Hello again Blogetta! Bloginita! Blogayyah! Blogia-Sophie!
Here are some overdue updates and some quick data analysis I did on a whim. Let’s start with the analysis.
As background info, one of the reasons I left Minneapolis (in addition to the weather destroying my health and wanting to be closer to family after a health scare) was the fact that it kept ending up on all those lists of the worst states for black people. It was a disparity I could feel. I kept slipping beneath the poverty line, made less than $15 an hour at most workplaces, and only broke past the median Black family income for the area ($49,738 in 2024, it was less back 2014-2020) at my final job—my favorite job—which was not-coincidentally a Black-led org. I still regret leaving that job, as it was the most stable I’d been in my life.
In any case, I was discussing the state of racial inequality in CA versus MN with my dad, and I sent him this November 2024 article on The Worst States for Black Americans as support for my arguments. For this project, I spent a couple of hours extracting the data, converting it to a spreadsheet, and turning those spreadsheets into charts and visualizations to put in perspective how my state is treating me.
Let’s count our blessings with facts and logic!
(jk)
First off, here’s the link the spreadsheet of tabular data created after pulling the data and transforming it:
The data from based on “five-year estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey. If this were not a quickie, I would go directly to the US Census Bureau to pull the data myself.
I do love exploring Census data.
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From the spreadsheet, I created a comparison of White American median household income versus Black American median household income, in descending order by income level.
Black people have some of the highest incomes in CA, but the cost of living is higher so that doesn’t tell us much about how well they’re doing.
If you look at the source data, CA is firmly in the middle of the pack in terms at 24th best state for Black Americans. I guess we can conclude that the Black Californian experience is not especially good or bad? It probably varies so widely by city and county that I want to dig in by MSA one day.
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Now we take a look at the first disparity: the difference between median incomes for Black Americans and White Americans:
This is one of the measures in which California is doing quite badly. Black Americans make less money in every state, but in the rags-to-riches Golden State, the difference in average income is over $30k. That’s a whole salary!
But as economically segregated as CA is; MN, IL, and WI are more so. CT and NJ having the highest disparities surprises me, but I don’t know much about the racial dynamics of those states. My bias is that I expect the South to have lower outcomes than it actually does, I admit.
I am fascinated by the equality in Hawaii though! A lot of the states with the lowest income disparities seem to have low Black populations in general, and I wonder if that’s the case with Hawaii. Less community presence, more integration.
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Let’s jump to unemployment rates. This chart is organized by the disparity in unemployment rates between Black and white Americans, organized by state:
The average Black unemployment rate across all states is 8.8% (unweighted by population size) while the average white unemployment rate is closer to 4.4% for an average disparity of 4.4%. CA has a higher Black unemployment rate but a higher white unemployment rate as well—it’s hard for anyone to get a job out here. The disparity between Black and white unemployment is basically in line with the national average, a little bit higher but not to the point I would say that CA is particularly bad at hiring Black folks.
Alaska is the only state where Black unemployment is lower than white unemployment, but I imagine the only Black folks that far north in the cold are there for a reason!
(I actually got to learn a bit about Black folks in Alaska when I was up in Homer. There was even a display in the Anchorage airport, IIRC.)
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Our penultimate measure is the home ownership rate. This chart is organized by size of disparity, where the more equal states are towards the left and the more disparate states are towards the right.
White North Dakotans are more than 5 times as likely to be homeowners than Black North Dakotans, White Mainers are almost three more as likely to be homeowners than Black Mainers, and White Minnesotans are almost 2.7 times more likely to be homeowners.
This chart explains one of the reasons that wealth levels between Black and white Minnesotans and North Dakotans are so unlike: homeownership is a key means of building wealth. Many of the homes in MN and ND (all of those family cabins, for example) were already owned by white Americans before the waves of Black migration shifted its demographics. Red-lining certainly worsened things, but I know this isn’t the only excuse, as older states have successfully become more integrated. On a side note, I am getting a lot of statistical mixed messages about Black folks in New England.
(My hypothesis is that Black people who can’t code-switch well enough often get locked out of the social networks that lead to opportunity and wealth, and that this is less of a problem in low-context cultures, more of a problem in high-context cultures like Minnesota’s. But investigating that would be another project entirely...)
CA is a newer and younger state that low-key had a mixed Black dude as its leader before it was annexed. Black folks have been here since the start, and there’s been less time for European Americans to develop a head start. It’s also a state of transplants rather than exclusive communities, even though we’ve been bleeding Black folks for a while.
But even though Black people can’t afford to buy a home there, neither can anyone else. We all out here renting together! 😂
No, I joke.
CA may have the second-lowest homeownership gap for White Americans, but there’s still a major gap where they are 1.7 times as likely to be homeowners compared to Black Californians. And our housing crisis shows itself in other ways. There’s a statistic about San Diego that I have memorized: “Black San Diegans make up 28% of the homeless population in our region even though they only represent 5% of the overall population.” I could have sworn the numbers were 24% and 6% when I first memorized it, though, so maybe things have gotten worse?
As a final aside, I am intrigued but not surprised by the high rates of Black homeownership in the South. It illustrates how there are different kinds of wealth, different kinds of stability, different kinds of opportunity to aim for… I tend to joke that choosing where to live as a Black person is a Pick-Your-Poison kind of affair, but you could also call it Choose-Your-Own-Adventure if you want to get more glass-half-full with it.
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Final two measures: the size of the Black population by state and the percentage of the population that’s Black.
California has the 6th highest population of Black Americans! But it’s also massive so that only makes sense. (4th biggest economy in the world, woot woot! 💪🏾 Donor state 4 life!)
We’re only 5% of the population here, however. I suspect that this explains the lack of Black community that UCSD colleagues and writer friends have reported feeling in CA.
There are some interesting stories to be found by looking at the correlations between size of Black population, amount of integration, and under what conditions economic success best results. I know there are studies that find that “An overwhelming 70 percent of majority-Black zip codes are distressed, compared to 20 percent of zip codes nationally and 16 percent of majority-white zip codes” and that “The places most conducive to upward mobility include large cities — San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Providence, R.I. — and major suburban counties” and that “The more connections between the rich and poor, the better the neighborhood was at lifting children from poverty”. I’m interested in what all of those studies have to say, but I’m particularly interested in whether Black people with strong Black communities have stronger economic outcomes than Black people in PWI spaces. And even if they do, are they happier?
According to Wikipedia, “As of 2021, California has the largest multiracial African American population by number in the United States,” which tracks with my experience of SD. So many mixed couples! Including me and my partner so I can’t even complain! UGH!
Anyway, this was fun!
OTHER UPDATES:
WRITING:
I finished draft one in September/October, gave it to the editor, got my second editorial letter, and now I’m one scene away from completing the second draft. I am stuck on this final scene, so I am asking the editor for help. I got to see sketches for the possible cover, so the book has been seeming more and more real as of late.
Once the cover is confirmed, I will switch to promotion mode. At that point, you won’t be able to shut me up about the book.
READING:
For a while, I was attempting to read all of the New York Times’ top 100 Best Books of the 21st Century that I haven’t read, but too many of them were boring—no, I'm exaggerating. They’re just not for me.
Someday, I'll get around to reading Bolano because I own both 2666 and The Savage Detectives, but I will NEVER read Jonathan Franzen and you can't make me!
As of now, I’ve been aiming to read 25-50 of the list that interests me while mixing in a good 25 books from my 200-book library. I wish someone would make a list of the top 100 speculative fiction novels of the 21st Century. Also, the Neopolitan Quartet is so good it’s unfair. Maybe I’ll just read a lot of Elena Ferrante this year, who knows? She makes me feel alive.
DATA:
I finished the Tableau certificate and started on the Google Advanced Data Analytics Professional Certificate as noted above, but I need to balance that with independent projects. I’m being a perfectionist about the next project, but it’s going to be on my Tableau page, which I plan to prune soon. I’ve been looking for opportunities to do volunteer data analytics so that I can work on more real-world problems with real-world datasets. The projects I create for myself tend to be a little lighter in tone and are more designed to show my interests (writing, demographics, anime, etc).
LIFE:
I grew tired of San Diego's skid row (although it did wind up in my novel in a scene or two) and now live in North Park, which I love.
I have finally found a good therapist here in San Diego, and she specializes in neurodivergence. Based on her diagnosis (and my Hasan-beating high score on the RAADS test), now I need to grapple with the fact that I might have Autism and CPTSD and social anxiety stemming from living with those.
It turns out that I might be right when I sense that someone dislikes me on first impression for no real reason, as that’s a common implicit bias neurodivergent people face. I’m beginning to wrap my mind around some past encounters and realizing that our disagreements may not have been an issue of me miscommunicating as much as it was an example of the double-empathy problem. There are a lot of small things that, rather than blaming them on myself, may turn out to be bias from the other person. So that has been something to deal with.
I’ve low-key been putting friendships on hold as I develop a new personal story, given that Maya Amasses the Skills and Experiences to Defeat Social Anxiety has a different goal, conflict, and narrative arc from Maya Builds Relationships Strong Enough to Heal from Childhood Neglect or from Maya Discovers the Tools and Allies to Aid her Acceptance of Monotropic Neurodivergence. And if I have all the above? That’s too cluttered of a plot. Never mind it. We should trim that for the audience’s ease of understanding.
I am jealous of autistic supports, though. I want to be given direct instructions, I want to be taken at my word, I want to work on spreadsheets and databases in a quiet office where I’m allowed to wear headphones and sing along if the feeling strikes me. I wanted the accommodations from the neurodiversity training that my last job made me take, all the accommodations they didn’t offer me.
I’m realizing that I’ve been lucky in that the majority of my job offered me these supports as built-in benefits. Now that I’m working on a career change, I need to be ready to explicitly request accommodations, and I may need a formal diagnosis for that. I will keep looking for more naturally supportive workplace like those I was fortunate to find in the past, however. Either works!
Oh, but did you know that “Black Women Lost The Most Jobs In April and Changes In DEI Could Partially Be To Blame”?
So I’m not alone, at least. Call me weird, but the right statistics can calm me during tough times. This stat is depressing in the big picture, however, emblematic of how some people want to send this nation sliding backwards due to greed.
Unemployment got me feeling like nobody’s in my corner too often, so sometimes I just need to sit down and count how many folks have helped me out—it’s definitely more than zero!
I’ll let myself rest, let myself brood just enough, and then get back to Acting As If there’s a place that values me enough to pay me what I’m worth. I’ve found such places before, and I can do it again.
Anywho, it’s time to get to my Databases with Python class.
Hajoghutyun!
I cut my original reason for including this image, but here is an old, old photo of me dressed up to usher for the Oscars. I did not know how to style my hair back then. lol
