The day after Buttigieg’s announcement speech, he addressed on CNN his campaign’s issue with attracting and appealing to a black voter, pledging to “do better” and saying in part:

“I’ve been on the trail, we found, to some extent, it depends on geography. We had a very diverse crowd at my first stop in Nevada, but less so in South Carolina.”

Bingo!

Among the many different ways the African-American population is diverse in this country is geographic. There is the South, where most black people in this country still live, and there is everywhere else.

In a way, I think that you could make a case that there are two black Americas among the people descended of the enslaved in this country: The sons and daughters of the Great Migration and the sons and daughters of the people who stayed in the South.

I was born and raised in the South, but have lived the last 27 years in the Midwest and Northeast, and I can tell you that those are not the same black Americas.

One difference is religiosity. While black people in general are more religious than the overall population, black people in the South are also appreciably more religious than black people in other parts of the country, according to Gallup data . The data reveals that the percentage of black people who were deemed “not religious” (based on how important attending church was to them) was 13 percent in the South. It was twice that number in the West, and around 20 percent in the Midwest and East.

The Pew Research Center found a similar difference in 2009: While only 9 percent of black people in the South were religiously unaffiliated, that number nearly doubled in the Midwest to 17 percent and was 14 percent in the Northeast and 15 percent in the West.

This religiosity translates into a form of social conservatism. Taking that into consideration, a more progressive view may have more resonance among black people outside the South than in it. Messaging, policies and appeals won’t necessarily work the same in these different areas.