Ethnoracial Diversity across the Rural-Urban Continuum

Both scholarship and popular opinion have long held that cities are more racially and ethnically diverse than rural communities. However, recent trends hint at the potential for less distinctive diversity profiles on either side of the metro-nonmetro divide. To explore this possibility, we compare the magnitude and structure of ethnoracial diversity in 2010 for over 27,000 census-defined places arrayed across 10 different types of county contexts that span the rural-urban continuum. Although the average resident's exposure to diversity steadily declines as contexts become more rural and remote, place-based (or unweighted) results show an uneven pattern of diversity across most of the continuum. Our multivariate analysis also supports the unevenness scenario: when detailed characteristics of places are taken into account, many of the associations between the context indicators and diversity weaken to the point of non-significance. Taken together, these findings suggest a blurring of rural-urban boundaries with respect to community ethnoracial composition.