptually similar to multilevel approaches that model variation in the average individual-level racial gap (i.e., inequality) at the second level in relation to aggregate characteristics (see Bryk and Raudenbush 1992). We have chosen to exclusively examine county-level factors given the limited benefits of the more complex and data-intensive multilevel approach for our research question, and the persistence of the Black concentration relationship in multilevel models (e.g., Cohen 1998).
Elimination of the SF3 in the decennial census after 2000 requires us to use the ACS. 3-year and 1-year ACS estimates are available for select geographies (i.e., those with populations of 20,000 or more and 65,000 or more, respectively). However, given the population thresholds, users must rely on the 5-year estimates to analyze all counties.
Users are cautioned against comparing ACS multi-year estimates that have three or more overlapping years. We present multiple years for which ACS data are available to examine stability in the linear or non-linear nature of the relationship given errors around small area estimates. However, we focus on 2000 and 2008–2012 in the central portion of our analysis to avoid erroneous comparisons.
These are separate requirements because of the difference between the total population and the population for whom poverty status is determined. As described in the ACS subjects definitions documentation for 2012, “[p]overty status was determined for all people except institutionalized people, people in military group quarters, people in college dormitories, and unrelated individuals under 15 years old” (p. 103). Retrieved December 12, 2014: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/data_documentation/SubjectDefinitions/2012_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf.
We also exclude counties in Alaska and Hawaii (20 additional counties) because these states have unique racialized histories. In addition, we combine 33 independent cities in Virginia with their parent county. Similarly, Broomfield County, CO, is combined with Boulder County, CO, to maintain consistency across units [for studies using the same approach see Curtis et al. (2012) and O’Connell (2012)].
There were no additional counties with a White population small enough to necessitate exclusion.
Our conclusions are consistent with analyses using proportion Black squared, a common alternative measure in the racial threat literature. However, the form of the relationship represented by a squared approach has theoretical implications that are incongruent with the racial threat hypothesis and, therefore, is less ideal than what we present here.
For the metropolitan status data see Economic Research Services. 2004. Rural–Urban Continuum Codes. Retrieved on April 28, 2012: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/RuralUrbanContinuumCodes/.
Sensitivity analyses (not reported) suggest that including state controls improves model specification by reducing heteroskedasticity and spatial autocorrelation in our residuals (see the text for further discussion of these and other modeling issues).
One concern about treating the non-South as a single region is the potential to mask the variation of slavery history among places outside of the South. However, the reported results hold when dividing the non-South into several possible sub-regions based on historical exposure to slavery (e.g., Illinois eastward compared to west of Illinois; including West Virginia in the non-South; including Missouri in the South). Ultimately, we selected the census-defined boundaries because they permit us to speak directly to a large body of previous work using the same divisions.
Four counties in Missouri (non-southern) had slave concentrations greater than 30 %: Howard County, Lafayette County, New Madrid County, and Saline County (see Fig. 1). We treat them as part of the non-South, and results are consistent with alternative specifications that include Missouri in the South and Missouri’s high-slave counties in the high-slave sub-region.
Our substantive conclusions are consistent when using the Plantation Belt to define the high-slave South. We prefer the slave threshold because it is a more proximate measure of slavery and it more closely reflects the types of places that we expect would have a lingering effect of slavery, namely those that were most dependent on slave labor.
We considered alternative methods of attaching the historical data to contemporary boundaries, including those that would involve assuming an even distribution within the historical units (Goodchild and Lam 1980), and determined that alternatives would be more problematic for our purposes since the slave population was highly unevenly distributed within counties (i.e., large numbers of slaves were concentrated on plantations).
As a precaution, we use robust standard errors even in instances when the χ2 statistic is marginally significant at the p < .10 level.
Our choice of spatial weights matrix is informed by the structure of our data. After excluding counties with Black populations below 50, the number of counties without a geographically contiguous neighbor (i.e., “islands”) precluded our use of alternative spatial weights matrices (i.e., contiguity matrices, e.g., first order queen contiguity). However, in previous iterations of this analysis, the results were consistent when using alternative software (e.g., R) and spatial weights matrices (e.g., queen contiguity). Therefore, our results are unaffected by either our choice of spatial weights matrix or software.
Our model comparison results are consistent when using the AIC and Root Mean Square Error (MSE) as the means of comparing fit between the models.
Additional sensitivity analyses suggest a preference for the non-linear association in the low-slave and non-South regimes even when excluding outliers and counties with the highest Black concentrations.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by NICHD Grant #R24 HD047873 awarded to the Center for Demography and Ecology, and by funds to Curtis from the University of Wisconsin System Institute for Race and Ethnicity, and the Wisconsin Experimental Station. The authors appreciate helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper from Monica Grant, Junho Lee, Mara Loveman, Jenna Nobles, Christine Schwartz, Jun Zhu, and the anonymous reviewers at Spatial Demography.
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Katherine J. Curtis and Heather A. O’Connell contributed equally to the conceptualization and execution of this study and are listed in alphabetical order.
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Curtis, K.J., O’Connell, H.A. Historical Racial Contexts and Contemporary Spatial Differences in Racial Inequality. Spat Demogr 5, 73–97 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-016-0020-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-016-0020-x