It’s an interesting question: which state is worst for each race? Off the top of my head, I’d say:

Whites: West Virginia

Asians: Hawaii

Blacks: Wisconsin

Hispanics: Connecticut

American Indians: South Dakota

I’m basing this on my impressions after years of looking at various statistics by state, but I’m not looking at spreadsheets while jotting these names down.

West Virginia whites are pretty clearly at the bottom of the totem pole of whites by state. It’s even possible to identify the county at the bottom: McDowell County, WV, whose Walmart closed earlier this year. Here’s the old Walmart’s sign that has been painted black.

Hawaii has racial demographics that on the surface appear similar to Silicon Valley’s. I’ve written about Wisconsin a lot. Connecticut has troublesome Puerto Ricans. South Dakota has the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation, which is tragic.

Best for each state:

Whites: Minnesota

Asians: Texas

Blacks: Hawaii

Hispanics: Florida

American Indians: California

Note: the best states by race are even more off the top of my head than the worst states.

Minnesota as #1 for whites depends on how you value the distribution. Minnesota has fewer elite whites than some other states but does well by the middle and lower half. Other contenders might be New Jersey, New Hampshire, Illinois, and the like.

I’m picking Texas because there are a lot of Asians in Texas and most seem to do pretty well.

Obviously, there aren’t many blacks in Hawaii, and most of them there have some connection with the military or are exotics like the President. Among states with a lot of blacks, probably Georgia?

Another choice for Hispanics would be Missouri, which has traditionally had a small but unusually elite Hispanic population due to St. Louis being connected by the Mississippi to ships from Latin America. A.J. Liebling famously said of New Orleans:

New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York, although all seaports resemble one another more than they can any place in the interior. Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic.

But St. Louis is a little bit like a further New Orleans. The effect is barely noticeable, but if you look for it you can notice that St. Louis traditionally had more rich people with Spanish surnames than other Midwestern cities.

What are your nominations?