Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps · Winter 2021
Highlights
- In 1971, the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (DGEI) released a provocative map, Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track. The map (figure 1) uses sharp black dots to illustrate the places in the community where the children were killed. On one single street corner, there were six Black children killed by white drivers over the course of six months. On the map, the dots blot out that entire block. (View Highlight)
- The people who lived along the deadly route had long recognized the magnitude of the problem, as well as its profound impact on the lives of their friends and neighbors. But gathering data in support of this truth turned out to be a major challenge. No one was keeping detailed records of these deaths, nor was anyone making even more basic information about what had happened publicly available. “We couldn’t get that information,” explains Gwendolyn Warren, the Detroit-based organizer who headed the unlikely collaboration: an alliance between Black young adults from the surrounding neighborhoods and a group led by white male academic geographers from nearby universities.1 Through the collaboration, the youth learned cutting-edge mapping techniques and, guided by Warren, leveraged their local knowledge in order to produce a series of comprehensive reports, covering topics such as the social and economic inequities among neighborhood children and proposals for new, more racially equitable school district boundaries. (View Highlight)
- Early twentieth–century redlining maps had an aura very similar to the “big data” approaches of today. These high-tech, scalable “solutions” were deployed across the nation, and became one method among many that worked to ensure that wealth remained attached to the racial category of whiteness (View Highlight)
- Zoning laws that were explicitly based on race had already been declared unconstitutional; but within neighborhoods, so-called covenants were nearly as exclusionary and completely legal (View Highlight)
- Who makes maps and who gets mapped? The redlining map is one that secures the power of its makers: the elite white Christian heterosexual men on the Detroit Board of Commerce, their families, and their communities. This particular redlining map is even called Residential Security Map. But the title reflects more than a desire to secure property values. Rather, it reveals a broader desire to protect and preserve home ownership as a method of accumulating wealth, and therefore status and power, that was available—preferentially and unfairly—to white people. In far too many cases, data-driven “solutions” are still deployed in similar ways: in support of the interests of the people and institutions in positions of power, whose worldviews and value systems differ vastly from those of the communities whose data the systems rely upon (View Highlight)