Racial Segregation in America

If you've not seen this yet, let me point you to the interactive map of the week.

The map was created by Dustin Cable at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. The map displays the population distribution, using the 2010 census data, of every person in America broken down by ethnicity. The map has 308,745,538 dots, each representing a single person. Caucasians are blue dots, African-Americans are green dots, Hispanics are orange dots, Asians are red dots, and other groups are brown dots.

From a bird's eye view this is what America looks like:

But the real insights come when you use the interactive map to zoom in on various cities in America. At this finer, local scale racial segregation appears in just about every American city. Go to the map and zoom in on your town.

Here's my town, Abilene, TX:

As you can see, the two main colors are blue (Whites) and orange (Hispanics). Those are the largest and next largest ethnic groups, respectively, in Abilene. And as you can can see, the two groups have separated themselves. Most of the Hispanic population is in the north, central part of Abilene. There is also a concentration in the south, center/east area of town. The two main centers of white folk are the south-western and north-eastern parts of town. These are the directions of "white flight" in out town, toward our suburbs, the two sections of blue you see outside the highway loop encircling the city (the lower left and upper right parts of the map).

One of the takeaways, for me at least, is that encountering difference will involve some intentionality. You have to, quite literally, move in different spaces.

This has been one of the most important aspects of driving the van for Freedom Fellowship (our local church plant that feeds and reaches out to the poor and homeless). In picking people up for Freedom I'm getting out of the "blue Abilene" and exploring parts of my city that I never would have seen before. And let me tell you, it's eye opening.