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America’s Racist Maps Segregated Black Communities and Cemented Lasting Inequality
Federal maps classified Black areas as high risk and fueled exclusion.
We tend to think of maps as neutral acts of representation, a simple layout of space that does not have any political or social implications to it. For centuries, maps have been used to serve political goals. In colonial times, maps helped missionaries and rulers take control of lands. In the US, maps have been used to enforce racial hierarchies. This has hurt people of color for many generations by changing their social status for the worse. Counter mapping has emerged as a way to challenge these old ideas. By looking at the racist history of US maps and the legacy of the “Green Book,” we can see how maps have both oppressed and empowered people of color since the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow laws.
Maps can be used to shape how we see nature in ways that benefit those in power. They become a kind of visual rhetoric because the way space is represented is closely tied to racial ideologies. Two key examples from the era of colonization demonstrate this. During the European Age of Exploration (15th — 18th Century) and later in the 19th Century when the United States began dipping its toes into expansion and conquest itself, maps reflected political…
