Percentage Population of Select Racial Groups by County: United States in the Year 2000

The maps accompanying this text depict the population distribution of three select racial minority groups in the United States of America for the year 2000: African-American, Asian-American, and those who categorized themselves as ‘Some Other Race.’ The data for each group were mapped as a percentage of total population in each of the 3000+ U.S. counties. The data used in the creation of these maps were gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau for its A.D. 2000 general population census and accessed through their web portal at www.census.gov.

Data classes were chosen manually for each group’s data. My decisions in classifying the data were an attempt to highlight the distribution of data for each group, with an upper limit set at the highest value for a given data set. Looking at each map individually, certain patterns -- contemporary, historical, and geographical -- are evident.

Figure 1.

The strong influence of historical slavery is evident in the map depicting the U.S.’s African-American population (Figure 1). A concentrated population of this racial group is found in a broad swathe stretching from Mississippi to Virginia. In the nationwide list of counties ranked from greatest to least percentage population of African-Americans, a majority of the top one-hundred counties are located in Southern states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Philadelphia County, contiguous with the city of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania -- the first county north of the Mason-Dixon Line on the list -- appears at #159, and even that’s a questionable entry. (Philadelphia has long been referred to in print as “that Southern city up north.”)

Mississippi is the state with the greatest concentration of African-Americans, specifically the Delta region in the state’s northwest. Out of a population of less than ten-thousand, Jefferson County in southwestern Mississippi had the highest percentage of African-Americans in the nation in 2000, or 86.5% of its population, whereas Webster County, West Virginia was the least Black county in the U.S. where a single African-American resided out of a total population of 9,719 souls, a percentage population of 0.0001%. Clearly the economics of slavery remains a strong determinate for the distribution of African-Americans across the nation.

Figure 2.

The distribution of Asian-Americans in the U.S. in 2000 shows a pattern strongly influenced by geographic situation, namely its position on an arc of the Pacific Rim (Figure 2). The other major factor is urban concentration and concentration around universities.

America’s West Coast states -- California, Oregon, and Washington -- are the locations of the greatest overall number of Asian-Americans in the contiguous U.S. And even within these states, the greatest percentage concentrations are found in regions with significant conurbations: the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles County (11.9%), San Diego County (8.9%), Multinomah County (Portland, Oregon) (5.7%) and King County (Seattle, Washington) (10.8%), though there are exceptions to this general rule (for example Solano and San Joaquin counties, located in California’s Central Valley, have sizeable Asian-American populations).

On the U.S. east coast, Asian-Americans are concentrated in urban areas, notably New York, Boston, and Washington, DC. Centre County, Pennsylvania stands out as the location of Penn State. Other urban areas around the country with significant Asian-American presence include Kings County, WA (Seattle), Denver, CO, Houston, TX, the Dallas/Fort Worth Metropolitan area, Atlanta, GA, Chicago, IL, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN.

The county with the highest percentage Asian-American population (46%) is Honolulu County, contiguous with Hawaii’s island Oahu (not depicted on the map). In the contiguous U.S., San Francisco County has the highest population of Asian-Americans (30.8%). The county with the least population of Asians in the U.S. is Monroe County, Kentucky where just one person out of 11,756 claims Asian heritage (0.000085%).

Figure 3.

The distribution of the population categorizing themselves as Some Other Race in the U.S. (i.e. persons choosing to be unspecific as to their racial category) is strikingly clustered along the U.S. border with Mexico (Figure 3). One can conclude that perhaps ‘Some Other Race’ is a euphemism for Latin American immigrants who -- for one motivation or another -- are disguising their identity from authorities. Interestingly, U.S. counties with the highest percentages of Some Other Race persons are those in east central New Mexico and Imperial County, California. Imperial County, one of California’s richest agricultural regions, has a high percentage population of immigrant labor who work in the fields. It is also a county where -- up to twenty miles from the actual borderline -- paved roads leading out of the county are fitted with border patrol checkpoints.