Does Pelosi know where the most segregated U.S. cities are?

June 26, 2013

By Chris Reed

The howls from California Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were instantaneous over the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the special powers over local and state elections given to the Justice Department need to reflect modern realities, not what life was like in 1965, when Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was first adopted.

The decision seems completely reasonable. We’re coming off a national election in which the African-American turnout rate was higher than the white turnout rate. African-American elected officials are ubiquitous in the South, so why should Voting Rights Act-secured special Justice Department scrutiny be presumed as necessary basically for just one region in 2013? As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion, “history did not end in 1965.”

But what is striking about all the cacophony from the left, and the media, over an eminently defensible ruling is that no one seems to acknowledge where the worst segregation is these days — that is, where generally wealthier whites with more flexibility on where to live go out of their way to not live with generally poorer minorities. By and large, it’s in liberal cities — including the president’s adopted hometown.

This is from a 2011 Huffington Post story on a study based on 2010 census data by Brown University professor John Logan and Florida State University professor Brian Stults. The most segregated cities in America, from 10 to 1:

10. Nassau-Suffolk, Long Island, New York

9. St. Louis, Missouri

8. Cleveland

7. Miami

6. Philadelphia

5. Chicago

4. Newark

3. New York City

2. Milwaukee

1. Detroit

I think this is awfully telling. To hear Pelosi tell it, bigotry is a Southern phenomenon. But this makes it look like the Northeast has a significant problem, too. As Paul Harvey would say, it’s the rest of the story — and it paints a much different picture than the one you get from the ardent defenders of a never-changing, trapped-in-amber Voting Rights Act. That picture is one of liberal hypocrisy on race.