Answer:
When politicians speak about the plight of African Americans in the United States, their focus is predominately on those who reside in urban areas. They often discuss the lack of resources for African Americans in metropolitan and suburban areas, focusing on issues such as lack of education or employment opportunities or the need for criminal justice reform due to overcriminalization and underpolicing. While these are salient issues that need to be addressed, this limited focus ignores the plight of many African Americans residing outside of densely populated urban metro areas. African Americans make up 12.3 percent of the United States population and comprise 14.3 percent of the population in Southern nonmetropolitan counties.1 However, when politicians talk about rural America, they seemingly only focus on these areas’ white residents, neglecting the fact that they are home to a significant number of African Americans.
Using data taken from the Opportunity Atlas2—a collaboration between the U.S. Census Bureau, Harvard University, and Brown University that provides data on economic mobility throughout the country—one can see that the South has the lowest level of economic mobility for all demographics.3 Compared with other groups, African Americans have particularly low prospects for upward mobility and, in certain cases, are more likely to experience downward mobility.4
A long and brutal history of racist policies has kept African Americans from experiencing economic mobility through both legal and extralegal means. While the post-Reconstruction era and Jim Crow policies led to harsh outcomes for African Americans, the response by Southern—and national—politicians to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s continued to promote policies that oppressed African Americans. This so-called Southern strategy has driven conservative politics and policy over the past 50 years, hurting African Americans to this day.5 Figure 1 shows a strong clustering of low mobility in the South and in certain parts of the industrial Midwest; it is not random that the areas with the lowest economic mobility are those with high populations of African Americans.
Step-by-step explanation: