Actually, doesn't this need to be controlled for economics and population? If the African American population is substantially larger in Southern cities, then it is not a surprise that there are more streets that have African Americans on them.

I am not saying that the cities in the North are more integrated, I am just saying that I am not sure this chart proves anything. For what it is worth, I have lived all over the country, and I have noticed slightly more people with racists assumptions in Memphis than elswhere, but no real apparent difference in the percentage of people that socialize with others of different races.

Look at the chart and at the larger report, which shows what percentage of the general population in cities and areas are black (it is unfortunately just looking at white-black integration).

A city like New York has a higher black percentage of the population (23.7%) than Charlotte or Raleigh, yet only 4.7% of the population lives in areas with significant integration.

People may be more verbally racist in places like Memphis but they also don't run away from having black neighbors as often as up North. Of course, just because Southerners live near blacks does not mean they are any more integrated in their friendships. But it's a start.

This post demonstrates everything that can go wrong when leftish intellectual poseurs calumny liberals and liberalism to establish their "independent" boda fides.

Spying a report about an odd study in a magazine with an increasingly distorted partisan agenda, the big-think wanna-be does not pause for a second to assess the soundness of the study, or even what it claims to be doing. No, that might spoil the opportunity to aggrandize his egotistical self-image as a different kind of liberal -- oh, yes, one of those tough-minded liberals not afraid to speak truth to his own. So he proceeds directly to slander without bothering about facts and argument. Flogging conservative spin is just so much more fun and rewarding than actually thinking, after all. So we get folderol about "hard" truths and "hard" reality and scorn for supposed "latte-sipping liberals" (who necessarily lack credibility) as a substitute for actually looking hard at facts and logic and making an honest assessment of credibility.

But what are the facts here? To start, the way this study measures integration merits a good, long guffaw. An integrated census block, for this study, is one that is at least 20% white and 20% black. Now, anyone who gives half of a second of thought to that (even our esteemed liberal-critic-of-liberals) should see two enormous flaws here.

First, consider cities with populations which are less than 20% black, like most American cities. In this case, blacks can achieve "integration", according to this study, only by becoming more densely concentrated! Albuquerque, which ranks last in the integration index in this study, is a perfect example. Albuquerque is only 3.2% black. If blacks were perfectly evenly distributed thoughout census blocks in the city, no one in the entire city would live in an integrated census block. If every black in Albuquerque lived in a census block that was 70% black and at least 20% white, however, almost 5% of the people in the city would live in "integrated" blocks. This is an absurd conception of integration.

But the absurdity does not stop there. We must also consider cities with large proportions of Hispanics and Asians. Particularly in cities in which close to half, or more than half, of the population comes from these groups, there will necessarily be few blocks in which both blacks and whites are more than 20% of the population (unless the Asian and Hsipanic populations are themselves extraordinarily segregated). For example, if a census block is 61% Hispanic and Asian, it is literally impossible for it to be integrated according to the measure used in this study. Even in census blocks which are a quarter or a third Hispanic and Asian, the black-white population ratio must be extremely finely balanced to achieve "integration."

If you examine the actual maps for the data used in the study, this problem becomes blindingly obvious. Most of the Western, Midwestern, and Northeastern cities mired at the bottom of the study's integration index have maps colored almost a solid green. Albuquerque, Miami, El Paso, New York, and almost every city on the West Coast are good examples. According to the map index, the green areas are "else" blocks -- which means they are blocks in which whites and blacks are both under 80% of the population, but also blocks where both are not above 20%. But that can only happen where a third (and possibly fourth) population group is present. So the ubiquity of green in the regions where cities have low "integration" indices is really a sign of a very large proportion of Asians and Hispanics in the population. By contrast, many of the supposedly highly integrated Southern cities have negligible amounts of green on their maps, which means they have almost no Hispanic or Asian population to depress their integration index. But this is another absurdity -- cities are made more integrated by having fewer Asians and Hispanics.

I think that says enough about the methodology of this study. It has the clear odor of special pleading for Milwaulkee, which the authors seem to feel has been hard done by when assessed with the standard measures of integration, and the whole things seems to have been jury-rigged to make Milwaukee come out better. Not even a high-school social science student could take it seriously as a way to compare how integrated cites are, and it is certainly shameful for our illustrious blogger to pretend that he does. But I just want to mention one other point about the study because it shows the egregiousness of the bad faith involved here: the authors themselves contend that their measure of integration is worthless for making comparative rankings of cities. Right after the bullet-points in their Findings section, in big bold print, they state, "An alternative definition of black-white integration is presented in this paper, not as a competitive model for ranking cities and metro areas, but to expose the biases and limitations of the segregation indexes."

Now, I have some sympathy for what they are trying to do, since there may be problems with existing segregation indices. But I have none for posturing bloggers (or news-magazine reporters) who distort a study in ways in which even the authors explicitly warn against in order to make cheap shots against liberals.

Mr. Newman, you owe a lot of folks an apology.

Gee- I'm not sure who I should be apologizing to? Myself, since I've been attacking Lott and the South for a couple of months? Of course I don't drink lattes-- not a big coffee-drinker, so I prefer fizzy Italian sodas as my favorite cafes.

But the point holds that southern cities with large black populations are less residentially segregated than northern cities. This is a long-term problem that northern liberals ignore all too often in finding the South's racism far easier to confront that the pervasive institutional racism of northern segregation.

Of course, there are complications in a black-white measure of segregation, but you don't make the problem go away by raising a southwest city to waive it away. The cities on the chart (save Orange County)all have significant black populations, so it is those cities that are at issue. And while no measure is perfect, if you look at the various ways the larger study examines the issue, this study is one of the more compelling I've seen.

But I'm not sure what this has to do with anything- not everybody lives in cities. For instance, I was under the impression (and I may well be wrong) that Atlanta didn't vote much differently in this Confederate-flag afflicted gubernatorial election than in the previous one.