To the surprise of almost no one, when the list of the Most Diverse States in America was recently released by WalletHub, South Dakota was way down in the bottom third in the rankings - at number 35 overall.

But a new set of numbers found something quite interesting - inside one of the least diverse states in the nation is one of the most diverse cities.

The September 2020 issue of Men's Health has the Mount Rushmore State's largest metro area, Sioux Falls, as the 11th most diverse city out of the most 100 populated places in America.

MOST DIVERSE CITIES IN AMERICA (Men's Health)

  1. Las Vegas, Nevada
  2. Chesapeake City, Virginia
  3. Anchorage, Alaska
  4. Plano, Texas
  5. Aurora, Colorado
  6. Tulsa, Oklahoma
  7. Riverside, California
  8. Lexington, Kentucky
  9. Tucson, Arizona
  10. San Antonio, Texas
  11. Sioux Falls, South Dakota

A look at the latest numbers from the United States Census Bureau doesn't exactly indicate that Sioux Falls is worthy of that lofty ranking.

As of July 1, 2019, the city of 183,793 people is overwhelmingly white (84.5 percent) with no other racial group making up more than six percent of the population. African Americans (6 percent), Hispanics (5.3 percent), Asians (2.5 percent), and Native Americans (2.4 percent) make up the rest of the numbers.

And while Men's Health does rely on the census numbers as one of the factors for their rankings, the publication points out that they also consider things like segregation scores from the Social Science Data Analysis Network, the extent to which people of different races and ethnicities live among one another, as well as health data to measure the connection between income inequality and racial segregation.

Falls Park

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