*5 In the 1960s, just a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent: Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the size of the white majority in the whole United States is down to what it was only in the Deep South back then—which I think helps explain why so many white Americans outside the South turned into crypto-Southerners during the last fifty years. As their communities got more racially and ethnically diverse, they got more consciously white and defensive and racist.
