It would be hard for any metropolitan area to be whiter than Pittsburgh.
It's so hard, in fact, that of the 100 largest metro areas in the United States, only one has a smaller share of blacks, Hispanics and Asians -- the Scranton-Wilkes Barre region of northeastern Pennsylvania.
A new Brookings Institution report released last week, examining 2010 census data on how Americans identified race and ethnicity, found that southwestern Pennsylvania is whiter even than the Amish country around Lancaster, the Mormon population center of Salt Lake City, Midwest agrarian capitals such as Des Moines, Iowa, and far more isolated places like Boise, Idaho.
It is not stunningly new data for this former melting pot -- findings from the 2000 census were much the same -- but what might be eye-opening is that the pace of change toward greater diversity is even slower here than for all those places above, as well as the rest of America.
Meanwhile, my relatively cosmopolitan hometown is the eighth least diverse of all cities in the survey.
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