Making Metros White? The Effects of U.S. Metropolitan Reclassification on Racial Compositional Change

Abstract

This analysis cautions scholars to be more attentive to what constitutes the “metropolitan.” Between 1990 and 2010, the Office of Management and Budget brought ninety-one metropolitan areas into existence and altered the boundaries of almost half of the others. Because metropolitan area reclassification not only creates new metropolitan areas but also frequently leads to the incorporation of peripheral, majority-White, counties, this article analyzes the effects of these territorial alterations on aggregate metropolitan racial diversity, changes in the aggregate counts of White people in metropolitan areas, and differences in the counts of census tracts in which White people form significant majorities. Using census data from 1990, 2000, and 2010, we demonstrate that the 2010 reclassification produces metropolitan areas that are relatively more White and relatively less diverse than those based on the 1990 definitions. In addition, using 2010 metropolitan boundaries rather than those from 1990 boosts the counts of predominantly White census tracts at the expense of other types. The reclassification process appears superficially to be race neutral, because it entails the periodic evaluation of intercounty economic linkages. We point out, however, that racialized residential processes help forge these new patterns of economic and social interaction.