i want to talk about the election for the first time in the united states a predominantly white
group of voters voted for an african american candidate for president and in fact barack obama did quite well he won three hundred and seventy five electoral votes and he won about seventy million
we asked those people actually we didn't ask them but when they conducted exit polls in every state in thirty seven states out of the fifty they asked a question that was pretty direct about race they asked this question
and people who voted for john mccain as a result of that factor maybe in combination with other factors and maybe alone we're looking for this behavior among white voters or really
black voters so you see big differences in different parts of the country on this question in louisiana about one in five white voters said yes one of the big reasons why i voted against barack obama is because
he was an african american if those people had voted for obama even half of them obama would have won louisianasafely same is true with i think all of these states you see at the top of the list meanwhile california
new york we can say oh we're enlightened but you know certainly a much lower incidence of this admitted i suppose manifestation of racially based voting
this manifestation of racism in this big national experiment we had on november fourth and there are a couple of these that
and you see this part of the country the appalachians region is less educated it's just a fact and you see the relationship there with the racially based voting patterns
the other variable that's important is the type of neighborhood that you live in states that are more rural even some of the states like
new hampshire and maine they exhibit a little bit of this racially based voting against barack obama so it's the combination of these two things it's education and the type of neighbors
so yes racism is predictable these things among maybe other variables but these things seem to predict it we're going to drill down a little bit more now into something called the general social survey this is conducted by
the university of chicago every other year and they ask a series of really interesting questions in two thousand they had particularly interesting questions about racial attitudes
one simple question they asked is does anyone of the opposite race live in your neighborhood we can see different types of communities that the results are quite different in cites about eighty percent of people have
take the white people in the survey and split them between those who have black neighbors or really some neighbor of another race people who have only white neighbors
and we see in some variables in terms of political attitudes not a lot of difference this was eight years ago some people were more republican back then but you see
you favor a law banning interracial marriage there is a big difference people who don't have neighbors of a different race are about twice as likely
i'm a big fan of cities especially if we have cites that are diverse and sustainable and can support people of different ethnicities and different income groups i think cities
like new york so we can think more about things like street grids this is the neighborhood where i grew up in east lansing michigan it's a traditional midwestern community which means you have real grid you have real neighborhoods and real trees and real streets you can walk on and you interact
a lot with your neighbors people you like people you might not know and as a result it's a very tolerantcommunity which is different i think than something like this which is in schaumburg illinois where every
little set of houses has their own cul de sac and drive through starbucks and stuff like that i think that actually this type of urban design which became more prevalent
in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties i think there is a relationship between that and the country becoming more conservative under ronald reagan
but also here is another idea we have is an intercollegiate exchange program where you have students going from new york abroad but frankly there are enough differences within the country now where maybe you can take a bunch of kids from
is the networking experience you get when you go to college where you do get a mix of people that you might not interact with otherwise but the point is this is all good news because when something is predictable
very
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