How white is your neighborhood? September 20, 2010 Jill Really fascinating and beautiful maps over at Gawker, looking at the racial integration of major American cities.
It’s kind of amazing that in the map of NYC, you can see a fairly sharp divide right along Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn with a mixed border area.
I think the next time I hear a white person use the term “postracial”, I’mma refer him/her to these maps. My own city isn’t on the list (which, as a mid-size city I didn’t expect it to be), but it would look the same. My neighborhood is one of the few that are integrated, and that’s mostly due to economics, not any kumbaya feeling on the part of white folks. In my city, the east side is black (with a small population of poor white folks of German or Anglo Protestant descent), the north side is mixed (black, Catholic white “ethnics”—mostly Italian, and recent immigrants from various places), the areas just south and just west of downtown are mixed but more white than black—and the west side is overwhelmingly white. The newer subdivisions to the western edge (less than 20 years old) are 98-99% white. Here, you can accurately predict someone’s race or religion probably 75% of the time just by knowing a person’s address. Traffic court is another good place to see exactly how “postracial” the world is.
Naw, La Lubu, the data for these maps are from the 2000 census, so that was like, before we we became postracial… Did anybody notice how some of the Gawker commenters are all like, “Wow, it’s amazing how ethnic groups self-segregate!” Also, if you check out the original Bill Rankin project that inspired Eric Fisher, he has a map of Chicago done in a similar style, except by socioeconomic class. Flipping between them is really…pretty much as you’d expect. Thanks for sharing.
It’s pretty white, I live in a small town in Maine. I live only 45 minutes from Portland and there is some diversity, but not a lot.
The city I grew up in in the Netherlands is large enough that there ought to be some diversity, but it was a very white city. I attended an even whiter school. Now in my current city, there is aslo segregation by neighborhood. I happened to live in a black nieghborhood, however.
Went to the bay area map and Gawker described the city of San Francisco as very, very white. Wrong! For the record SF is 45 % white.
Yeah, drydock, I was very surprised by the claim that SF was very, very white as well. My L.A. neighborhood is filled with Persian and Israeli immigrants, and in a discussion about the census with a neighbor from Israel recently, learned that he checked the “other” box on the census. From Moroccan and Yemeni heritage, he said emphatically, “my family and I are not white. Very few Israelis are white. Actually, Jews don’t even count as white!” In his mind, white meant Northern European only.
I found these just a little while ago, and have enjoyed looking at them– as much as you can enjoy looking at something like this. In my own city, I found the map to be illustrative of something everybody already knows about– but I was also instantly reminded, finally seeing this from a bird’s-eye view, that all the “bad neighborhoods” directly correspond to non-white.
Elizabeth: I found these just a little while ago, and have enjoyed looking at them– as much as you can enjoy looking at something like this. In my own city, I found the map to be illustrative of something everybody already knows about– but I was also instantly reminded, finally seeing this from a bird’s-eye view, that all the “bad neighborhoods” directly correspond to non-white. I had the same reaction looking at my city’s map, though I’m well aware of the racial divide.
Amber: What no Chicago!!!!Talk about no love to the largest city in the Midwest. Read the Gawker entry: the original map was of Chicago, by cartographer Bill Rankin. Eric Fischer riffed off that map.
@drydock and Hugo: Yeah, it seems like the Gawker people didn’t even look at the SF/Bay Area map, and just wrote up their pre-existing stereotypes about San Francisco instead. Or else they were unclear as to what part of that map was the city itself, because SF proper seemed like one of the most diverse (as in racially mixed) of any of the cities mapped– certainly more so than segregated Manhattan, for example. Speaking of the San Francisco map, somebody on the flickr page posted a link to a zoomed-in version superimposed over a map that had city names on it, here: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~lwu2/SF-dots/– particularly helpful if you want to really know which city is where in the East Bay. I found the concentration of green and pink in the center of otherwise mostly-pink Berkeley particularly interesting– that would be UC Berkeley.
My Manhattan neighborhood is about 40% Latino, 30% white, 20% black, 10% others. I’m white, so’s my husband. Our building is totally mixed and on our street most faces are Latino. It’s a pretty decent area. 20 years ago it was dangerous but it’s getting a bit yuppier. Class-wise it is extremely mixed as there’s social housing, rent-controlled, regular rentals and homeowners, meaning there are professionals and working class of all races, so color is not as closely aligned with other indicators as might be the case in, say, Detroit. I feel this is very healthy because it probably reduces race as a factor in the way people here assess one another.
I’d be interested to see Native populations on these maps. There would be enough in neighborhoods in Minneapolis to show up. I wonder if it was an omission because the populations are so small or if it was an oversight.