A Strangely Beautiful Map of Race in America
Dustin
Cable
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Demographic
researcher Dustin Cable's Racial Dot Map is staggering both visually and
statistically. From afar, the most racially diverse pockets of the United
States appear like blended watercolors in shades of purple and teal. Zoom all
the way in, though, and each dot represents a single person, all 308,745,538 of
us.
The data
behind the map comes from the 2010 census, available publicly through the National Historical
Geographic Information System. Cable, a researcher with the the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center
for Public Service, has modeled the project on a previous MIT map plotting population density by
individual dots. Cable's version color-codes the results by race and ethnicity,
producing an eerily beautiful picture of American segregation (and, less
frequently, integration) that tricks the eye at different scales.
At most
zoom levels, each dot is smaller than a pixel, and so the blended colors from
afar are "aggregations of many individual dots," with people
represented by the color scheme at right. Looking at the entire country, most
of the patches that aren't blue correspond to colorfully smudged urban areas.
Many of those metro areas look purple from a distance until, like with this
picture of Boston, you zoom in closer and colors break apart. The city is
diverse from a distance, but quite segregated at the neighborhood and even
block level.
The same
pattern repeats in numerous other cities. Here is a close-up of Baltimore:
Pittsburgh:
Houston:
And the
Bay Area:
All maps via The
Racial Dot Map.
Keywords: Baltimore, Boston, Houston, Oakland, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Maps, 2010 Census, Segregation,Race, Integration
Emily
Badger is a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities. Her work has previously
appeared in Pacific Standard, GOOD, The
Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. She lives in
the Washington, D.C. area
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