Thursday, August 29, 2013

Mapping Race in America

This amazing map shows every person in the US, identified by race. I zoomed in on my own neighborhood, just west of Baltimore. Catonsville is that swath of blue (= white people) in the center. Baltimore is the mass of green (= black people) to the right.

Zooming in closer. Here you can clearly make out the very mixed neighborhood to the north of Catonsville, called Woodlawn. Just to the west, across Patapsco State Park in Howard County, is a mass of red (= Asian people), since for mysterious reasons that area has been taken over by Koreans and Indians. Down to the southwest you can see lots of orange (= Hispanic people) in Columbia.

Zooming in even more, you can see Catonsville's black neighborhood, centered on Winters Lane --right under the word "Pike" -- which has been a black neighborhood since the Civil War. To the west of that is a small but growing Asian pocket, which explains why the strip mall closest to my house is dominated by an Asian grocery store. I could spend all day looking at this, so I had better close it now.

No comments: