During the second presidential debate, Donald Trump was asked whether he could be a president to “all the people in the United States.” He had a very specific answer: “I would be a president for all of the people, African Americans, the inner cities,” he replied. Later in the debate, he spoke again of how he was going to help “the African Americans,” who lived in “inner cities,” suffering from high poverty rates, bad educational systems, and no jobs.
There might have been a time when conflating inner cities and African Americans was appropriate shorthand, but it’s just not accurate anymore. The majority of African Americans are living both above the poverty line and outside of the inner cities, rendering Trump’s comments misleading and factually inaccurate.
Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, looked at numbers from the 2010 to 2014 American Community Survey and found that 39 percent of African Americans live in the suburbs, 36 percent live in cities, 15 percent live in small metropolitan areas, and 10 percent live in rural communities. That’s a noticeable shift from 2000, when 41 percent of African Americans lived in cities, 33 percent lived in suburbs, 15 percent lived in small metro areas, and 11 percent lived in rural communities.
There was a time when even more African Americans lived in urban areas: After the Great Migration, many blacks moved north for job opportunities. They were relegated to urban cores because they weren’t allowed to live anywhere else; policies such as redlining meant that they could only buy homes in certain neighborhoods, usually the places whites no longer wanted to live. In 1990, 57 percent of blacks lived in central cities, and 95 percent of blacks in the Northeast, Midwest, and West lived in metropolitan areas, according to Census data.
[For more of this story, written by Alana Semuels, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...n-inner-city/503744/]
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