There are more black Arkansans living in Washington and Benton counties than there are people -- period -- living in Chicot County. There are at least 16 other Arkansas counties with fewer people living in them than Chicot.
I looked those numbers up after chatting with a friend about how the number of black residents in Northwest Arkansas was growing at an even faster rate than the population overall. We were discussing if that really mattered in light of the small percentage of the population involved. Then I remembered there's a big, big difference between a small percentage and a small number.
Everybody matters. Yeah, only 3.4 percent of Washington County's population is black and Benton County is even lower at 1.9 percent. Still, that's a lot more people than 100 percent of other places.
Northwest Arkansas has passed some kind of threshold or attained some sort of critical mass here. I've never been a member of a minority, but I imagine I'd feel a whole lot less lonely in a school or an office where there are 100 people who looked like me, no matter how badly outnumbered we were, than in one where there were only five of us.
I speculated to my friend that there are probably more black Arkansans living in Washington and Benton counties than there are in Phillips County, the archetypal Mississippi River Delta community whose county seat is Helena-West Helena. I checked my guess later and was wrong, but I wasn't wrong by much. Someday soon, I'll be right.
There were about 11,865 black Arkansans total in Benton and Washington counties in 2013, according to U.S. Census estimates. Phillips County had 12,647 "black or African American only" residents, according to the same estimates. Phillips County's overall population fell by 6.2 percent between 2010 and 2013.
All this may sound like a small thing compared to Pulaski County's estimate of 140,000 or so black residents or Jefferson County's 40,000, roughly. But Northwest Arkansas is a thriving, growing community. Our numbers in all categories, including this one, are going to grow. More importantly, a thriving, successful community like ours tends to get more diverse. A community is not really diverse until more than one sector within it has enough people to be a community within a community. There's a difference between being an ingredient and being a seasoning.
I'd also like to point out broad, sweeping generalizations about issues such as, for instance, the administration of justice or support for the police might be more hurtful to more of our neighbors than such comments would have been in the past.
Now that I've finished writing about something important, I'll take up the legislative session that begins this week.
This just in: The new governor wants his income tax cut and wants it now. Everything else will have to get in line behind that, as far as he's concerned.
The more things change, the more they remain the same, as the French say. The last new governor we had let it be known that the sales tax on groceries needed to be cut and everything else had to get in line behind that.
There's been much ballyhoo about how this will be the first session with a Republican governor and with large Republican majorities in the Legislature. Depending on the partisan slant of the observer, this has been heralded as either the dawn of a brave new day or the end of life as we know it.
Everybody should remember how, for decades, liberals have complained that our state's "Democratic" lawmakers would be Republicans in any other state. Sure, a change in party control is a watershed event, but let's at least acknowledge that our change is as much a case of accurate labeling as it is a real change of attitude. I'm old enough to remember Ed Bethune running for office in the 1980s and saying that most voters in Arkansas were Republican, they just didn't know it yet.
There will be a lot of social legislation; call them gun and baby bills. If social conservatives are wise, though, they'll be organized and have a few bills they can all get behind. They're the majority now. There's no need for every Republican lawmaker to prove his conservative credentials by sponsoring an abortion bill.
Do you want to get something passed, or do you want to grab a headline? That's a question every sponsor needs to ask himself.
DOUG THOMPSON IS A POLITICAL REPORTER AND COLUMNIST FOR NWA MEDIA.
Commentary on 01/11/2015