Racial Makeup (or Lack Thereof)

My roommate and I were sitting in our room talking about the small town up in Michigan where her family has a lake house.  She explained to me that she and her family became curious about the demographics of this tiny Michigan town and decided to look it up.  They discovered that only 411 people were permanent residents of the town.  Naturally, I became curious and decided to look it up as well.  We were both surprised to find that the very first link to pop up was “Racial Demographics”.  I didn’t reference race even remotely in the search browser, but the search engine deemed it important enough not only to mention, but to list very first.

I clicked on the link to find that 0.2% of the population is African American.  Now, if you do the math – which I did – you can see that this means only 0.822 of a person is African American. It’s easy to claim that our world today is more integrated than it used to be.  However, when looking at these facts, it is very hard to deny.  Sure, the world may seem integrated because blacks and whites attend some of the same schools and sometimes shop as the same grocery stores.  But here, in the United States of America, where all men are created equal, there are still towns that are so white not even one full African American lives there.  And I can’t help but be reminded of the days in the past when blacks were counted as only ¾ of a person.  Looking at these statistics, it makes me wonder: how far has America come, really? 

So, this really brought two problems to my mind.  One being that there are towns in this country that are still entirely white.  It was shocking to me to discover this, as I thought those days were long gone.  The second issue is that I have no earthly clue how one could go about fixing this problem.  People fought for a long time to get rid of the laws that forced segregation, which makes me feel as imposing a law forcing integration wouldn’t quite seem right.  But, if people aren’t forced to integrate among races, will it happen naturally?  I think those statistics answer that question for us: no.  Blacks are not actively moving into all-white neighborhoods and towns, just as whites are not actively inhabiting the black parts of town.  What can be done about it?  I don’t know.  But, it is an issue that needs to be addressed.

The link to the website I mentioned can be found here:

http://www.towncharts.com/Michigan/Demographics/Onekama-village-MI-Demographics-data.html