Doing some research recently on African-American voting patterns, I came upon this map of American ancestry from the U.S. Census (pdf):
And it reminded me of a mindblower of a political explanation that I meant to share here.
This is long, so meet me after the jump...
Looking at the map above, you notice the swath of African-Americans (purple) running through the southeast. Something I hadn't heard of but is apparently relatively common knowledge is that that pattern in the population is referred to as the Black Belt.
That may seem a little coarse, but it actually refers to the color and richness of the soil.
I looked for maps of soil color, but if such a thing exists, I wasn't able to find it. The clearest picture of soil distribution matching that pattern was this map of "soil orders" suggesting ultisols and/or vertisols having something to do with that color:
This National Science Foundation lesson on soil orders offers a more detailed version and settles the question.
Vertisols are definitely black. (pdf) (Ultisols, not so much (pdf).)
Our friend, the google, shows how that pattern manifests today in the form of farms making use of that rich soil that comprise that lighter colored swirl.
Farms are actually the point, because while Black Belt may have been a reference to black soil, that's not to say the Black Belt doesn't also have racial meaning. Pretty much every source one checks cites this explanation from Booker T. Washington's 1901 autobiography Up From Slavery:
...The term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the color of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.
That "political sense" Washington refers to includes an electoral sense as well. Slave-descendant voters in Black Belt counties leave a blue Democratic voting stripe through otherwise red states, seen especially vividly in this New York Times county map of the 2008 election results:
I also ran into this voting pattern described as "the cotton vote." As data became available from the 2008 election, aligning a map of the blue strip of Obama-voting Black Belt counties with a map of cottom production from 1860 (!) revealed a remarkable correlation:
I already think that's mindblowing, but that's not even the mindblowing part. The mindblowing thing is that what's really responsible for this phenomenon of modern politics is the still-forming North American coastline of 100 million years ago.
From Deep Sea News earlier this summer:
"During the Cretaceous, 139-65 million years ago, shallow seas covered much of the southern United States. These tropical waters were productive–giving rise to tiny marine plankton with carbonate skeletons which overtime accumulated into massive chalk formations. The chalk, both alkaline and porous, lead to fertile and well-drained soils in a band, mirroring that ancient coastline and stretching across the now much drier South. This arc of rich and dark soils in Alabama has long been known as the Black Belt."
Behold! Your late Cretaceous coastline and future Democratic strongholds:
Oh, what? You've still got some unblown mind left? I have a little more.
The map above represents 75 million years ago. Dr. Ron Blakey of Northern Arizona University actually offers us several maps in the late Cretaceous range. But why would that time period be particularly relevant? I find two explanations. One is that the Cretaceous was a boom time for the sort of plankton that would eventually become the Black Belt.
The other explanation is that the Cretaceous ended when, 65 million years ago, an asteroid (or asteroids) slammed into the earth, right across the future-Gulf of Mexico at the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Not only did the impact and resulting fallout from that asteroid kill the dinosaurs, it also wiped out huge quantities of marine life, including many of the "tiny marine plankton with carbonate skeletons" (I'm guessing some version of Coccolithophore? Anyone?) that would become the rich soil that slaves would farm on land their ancestors would inhabit in voting districts that would favor Democratic candidates around the turn of the second millennium of the Common Era.
Below is a map of the Chicxulub Crater, the crater left by the asteroid 65 million years ago, showing its location at the end of the Yucatan Peninsula. It looks like a topographical map, but actually it's a Bouguer gravity anomaly map. The best explanation I could find for gravity anomaly maps is from this Earth Observatory page from NASA.
I think the idea is that the impact created ridges of higher density, which show up as gravity anomalies. As ever, any insights and expertise you can offer on anything in this post is greatly appreciated.
Also, the more I researched this, the more I ran into people who'd already done portions or variations of it. I tried to include as many links as I could to previous work. Credit also to Allen Gathman for the cotton vote connection.
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wow. Nicely done.
Yeah, mind blowing that an asteroid hitting the earth all those millions of years ago created the conditions for electoral voting patterns by a species that was still millions of years away from evolving.
I'm famished.. I enjoy salary, cheese [cheddar] greens, doe, bacon, lettuce, cake, and again... I'm not starving, but famished. ;]
Cheers
I wonder if this has any relation to the old habit of dirt eating in the South est coast.
Maybe God himself is stopping the rnc? Hmm. Indeed. You know, funny that goper tea bagging extremist in government and beyond feel one should ONLY have sex to pro create a baby. Animals ONLY procreate to continue the species. MAN was given by God dominion over the animals kingdom thereby setting man and woman apart from animals AND made sex feel good. Pleasurable if you will. Because man is mindful enough to have pleasure sex without raping or forcing the "rape-E" to carry to term a rape baby that she most likely cannot afford or take care of.
What of the boy friend or husband of the rape baby mother? Should he be FORCED to pay for and raise a rape baby he will most likely despise its whole life? Hmm. Indeed. How will a mother of a rape baby pay for this rape child un wanted for 18 to 21 years?
Goper's are simply out of there minds and love for anyone but themselves to be made to suffer at the religious morals they themselves choose to force upon others. ; ] They believe fairy tales made up magic over fact and logic and assume after wrecking the entire worlds economy as a PARTY, that they have ANY credential to tell anyone what to do about ANYthing. ; ]
Jog on mate.. ;]
Cheers!
mowdy5gs
Thanks, Will, this is terrific. I love reading how all this fits together....I think you were awake in your science classes (unlike some others we could name!!).
Oh this is so great. Love the Maddow Geek.Speaking as a Wisconsin German.
Yeah, I'm looking at all kinds of stuff in this, like how some ethnicities stayed clustered, while it looks like those PA Germans fanned out a long ways west (another Wisconsin German here!).
Wonderful stuff Will! Just a few notes to add about some African American clusters, Black Belt, etc. that aren't mentioned above. I only know about this from having lived in Arkansas (worked at the University of Arkansas Press, where we published a lot of these Arkansas-specific books) and having known some cultural archeologists and other historians and scholars at the university.
The South is pretty fascinating, but one other factor in it is Mississippi River delta. Flood plains get richer soil that non-flood plains. So look at that area from about Memphis down (man, I love me some Delta Blues too, the things you get to learn about and enjoy from diving into stuff like this)...
That area WASN'T under the ocean in the period in that really cool map above (I think I've had dreams about that shallow ocean in South Georgia/Florida, very odd dreams). At first I thought that swath running up to Canada was some other path that evolved into the Mississippi, but I don't think it is. It's clear over on the other side of the Ozarks.
Tho I'd bet that shallow ocean went even higher at some point. I only say that because I used to work at an Ozarks Summer Science/Nature Camp, up in Walmart-land in the northwest corner, and we always had one day with the kids on this really great fossil stream, and there were TONS of those little ocean fossil skeletons in nearly every hunk of rock you picked up. Sort of looked like mini-conch shell imprints and smaller water centipedes.
Meanwhile, I learned a lot about the poorer "Hill Country" South (like the Ozarks, but also into foothills and the Appalachians, further east) vs. Delta South from knowing Dr. Margaret Bolsterli and reading her book, "Born in the Delta," because she so directly illustrates the contrast, both in linguistic conventions, and in economics as destiny. (Is good companion reading with Maya Angelou).
It's the difference between the folks that say "Y'all" and the folks that say "You-uns," Bolsterli used to say.
Or more contemporarily, it's whether you get sweet tea or unsweet tea, when you order iced tea in a restaurant.
But when I lived in Valdosta, GA, that was antebellum South. Deep South. Whoa Nelly, it really was, too. See that non-black bit in South GA? What's that little white pocket there? Crackers? Uh, yeah. It's the bit that Sherman didn't burn. That's my guess. The soil down there, and in a lot of the Delta, since flood control, is pretty fried, I think. Over-farmed and over-pesticided for cotton. And that bit of South GA is pretty sandy too. Swampy and sandy, nearly North Florida.
The soil in the hills and mountains (Snuffy Smith-land) is most definitely NOT black. I couldn't grow crap in my gardens in Fayetteville, Arkansas, nor in Clemson, South Carolina. Red clay. Karst topography.
Lotsa cool waterfalls and caves to explore, tho! And great whitewater canoeing and kayaking. That's the what I miss about living down there (and Delta Blues, Southern poetry, and the Southern "grotesque" in literature). A lot of my friends in the North never could understand how I could live down there and love it for as long as I did.
Now that I'm living further north and loving that too, I am more aware of how I paid a price for living there, a price maybe I'm still paying. But no regrets. I got to tap into some really rich cultures and traditions in some stunningly beautiful countryside.
It is fascinating how most people did tend to stay clustered in the areas where they originally migrated to with the exception of the Germans. I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that the Irish, Hispanics, Africans, Native Americans, and Asians all encountered significant racism and bigotry in this nation during various periods in our history whereas the Germans did not? Interesting.
Mind Blown!
This is awesome. I love you Rachel and I love you Maddow blog. Keep working hard and providing mind blowing articles like this.
For the record I love Will as well.
I love lamp.
On the Chris Hayes segment, the great irony I was considering today is this: in a partisan America, red-meat for one is also red-meat for the other -- the trick (it seems) is in the attempt to out-think the lions on the other team. So far, Romney has mostly backfired to his base so hard that the blow-back is giving some wind in the sails of the ho-hum left, who barely cared. Until now. Not sure if it was worth the price.
(apologies for the hunting/sailing mixed metaphor)
This is just amazing. Thanks Will (and Rachel too). Life, politics, and nature just gets interestinger and interestinger.
omg omg. Got distracted by census. Can't fully appreciate this. Leave door unlocked, willya Will...
Now let's do something really subversive.
Correlate the German areas with reactionary, right wing voting.
Just saying . . . .
Multiple sources there. Historically the largest were the expatriate English, largely younger sons who came from England where it was getting harder and harder for the landed aristocracy to have total control of their tenants. So they came to a new land where they could recreate an imagined Golden Age (with themselves, of course, as the lords.)
Why German? Why not Protestant?
(Angeleno, you do realize that was a racist remark?)
Actually, many of those historically ethnic German and Norwegian areas (Garrison Keillor's hysterically funny "Lutherans," if you will) were pretty progressive, even socialist, at the turn of the 20th Century.
Look at how the Wisconsin state flag gets mistaken by the GOP for a "union" flag.
Farmers. The Grange. Fighting Bob LaFollette. Upper Midwest (and PA for that matter) has historically been known as an area inculcated in a really strong, progressive public education system (why all the children in Praire Home Companion are "above average.")
A lot of what the German immigrants of that great wave were fleeing when they came over was a lack of opportunity in the old country, where landed interests and entrenched politics weren't very hospitable to radical ideas about labor that came from Marx and Engels.
The early union movement was often bloody and confrontational, on both sides. I think also (don't quote me on this, however, as I didn't live in Montana very long) that the mining communities in Montana, with some really rough union fights, and really open and contentious public square debates over WWI in particular (because it was largely against Germany) led to actual prosecutions in Montana for free speech as a violation of the Alien and Sedition Act. I remember hearing German names associated with that too.
A colleague of mine in Montana wrote a book about that period there, Clem Work, and I found it just fascinating. It's called "Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West." Worth taking a look.
I guess I'm just remembering a little bit of family history. Lovely, kind German people burning a cross in front of my mother's house, in front of her church. All that funny racism and suppression of my family by those pious Lutheran do-gooders. Yeah, guess I got it wrong. NOT!!
It's funny, look at a map of America today and racial makeups and you will see the African Americans are concentrated in the South East, The Irish in the North East, the Hispanics in the South West, and of course the Native Americans were forced onto reservations, but Germans are all over the whole expanse of America. That's probably because the first four just weren't able to migrate because of real racism and bigotry in America. The Germans never experienced that.
OK... Yall played Nazi Punks F*ck off in the intro... This means you must book Jello Biafra for next week. If/when you find him (which I'm not counting on), you should ask him about how much things have changed in SF city politics since he ran for Mayor (and supposedly came in third before having his votes annulled for using an alias... Who knew his name is really Eric Bouchler, which sounds FRENCH... I might add). Oh, and I thought I was the only kid in CA that actually tried to learn and recite DK songs to my parents (my mom actually said she liked the intro to the re-recorded version of California-uber-alles one time!!!) Yay for punk rawk mom! Seriously though, Jello has good stuff to say (see, "I blow minds for a living"), I wonder if he would come on?
For the sake of making an already complex sentence a little less confusing, "ancestors" should be "descendents" in the third paragraph beneath the Cretaceous graph.
But this is truly amazing - Imagine if we allowed science and politics to commingle more often...(I'm looking at you, Todd Akin)
Wandering minds in the dark of night might say this is proof of Calvinism's "Predestination".
Or, to paraphrase Todd Akin, "It's gonna happen- relax and enjoy it!"
Why repeat someone else's ignorant ideas?
The idea that a rape victim cannot get pregnant, and the fact of the pregnancy proves she was not raped, but had consensual sex harkens back to the Salem Witch Trials, when an accused woman was bound and thrown into a river. If she drowned, it proved that she was not a witch. If she does not drown, it proves that her witchcraft saved her. Being proved of witchcraft was a crime punished by hanging.
Either way, the woman died.
In the discussion of 'forcible rape' it has occurred to me that the justification for slave owners to sire children by their slave women is helped by the theory that forcible rape keeps a woman from getting pregnant, thereby leading to the belief that 'she's gotta have it' and liked it, and therefore to the raping slave owner it wasn't really rape after all. Sick, but probably not far from the truth!
Amazing correlations!!!! This never would have occurred to me!!!
One of the reasons I like the Rachel Blog and bloggers like Will is that I get to read unique articles like this that expand my thinking!!
Did anyone think about just who it is who decides what is "Forcible rape".try this: you are home with your childern,, a man breaks into your home...you either have "sex" with this idiot or he will killed your kids...so you do what he saids..when the deed is done you don't have any bruising/cuts....you end up pregnant...will you still be forced to carry this child? who gets to decide is this "forcible rape"?
Oh, yes. I have thought about that a lot. I know exactly who will get to decide - exactly the same people who have been deciding it since the first woman got raped:
Everybody but the woman.
Minor quibbles and details:
about the soils, the South, with lots of rain tends to have leached-out soils with low fertility, the oxisols and ultisols. The exception is the vertisols, with large amounts of expandible clays. They swell when wet and shrink and crack when dry. Orgainic matter at the surface can be washed down into the cracks. As the soils shrink and swell, they mix, and can even invert themselves (hence the name vertisol). The process naturally adds a lot of organics deep into the soil, producing a thick, rich and black soil. Sort of like adding compost to the soil.
The banding around the Chixulub crater on the gravity map - the crust is denser than the limestones that cover the crater. When the meteorite hit, there were multiple rims raised up around the crater, forming circular ridges and valleys, like those around big craters on the Moon. The limestones buried them, leaving no real surface trace. When you are standing over a buried ridge, there's more dense crust and less limestone in the first few thousand feet down, and the value of gravity is slightly more. Over a buried valley, there's more light limestone and the value of gravity is slightly less. The effects are tiny - you'd never see them on a scale. You need a very sensitive meter to measure the values.
Lots more connections to that black belt. Include one of the big stories that the Brits conveniently left out of their reenactment of the industrial revolution -- the money gained from the slave trade fueled much of that early growth.
You could make similar environmental histories with almost every part of the US and the world. The coal regions and immigrant history. The glacial history of the Midwest, the prairie peninsula, the corn belt, the northern forests, the great rivers, the railroads and the rise of cities like Chicago.
All very fascinating. Too bad teachers are stuck with @!$%#ty history books.
Interesting analysis but, from having spent many a childhood summer in the piney woods, I can tell you that in SE Tennessee and northern Georgia the surface soil is mostly red clay and chert, red clay and gravel, and just more ever-lovin' red clay. And mud. Oh, the red mud...
Interesting presentation; however, the real conclusion to be drawn is: rich soil attracts farming (plantation farming, cotton crop); slaves work these plantations in the rich soil; emancipated slaves settle in the areas where they were enslaved, raising generations of progeny; those descendants, also remaining in the area and forming a "belt" of high-density African-American population, vote for Democrats. No need to get into the Chixlub asteroid, etc., except as an interesting sidebar in geology.
Agreed. I thought this was common knowledge. Maybe as someone from the northeast and transplanted in the South for 16 years it was obvious to me.
Reminds me of James Burke show, Connections.
Fascinating. I remember a brilliant high school earth science teacher - one who managed to teach his subject well to less-than-dedicated students - who showed us a map of how counties voted in Illinois (this was circa 1980, so the politics are a little dated now). Ignoring the cities for this purpose, the counties in the northern half of the state voted for Republicans in the state legislature; the southern half voted for Democrats. What did this have to do with earth science? He then showed us how far south the last glaciation period had reached - half way down the state. "The glacier left deposits that made the soil very rich. The farmers in the northern half of the state can grow much better crops. They therefore have more money, and they vote Republican."
utisols, vertisols. looks like utisol are the black belt, the orange. the vertisols are yellow whic appears to be near texas and the midwest.
COTTOM !
Do I sense another book coming..."Drift 2"? - Soils of controversy.
You think THAT'S mind blowing -- well a get a load of this. I did some research, and it turns out our entire PLANET was formed by celestial forces billions of years ago. Which has definitely had a profound effect on voting patterns today.
Looking at the Ancestry map it is interesting the portion of people that report their Ancestry as "American". Is this a political statement, or do they simply have no idea, or interest in what their genealogy is?
I think that some families have been in the US ...and even in their local...for five six seven and more generations and are an admixture and have no idea from where (else) they come. I noticed that too and noticed that (if I recollect correctly) it appears to be in S. Appalachia and the Ozarks in part. I've read those peoples have been in those mountains since the 1700's. Maybe those and the people around them have been there so long they don't know what makes up their ancestry but the distant ancestor stories they do hear are all of Americans before the Civil war.
I live on the E. Coast in the city...many locals are third and forth generation American (I'm second) and from one or two ethnicities...Irish or Italian or E. European Jewish, say
On a side note, looking at the ancestry map, there seems to be a little island of purple that is California's Solano County. I think this has to be an error - http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SolanoCounty.htm shows 56% white and 15% Black or African American.
This doen't wreck the theory you are presenting...