Rural-Urban and Within-Rural Differences in COVID-19 Mortality Trends

Since late-2020, COVID-19 mortality rates have been higher in rural than in urban America, but there has also been substantial within-rural heterogeneity. Using data from USA Facts, we compare COVID-19 mortality trends between U.S. urban (nonmetro) and rural (metro) counties from March 2020 to May 2021. We then compare trends within rural counties across different types of labor markets defined by county economic dependence (farming, mining, manufacturing, government, recreation, and nonspecialized) and by metropolitan adjacency. As of May 22, 2021, the cumulative COVID-19 mortality rate was 199.3 per 100,000 population in rural counties compared to 175.8 in urban counties. Net of controls, rural counties experienced a 3% higher average daily increase in COVID-19 mortality rates than urban counties over the study period. Rural mortality rates have been highest in the South, Southwest, and Great Plains. Both overall and within rural counties, mortality rates were highest in farming-dependent counties and lowest in recreation-dependent counties. Interaction models demonstrate that the protective buffer for recreation counties was even stronger for remote rural counties (those not adjacent to metro areas.

Introduction

The Introduction presents the book’s driving question: How does racism contribute to the persistence of racial segregation in urban America? It sets up the book’s answer to that question by highlighting a group of people the author theorizes are central to housing exchange: housing market professionals. Housing market professionals are the influential gatekeepers, or brokers, who connect—or avoid connecting—housing consumers to housing resources and opportunities. Professionals’ decisions about whether and whom to connect occur through what the author calls the racist market rubric—the set of racist ideas that links racial status with market worth—or the people-oriented market rubric—the set of equitable, people-affirming ideas that equalizes market worth. Professionals’ use of the racist market rubric in particular is supported by real estate organizational routines. The Introduction provides a brief overview of the book’s research methods and data, as well as brief chapter summaries.

Introduction

This chapter engages existing myths about the transformation of hospitals and jails in urban America and offers an alternative theory. First, it engages the explanation of “deinstitutionalization,” which holds that the mentally ill occupy the jails because of state hospital closures. Second, it offers counter-evidence that public hospitals are restricting access to medicine because states have underinvested in them. Finally, it counters the idea of mass imprisonment, in which the overinvestment in criminal justice systems would explain the use of medicine to socially control the urban poor. In light of these explanations, this chapter introduces the reader to the new evidence of the book and an alternative theory of redistributing the poor.

The Rural-Urban Continuum of Polarization: Understanding the Geography of the 2018 Midterms

This study of the 2018 congressional midterms demonstrates how voting patterns and political attitudes vary across a spectrum of urban and rural areas in the United States. Rural America is no more a monolith than is urban America. The rural-urban gradient is better represented by a continuum than a dichotomy. This is evident in the voting results in 2018, just as it was in 2016. We found that the political tipping point lies beyond major metropolitan areas, in the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Democrats enjoyed even greater success in densely populated urban areas in 2018 than in 2016. Residents of these urban areas display distinctive and consistent social and political attitudes across a range of scales. At the other end of the continuum in remote rural areas, Republican candidates continued to command voter support despite the challenging national political environment. Voters in these rural regions expressed social and political attitudes diametrically opposed to their counterparts in large urban cores.

School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric about Voucher Policy in Urban America

Depictions of school choice offering greater individual and local autonomy are widespread, yet they sit uneasily with portrayals of such policies within African-American political discourse. This article analyses the ways in which opposition to publicly funded private school vouchers has been used as a cue to signal solidaristic ties to the African-American electorate. School choice is highly racialized. Black politicians have been known to campaign against school choice policies by presenting them as tools of White outsiders to break up and divide the Black community. Although opinion polls have indicated that a majority of African-American voters support education vouchers, in a campaign context school choice policies can be framed through the prisms of racial authenticity and community control. Using data drawn from interviews with political operatives and archival research in Newark, New Jersey, this article demonstrates that school choice can paradoxically be rendered as a policy of community disempowerment.