How different are the North and South on issues of race?

Over the weekend (and bleeding into the week), there was an interesting conversation on Bluesky about the geography of racism in the United States.

The discussion originated with writer Elizabeth Spiers, a native of the South who objected to the tendency of Northerners — particularly liberal Northerners — to wave off the region where she grew up. Yes, it’s conservative … but there are swathes of blue in the deep red. And, yes, there’s racism … but there’s plenty of racism in the North as well.

Spiers suggested that the more important distinction was not North-vs.-South but, instead, urban-vs.-rural. It’s an interesting argument — and one that we can test.

Well, to some extent. It’s a bit hard to measure “racism,” as such, since so few people (although not no people) are willing to tell pollsters that, yes, they think non-White people are somehow inferior. That said, there is a set of questions that is included in the biannual General Social Survey which I think helps us get there.

It presents respondents with four answers to the question of why Black people in the U.S. tend to have worse jobs, lower income and poorer housing than Whites. Americans are asked if it’s mainly due to discrimination, a function of “less in-born ability to learn,” due to less educational opportunity or because of a lack of motivation. As you can probably see, two of those explanations are generally in line with research (discrimination and lack of opportunity), one is at best racism-adjacent (they are lazy) and the fourth is explicitly racist (less ability).

We can break out responses to those questions over time by Census regions, pitting the North and Midwest against the South and everything from the Plains states west. This isn’t exactly the standard definition of “The South,” including Maryland and Delaware along with Texas, Alabama, and so on. But most of the respondents in the GSS/Census Bureau South are residents of the Deep South or former Confederacy.

Here’s the percentage of each region that expressed agreement with the reasons for racial disparity over time. Notice the big surge in attribution to discrimination about a decade ago — a documented function of the BLM movement.

You will notice that the line for the Southern states (pink) is lower than the line for the Northern/Midwestern ones (blue) on the responses that center opportunity and discrimination as causes. In other words, Northerners are more likely to cite those reasons than are Southerners. Southerners used to be more likely to identify the racist or at-least-almost-racist answers, but the gap has vanished in recent years.

We can also break down responses by race and community. If we do, looking at the discrimination and motivation questions, we see that Whites are less likely than respondents overall to point to discrimination and more likely to cite motivation. The same is generally true of rural residents. Urban residents are generally more likely to point to discrimination and less likely to cite motivation.

If we look at South-vs.-North and rural-vs.-urban directly, we see that the two differences have often moved in sync. But, to Spiers’ point, the gap between rural and urban is, at this point, wider (that is, further from the middle point) on all four questions than the gap between North and South.

The gap is particularly wide on the question about discrimination — probably the most politically polarized question, again because of the recent discussion.

Of course, race itself is often a more significant factor in politics. If we look just at the (Census Bureau’s) Southern states, it is the case that more-urban counties supported Kamala Harris by wider margins last year. But counties with the highest percentages of Black residents almost always cast more votes for Harris regardless of population density. The most rural counties only voted more for Harris than Trump when they had lower percentages of Black residents.

If we run the same comparison looking at White populations, the results flip. The least-White counties generally cast more votes for Harris regardless of whether they were urban or rural. The most-White counties cast way more votes for Trump, even when they were very urban.

Spiers’ point, though, is that rural, White racists are not something that exist solely below the Mason-Dixon line. Rural Northerners are only slightly more likely to cite discrimination and slightly less likely to point to motivation as reasons for economic disparities in the U.S.

And if you think there are no racists in Northern cities? Well, perhaps you didn’t pay as close attention to the Black Lives Matter protests as you thought.

Photo: Restroom for White men at Chickamauga Dam, 1941. (National Archives)