Child Poverty and Race, USA 2016

This week’s Tidy Tuesday invited us to examine county-level census data from 2016 in the United States (sourced here). I have been poking around in the data and discovered an interesting visual artefact in the following otherwise unsurprising quick plot:

I split the USA’s 3,142 counties (excluding Puerto Rico) into regions, based on the US Census Bureau’s four statistical regions (pdf). I excluded Puetro Rico because its racial breakdown does not fit the exercise here. And I chose to classify counties by White (%) because that seems the best way to capture the percentage of the population from racial minorities. No doubt this is a hugely crude way to go about the exercise.

Anyway, even with my basic familiarity with the United States I am hardly surprised to see child poverty correlate negatively with the proportion of the population that is white. What is surprising I think is the way that child poverty seems higher in the Northeast and especially in the South in more homogeneous counties.

Still, we have to be careful. When we look at the Southern counties what we are seeing here might relate to a combination of rural poverty and an uneven distribution of people by race. Indeed, it is very striking how segregated the United States are.

Counties with population composed of 75% or more from one racial group

State	Counties	Segregated	Not Segregated	Segregated (%)
West Virginia	55	55	0	100
Kentucky	120	116	4	97
Tennessee	95	84	11	88
Maryland	24	14	10	58
Arkansas	75	43	32	57
Virginia	133	68	65	51
Alabama	67	30	37	45
Florida	67	28	39	42
North Carolina	100	40	60	40
Oklahoma	77	31	46	40
Texas	254	77	177	30
Mississippi	82	20	62	24
Georgia	159	37	122	23
Louisiana	64	12	52	19
South Carolina	46	5	41	11
Delaware	3	0	3	0
District of Columbia	1	0	1	0

But note also that each state (and I imagine at more granular levels than that) has its own population distributions:

So, as always, more study required.

Gist here.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{o'kelly2018,
  author = {O’Kelly, Ciarán},
  title = {Child {Poverty} and {Race,} {USA} 2016},
  date = {2018-05-01},
  url = {https://ciaranokelly.org/posts/2018-05-08-child-poverty-race-usa.html},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

O’Kelly, Ciarán. 2018. “Child Poverty and Race, USA 2016.” May 1, 2018. https://ciaranokelly.org/posts/2018-05-08-child-poverty-race-usa.html.