Go to any beach town in the United States, and you notice a disturbing trend. While the town itself might be racially diverse, the actual waterfront property is almost exclusively occupied by white people. Using race and population data from the 2010 census mapped by National Geographic, we were able to spot this rampant form of racial segregation throughout the country from rural coastal communities to tourist towns to major cities. In each location, people of color have been systematically excluded from living on the shore. What’s more startling though is that there are often large communities of color just a little further inland, where many are presumably low-wage service workers whose labor makes the affluent lives of the coastal white people possible.

It wasn’t long ago that most coastal real estate was considered unattractive (too buggy and humid) to white folks, allowing minority cultures like that of the…