Yes, Pennsylvania Is Just as Racist as You Think It Is

So the other day, the Inquirer’s Inga Saffron noticed this:

Shocking, but not surprising: PA is most prejudiced state outside the South, law professors find in survey. http://t.co/pCATL9wsBX #inq

— Inga Saffron (@IngaSaffron) June 23, 2013

Follow the link and scroll to the bottom of the page. That’s where you’ll find a map of America’s most racist states—a solid block of Southern states, as expected, but with one outlier: Way up there at the top of the map, Pennsylvania is colored in as well. The ranking was made by University of California profs using the National Annenberg Election Survey , which asked people to rank the intelligence, trustworthiness and work effort of different groups of people. Pennsylvanians tended not to rank those attributes too highly in, ahem, other groups of people.

The Inky’s Karen Heller follows up on this news today:

Pennsylvania consistently ranks poorly in surveys when whites are asked their views on the intelligence, trustworthiness, and work ethic of blacks, said University of California, Davis professor Christopher Elmendorf, who relied on National Annenberg Election Survey data.

Top-10 bad, Elmendorf said. “Pennsylvania is closer to Alabama than it is to being Utah.”

Which means James Carville was right after all about our state having Philadelphia and Pittsburgh on either side with the Heart of Dixie in between.

As you might guess, these attitudes are pretty deeply embedded in the constant Philadelphia-versus-Everyone Else warfare that tends to be the norm in Harrisburg. And, ahem, it’s not Philadelphia that’s being racist.