
The Racial Dot Map: One Dot Per Person for the Entire U.S. - yuribit
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html
======
crescentfresh
Panning around randomly I stumbled on this curious little area:
[http://i.imgur.com/42VLDN4.png](http://i.imgur.com/42VLDN4.png)

I thought whoa that's cool, a dense little community of minorities.

Turns out:
[https://www.google.ca/maps/@39.6908437,-86.4131159,15z](https://www.google.ca/maps/@39.6908437,-86.4131159,15z)

Damn it.

~~~
kpennell
Nice find. Interesting to see an effect of the drug war manifested on a map.

~~~
rayiner
That's a state institution, and only 17% of state prisoners are there for a
drug offenses. 83% of those dots are in for something else.

There is some sort of weird need for certain groups of people to ascribe all
crime to the drug war. I assume its a result of their holding worldviews
incompatible with the fact that the world has lots of bad, antisocial, people.

~~~
aetherson
A fair amount of crime which is not narrowly "drug crime" is at least
partially ascribable to the drug war. In decreasing order of being "drug
caused," we have:

1\. Violence over territory from drug dealers can lead to various violence-
related charges.

2\. Drug addicts may commit monetary crimes in order to pay for drugs.

3\. The general mess that the black market drug trade makes of some
neighborhoods creates an environment in which young people feel they have few
legitimate options and turn to crime.

Which isn't of course to say that all crime is ascribable to the drug war. But
certainly it's more crime than what you'd narrowly call "drug offenses" like
possession, dealing, trafficking, or laundering the proceeds.

~~~
rayiner
I think the kinds of people who engage in gang violence or monetary crimes
over drugs fit into the category of "bad, antisocial" people I mentioned.
Society would have to deal with their proclivities whether or not their
energies were directed towards illegal drugs or something else.

~~~
aetherson
That's quite an amazingly strong claim of biological essentialism. Got any
data to back it up?

It would be naive to imagine that there is no "fundamental nature" element to
people. That your genes or early childhood experiences or whatever do not make
some people more prone to antisocial behavior, and indeed do not make some
people guaranteed to be extremely antisocial. Some people who are now
criminals connected with the drug trade would, in a counter-factual world of
legalized drugs, find other outlets for their antisocial tendencies.

But it's just as naive, perhaps more so, to imagine that the circumstances
that people find themselves in do not also affect their social/antisocial
behavior. A hundred and sixty years ago, millions of people in the United
States actively participated in a monstrous crime perpetrated against an
entire race of people, the equivalent of what in the modern world would be
multiple felonies per day across their lifetimes. It was certainly antisocial.
Was that destiny? Were all those people just inherently bad? If so, what
happened to them? Why doesn't modern Georgia have most whites being serial
felons?

~~~
rayiner
I'm not suggesting anything is biological. But the guy who has never had a
real job other than crime isn't not a "bad, antisocial person" just because
you can ascribe his condition to his circumstances growing up. Nor can you say
that the drug war created those circumstances.[1] The drug war didn't create
these insular low-income communities that don't trust the police. It didn't
create households where fathers abandon their kids. It didn't create the
vacuum of social authority in these communities that is filled by the gangs.

Say you end the drug war, legalize everything so you can go into Wal-Mart for
a hit of heroin. What happens? The gang members driving around shooting each
other aren't going to go get jobs (there aren't any). Heck, you might dry up a
lot of what little income flows into these communities.

[1] Very interesting set of graphs: [http://www.newclarion.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/homicid...](http://www.newclarion.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/homicides-1900-20062.jpg;)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#mediaviewer/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png;)
[http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206-...](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206-00000002.jpg).

The first image is the number of homicides per capita. After hitting a minimum
in the late 1950's, it starts increasing again in 1960. By the early 1970's,
it's at historical highs (last seen in the 1930's). The second image is
incarceration rate, which we can use as a proxy for the intensity of the drug
war. Note how it's almost flat till about 1973-1974, and starts really
increasing around 1975-1980. The third image is a comparison of America's
murder rate to that of the U.K. Note how we have always been a dramatically
more violent society throughout the entire 20th century.

The final thing to note is that the peak murder rates of the 1980's are
similar to those of the 1930's. In other words, homicides went down
dramatically in the 1940's and 1950's, but returned to their previous levels
by the 1960's and 1970's. Don't be quick to ascribe the first peak to
Prohibition, either. Prohibition lasted from 1920-1933. You can see it caused
an increase in homicide rates, but the rate from 1900-1920 was already very
high, and Prohibition didn't increase it that much relative to how much it
went up from 1960 to 1980.

So what causes this pattern? Is it Prohibition or the Drug War? Or are those
just relatively small effects on top of much larger phenomena? The social
upheaval of the 1900's-1930's and of the 1960's to 1980's?

~~~
aetherson
You seem to be really caught up in this idea of hard-core gang members. And,
sure, it's true: people who have committed fully to lives of violent crime are
deeply unlikely to turn around and become model citizens.

But: if they don't have an income to support their lives of crime, and if
their leaders don't in fact have quite a nice income that the more common
criminals can aspire to, there's going to be much less incentive for people
who are deciding what they want to be to choose a life of crime.

And furthermore: committed, full time violent criminals are not the only
people we care about here. People whose lives are impacted by the black market
nature of the drug trade include many criminals who may in fact have a job,
and do some crime on the side. It also includes people who are drug consumers,
not dealers, who would materially benefit from a safer and hopefully cheaper
drug habit.

And it also includes people whose boyfriends and fathers would not be in jail
now, and if a large number of those boyfriends and fathers would not be
material help to their girlfriends and children, some number of them would be.

Is this it? Is it the only policy that we would need to vanquish poverty and
crime in the US? Of course not. But there's a reasonable argument that you
can't meaningfully address poverty and crime without addressing the drug war
-- that it blocks any other attempt to improve conditions in poor, crime-
stricken communities.

~~~
rayiner
> You seem to be really caught up in this idea of hard-core gang members.

I'm not. The vast majority of the gang members driving around shooting each
other up are not "committed fully to lives of violent crime." But they are
still "bad, antisocial" people. The 19 year old who mugs someone in a gang
initiation ritual is still a bad person even if you can explain his behavior
in socioeconomic terms.

> Is it the only policy that we would need to vanquish poverty and crime in
> the US? Of course not.

Obviously the drug war contributes to poverty and crime in the U.S., I'm not
denying that. But the comment I originally replied to stated: "Interesting to
see an effect of the drug war manifested on a map." As if that state
penitentiary wouldn't need to exist without the drug war.

People dramatically overstate how much the drug war contributes to violence in
the U.S., because their world views (usually individualist ones), don't
grapple well with a world where a meaningful percentage of the population is
bad and antisocial. If only the government didn't prosecute this drug war,
they say, we wouldn't need these prisons! People would get along! But the data
just doesn't support that narrative. Look at this chart of spending on drug
control: [http://cdn6.theweedblog.com/wp-content/uploads//us-drug-
addi...](http://cdn6.theweedblog.com/wp-content/uploads//us-drug-addiction-
rate-spending.jpg), and cross reference that against the homicide rate chart I
referred to earlier. You can clearly see that most of the dramatic increase in
homicides between the minimum in the late 1950's and the maximum in the 1980's
and 1990's happened by the early 1970's, while drug war spending didn't really
start until 1973 and didn't really ramp up by the 1980's.

We're not seeing the product of communities ravaged by the drug war. What
we're seeing is that the drug war has become the focal point for communities
that were already disintegrating before the drug war even started.

~~~
curun1r
> But they are still "bad, antisocial" people.

Yes, but how did they get that way? They got that way because they were drawn
into that life by older gang members. They see older gang members living a
life of relative privilege and they're willing to accept the violence that
goes along with it. If you take away the money, those older gang members
become much less attractive role models.

> As if that state penitentiary wouldn't need to exist without the drug war.

From Wikipedia: "In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug
Abuse Act, the United States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more
than two million."

In that same time period, when the prison population increased over 600%, the
US population increased roughly 30%. Unless you've got some other theory for
drastically increased incarceration rates, that prison and many others used to
house the over 1.5m extra prisoners we have today because of the WoD literally
would not exist.

~~~
rayiner
I spent several comments laying out a theory for the increased incarceration
rates, supported with charts and graphs.

The bottom line is that the increase in incarceration rates is the result of a
dramatic spike in crime rates starting in 1960, peaking in the early 1990's,
and the public response in the form of harsh sentencing laws in the 1990's
(three strikes, mandatory minimums). It's a simple explanation: there are more
people in prison because there is more crime, and because the spike in crime
caused people to vote (by overwhelming margins, I might add) for harsher
sentencing laws.

Compare incarceration rates with violent crime rates:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._inca...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png),
[http://www.volokh.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/01/vcrime500.j...](http://www.volokh.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/01/vcrime500.jpg). You can see that incarceration rates
are clearly a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. Violent crime peaked
in 1993, at 4.3x the 1960 baseline. Incarceration peaked in 2005, at 4.8x the
1960 baseline. It's not until the late 1990's that incarceration rates catch
up with violent crime rates.

The popular counterargument is that the increase in crime is itself a result
of the social effects of the Drug War, e.g. the impact on kids of fathers
being sent to prison for decades on drug charges. But the Anti-Drug Abuse Act
was passed in 1986, and the spike in violent crime rates started in 1960. The
slope of the crime increase between 1966 and 1972 is as high as at any time
after the drug war really got going in the 1980's, and 80% of the total
increase in crime between the 1960 trough and the 1993 peak happened by 1980.
It is simply inconsistent with the data to say that the increase in crime
since 1960 were anything more than moderately impacted by the Drug War, which
didn't really get going until long after crime had already skyrocketed.

------
Groxx
I wish maps like this would label in which order they draw the dots. It makes
a difference.

This one, for instance, appears to draw (bottom up) "White", "Black",
"Hispanic", "Other", "Asian" \- this over-represents the races higher up on
the list, especially in densely populated areas. That solid block of red? It
probably has other colors underneath, but you can't see them, _and they don 't
tell you this_.

This is one of the nicer maps like this that I've seen, but excluding that
info is blatantly misleading.

~~~
boyaka
Even better, why not just let people enable/disable the ethnicities? Could
even make it so it draws the most recently enabled race on top of the rest.
I'm trying to get an idea for where each ethnicity lives and it would be so
much easier if I could just look at one at a time.

~~~
Groxx
Yeah, I've seen a rare few that offer this, though usually not re-arranging
which are on top. It's usually surprising just how biased the default display
is :\

That said, it still surprises me that these map makers (all of them! not just
this one) don't take the simpler approach of drawing _all_ dots in a random
order - e.g. get rid of this "first all blue dots, then green, etc" behavior,
and pick the next dot's color randomly, while maintaining the distribution.
Then you'd have an unbiased "top layer" regardless of the size of your dots
(up to a point, obviously).

(hard to describe what I'm thinking of... basically `[red, red, ... * 25,
green, green, ... * 10, orange, orange].shuffle.draw` rather than just
`[].draw`)

------
ecdavis
I don't know if it's the color choices, the dot placement, or some combination
of the two, but this appears misleading to me. Looking at the Central District
in Seattle, one could be forgiven for thinking it is a majority black area.[0]
In fact, African-Americans only make up ~20% of the population there (very
high for the PNW, but hardly a majority). The New York Times census map gives
a far more accurate image of the racial demographics of that neighborhood.[1]
I believe the NYT map only has one dot per 100 people, which means the dots
are larger and less crowded. Notably, the NYT map uses green dots for white
population and blue dots for black population - the reverse of the map linked
here. That means if the color choices are having an impact on the way we
perceive mixed neighborhoods, the effect is the opposite depending on the map
you look at (i.e. you are more likely to think a mixed area is majority black
when looking at the OP map, majority white when looking at the NYT map). It's
worth thinking about color perception and optical illusions when viewing maps
like this.[2]

I love map-based visualizations - they're interesting and fun to look at.
Nonetheless, I don't think they're the best way of conveying demographic
information.

EDIT: Groxx has a fantastic comment about the order in which the dots are
drawn. This could explain my observations.

[0] [http://imgur.com/SWmuX1b](http://imgur.com/SWmuX1b)

[1] [http://imgur.com/lEwahHd](http://imgur.com/lEwahHd)
([http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map](http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map))

[2] [http://www.illusionspoint.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/09/Col...](http://www.illusionspoint.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/09/Color-Adapting-optical-illusion-9.jpg)

~~~
smackfu
Yeah, colors are hard. Compare the full saturation red they are using for
Asian to the baby blue for White. The red stands out more than the blue, even
though they are both supposed to represent one person.

------
calinet6
Hey why the hell is there a tightly packed cluster of black and hispanic
people north of San Luis Ob—.... oh.

[http://i.imgur.com/HXZ09dh.png](http://i.imgur.com/HXZ09dh.png)

~~~
rkuykendall-com
To save others from looking it up: "California Mens Colony Prison"

~~~
frewsxcv
To save others from Googling:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Men%27s_Colony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Men%27s_Colony)

------
ausjke
Is this correct? I thought the Hispanic and the black are like 40~% already,
the picture still give you the impression that non-white is something just
like 5%

Also, there are only two melting-pots, one in NY and one at CA, per the
picture.

~~~
sp332
America is 77% white.
[http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html](http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html)

~~~
Symmetry
Only if you count the 17% who are hispanic as white, otherwise it's 62%. But
Hispanic white people will probably stop being viewed as a separate racial
groups before that long, as happened with the Irish.

~~~
sp332
Yeah I mean, they're still of European descent, why not call them white? I
know, race is fuzzy.

Edit: For the US Census, Hispanic people are of "Spanish culture or origin
regardless of race."

~~~
pessimizer
Black Americans are also largely of European descent, so why not call everyone
white?

~~~
hyperpape
This is not accurate, to the best of my knowledge. I've consistently read
roughly 20% European ancestry as the average for African-Americans. One
source: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/genetic-
varia...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/genetic-variation-
among-african-americans/#.VBHQtvldUmg)

Of course, in general, legal racial categories may not map to anything
genetic.

------
stevenhubertron
Very cool looking. Now I can show my NY friends how diverse Denver really is
and why there is a great multicultural food scene.

~~~
lotharbot
It's interesting to note: in the late 1960s Denver was quite segregated. A
1974 Supreme Court decision led to students being forced to ride the bus
across town to mix with students of other races (I rode from southwest Denver
to Five Points for a few years in elementary school.) One of the major results
was white families moving out of the Denver city limits. They ended forced
busing in 1995.

Denver now has one of the most diverse populations in the US, though it's
often hurt by measurements that treat "white hispanic" (22%) and "non-hispanic
white" (50%) as both just white. Denver is home to the largest Mongolian
population in the US, one of the largest Native American Pow-Wows in the US,
plus significant African American, Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Russian, Polish,
Ethiopian, and Lebanese groups. While there are some enclaves, there are a lot
of very mixed neighborhoods as well.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/17/us/court-says-denver-
can-e...](http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/17/us/court-says-denver-can-end-
forced-busing.html)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denver](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denver)

~~~
stevenhubertron
Wow, thanks for this bit of history. I learned a few things about my town
today!

------
whistlerbrk
Boo... "Other Race / Native American / Multi-racial"

Turns out composition is better than inheritance for so many things.

~~~
tejon
Can't we all just switch to a functional paradigm?

 _Alternate one-liner:_ Click the lower button on the left and everyone turns
into a duck!

------
cmsmith
As expected, you can see 5 green dots at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in DC. Is there
anywhere else that we can do better at tying dots to individuals?

~~~
tedunangst
Who's the fifth?

------
araes
So many great data analysis exercises that could be run with such a set.
Effectively, you could create scalar variables representing lots of different
population statistics on a country, state, city, ect level.

Density: [http://i.imgur.com/bfVdrbK.png](http://i.imgur.com/bfVdrbK.png)

Racial Density / Clustering:
[http://i.imgur.com/pQDJLtX.png](http://i.imgur.com/pQDJLtX.png)

Terrain / Feature Clustering:
[http://i.imgur.com/AH9f2KW.png](http://i.imgur.com/AH9f2KW.png)

City Homogeneity:
[http://i.imgur.com/Lo3X6KI.png](http://i.imgur.com/Lo3X6KI.png)

City Racial Mixing:
[http://i.imgur.com/VBzLPI6.png](http://i.imgur.com/VBzLPI6.png) or
[http://i.imgur.com/ldIgYaw.png](http://i.imgur.com/ldIgYaw.png)

City Cluster Homogeneity:
[http://i.imgur.com/2TLabMj.png](http://i.imgur.com/2TLabMj.png) vs
[http://i.imgur.com/LlsAMx4.png](http://i.imgur.com/LlsAMx4.png)

Cluster to nearby dot gravity (how much do dots spread from a nearby loci):
[http://i.imgur.com/LlsAMx4.png](http://i.imgur.com/LlsAMx4.png) vs
[http://i.imgur.com/qNkMCcu.png](http://i.imgur.com/qNkMCcu.png)

And that doesn't even cover stuff that's harder to show like gradients, edge
analysis (who's likely driving between two towns?), or migration patterns if
multiple census years are available.

------
pea
Jesus, look at the difference between EPA and Palo Alto. I knew it was
segregated, but amazing what one road can do..

[http://imgur.com/JrLzd8X](http://imgur.com/JrLzd8X)

~~~
jroseattle
Reminds me of this old picture of the racial makeup around 8-mile in Detroit:

[http://images.sciencedaily.com/2014/09/140909162349-large.jp...](http://images.sciencedaily.com/2014/09/140909162349-large.jpg)

Green = African American, Orange = Caucasian

FWIW, having moved from the St. Louis area and traveling through Ferguson MO
on a daily basis, it's obvious to me the racial makeup is a symptom/result of
economics. Race + economics is a hard ship to steer, for sure.

~~~
pessimizer
>Race + economics is a hard ship to steer, for sure.

Or it's a really easy ship to steer, and racial makeup is a symptom/result of
preferences, planning, legislation, and enforcement.

------
vitaminwater
crazy how less dense western US is, when disregarding california...

~~~
calinet6
It is truly another world, with so much wilderness. This difference changes
the culture greatly as well, and how people think about land, the earth, and
other people.

You can find good people and good places everywhere, but the west really is
better in nearly all respects.

~~~
ctdonath
_This difference changes the culture greatly_

Hence the importance of _liberty_ as an axiom of federal governance: one group
with particular cultural interests (say, deep urban) should not impose their
situation-specific views on others far away with radically different cultural
interests (say, rank wilderness). What some may find need to prohibit in one
situation, others may find necessary to survival in another. The lack of
respect of axiomatic liberty causes dangerous sociopolitical tensions.

~~~
nemo
Very true. Sadly, the reality of the structure of our government is such that
rural areas have a greater representation in our governance than denser more
urban areas.

~~~
ctdonath
Us rural types find the reverse practically true, even with representation
explicitly skewed in our favor: urban centers regularly out-vote us by a long
shot.

------
thornygreb
[http://synthpopviewer.rti.org/](http://synthpopviewer.rti.org/)

has better locations and the points are households, not people.

~~~
lotharbot
On the down side, this appears to show "white Hispanic" as white, which makes
Denver look like a giant sea of sameness instead of one of the most diverse
cities in the country.

~~~
thornygreb
That is because hispanic is not a separate race according to the census it is
an ethnicity. There are white hispanics and black hispanics, etc.

~~~
lotharbot
I understand and reject that reasoning. When you're mapping diversity, put me
and my pasty-white Anglo-Dutch ancestry and my neighbors who grew up in Mexico
in different categories.

~~~
thornygreb
And that is your right, you can make your own map, the census is freely
available. It isn't a 'diversity' map, it is a map showing census data for
race, income, household size and age, not ethnicity.

~~~
lotharbot
> "you can make your own map"

or use the one in the original post. I'm just clarifying why I prefer that map
over the one you linked to.

------
exelius
This is fascinating. It really shows how racially segregated a lot of cities
are. But from my knowledge of a few cities where I've lived, all the "cool"
places to live are very mixed. Not sure if that says more about my idea of
desirable places to live or the effects of gentrification, but this map is
definitely very thought-provoking.

Thanks for sharing.

~~~
rayiner
If you're talking about NYC or San Francisco or the like, the "cool places"
are ones where higher-income white people are pushing out the lower-income
minorities that used to live in those neighborhoods. The mixture is temporary.

------
moron4hire
I find the fully-zoomed in view to be the most fascinating. To be able to see
the administrative lines appear, like the diamond of DC, even though it's one
gigantic metropolis almost all the way up to Baltimore. And definitely
confirms what I already knew about Philadelphia: extremely segregated.

------
tbeutel
Anyone notice the triangle of people floating in the empty space at the
southwestern corner of San Francisco near Lake Merced? That appears to be the
Olympic Club golf course. Do people actually list the golf course as their
home address on their census forms?

~~~
epmatsw
There's a park near me that appears to have several hundred or thousand Asian
people living in it. I'm not sure how accurate this data is...

------
oxalo
I think it'd be interesting to see this map in conjunction with a map of
housing prices.

------
BrandiATMuhkuh
This remind me a lot to sanddance
[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=188...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=188294)

------
colanderman
Dots should darken (or enlarge) when zooming in; as-is, because the dot-
density decreases, the image as a whole lightens and becomes difficult to see
at high zoom levels.

~~~
dj-wonk
I was wondering about this. Any suggestions on papers or code that detail that
technique?

~~~
jws
Its a tough problem, the "real" physical solution is bad the other direction.

If I zoom out to see the whole contiguous 48 states, each pixel on my screen
is about 10 square kilometers. Consider filling the screen with that 10 square
kilometers. For say, San Francisco, that gives me 13000 people to place in
something like a million pixels of white. That is a nice density for a dot
map, but my screen is mostly white. If we want to keep the color density, when
we zoom out to see the country, even San Francisco is going to be a mostly
white pixel.

With continuous smooth zoom you could smoothly change the size of the person
dot from a 1/10th of a pixel to one pixel and probably come up with a nice
effect, but you'd need to be rendering at 30fps or so to be smooth and this
web site doesn't seem to be built for that.

------
smackfu
If you zoom in, it gets lighter. That's unexpected, and seems to be an error
in their averaging code. Maybe it's not averaging using HSV but in RGB?

------
dj-wonk
Does this graph accurately indicate overall population density across the map?
Or does over-plotting hide the city population densities?

~~~
dj-wonk
In theory, I think so:

> Each of the 308 million dots are smaller than a pixel on your computer
> screen at most zoom levels. Therefore, the "smudges" you see at the national
> and regional levels are actually aggregations of many individual dots. The
> dots themselves are only resolvable at the city and neighborhood zoom
> levels.

[http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-
Map#thed...](http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map#thedots)

However, it would depend if high levels of smudging max out the color
intensity of a pixel. This could be solved with normalization, but I don't
know if they did.

------
JoeAltmaier
Cool! I live in a rural area, and I found my dot!

------
bsamuels
does anyone have a good explanation as to why each side of the US has such
dramatically different population patterns?

~~~
ecdavis
Geography and climate. The western US is very mountainous with lots of desert
areas.[0] The east, in comparison, is very flat with plenty of water and
climates more suitable for farming.[1] Population in the west is therefore
more clustered around the few areas suitable for human settlement.

If you're talking about the racial population patterns, that's a product of
history and geography (again). European settlement of the US started in the
north-east, African slaves were brought mainly to the south-east and Hispanic
migrants come largely from the south, across the border with Mexico.

[0]
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/USA_topo_...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/USA_topo_en.jpg)

[1]
[http://www.okatlas.org/okatlas/weather/climate/usa/climate.g...](http://www.okatlas.org/okatlas/weather/climate/usa/climate.gif)

------
humbyvaldes
Hispanic is not a race, it's an ethnicity. You can be Asian, Black or White
and be hispanic.

------
tejon
Am I the only person slightly miffed that this isn't presented on a black
background?

~~~
thrownaway2424
I don't think the chosen palette is perceptually uniform in intensity, either,
at least not on my display. A whole whack of white people (sky blue dots)
looks less populous than the same number of Asian people (red dots)

------
gone35
So much for 'the melting pot'... This society still has a _long_ way to go.

~~~
wuliwong
Where do you want to "go" as a society? Is the goal to have the same "diverse"
racial distribution in every community? I for one am ok with people living in
communities that are mostly of the same race. I think these communities
preserve cultures better. Something I personally would not like to see
disappear. For instance, I would not like Chinatown to become 50% white, 20%
black, 20% hispanic and 10% asian or something. I think that would be
terrible. As long as there isn't legislation that is forcing or evening
economically coercing people to live in segregated communities, I kinda like
just having the chips fall where they may and people live where they feel
comfortable.

I also wonder what other countries would look like if this same analysis was
applied? My guess is that you'd see the same basic result. Cities more
diverse, rural areas less. Within cities, you'd still find segregation.

~~~
lotharbot
my mom taught me this analogy as a kid:

"we don't want a 'melting pot'. We don't want everyone to become the same. We
want something more like a 'mixed salad' \-- all the pieces bring their own
unique flavor and contribute to the whole. It's OK if some bites have a little
more tomato and others have a little more carrot. Just don't be that picky
eater who pushes all of the cucumber off to the side like it doesn't belong."

------
tokenadult
The actual title of the submitted resource is "The Racial Dot Map: One Dot Per
Person for the Entire U.S." I'm pretty sure that this has been submitted to HN
before. It loads rather slowly on my computer here. A zoomed-out view does do
a good job of showing the remarkably low population density of the Great Basin
in the western United States, which was formerly known as The Great American
Desert. Presence or absence of sources of abundant fresh water has a huge
influence on population distribution in the United States.

A zoomed-in view of my metropolitan area, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, shows
the overall conurbation of the two cities and their suburbs reasonably
clearly, but with some rather odd blank spots on a closely zoomed-in view that
appear to correspond to census tracts with few actual residences, not matching
the actual distribution of built-up or undeveloped areas in quite the way that
most residents of this area would expect. (Some of the blank spots in south
Minneapolis correspond to lakes in the City of Lakes.) Of course an industrial
park can have a high daytime occupancy of interacting human beings while being
almost empty at night, and the other way around for a residential zone.

For any data collected by the United States federal government about race, one
has to go to the definition statements from the Bureau of the Census: "The
U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided
by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on
self-identification. The racial categories included in the census
questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this
country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or
genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race
item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may
choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as
'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic,
Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."[1] All of the definitions are
arbitrary, and some are very arbitrary indeed and imply divisions of personal
behavior that don't exist in actual practice. (My household is poorly defined
by the Census data gathered under the OMB rules, and I live with people of
another "race," whom I prefer to regard as my fellow human beings, every day
of my life.) In Minneapolis, it's not a big surprise to see concentrations of
"black" people (historically African-American people in north Minneapolis and
recent Somali immigrants in south Minneapolis). In St. Paul, the "Asian"
people are mostly recent Hmong immigrants. Hispanic people (mostly recent
immigrants from Mexico) have increased greatly in number in this area in my
lifetime. A typical set of signs at a public library in the metropolitan area
will be written in English, Spanish, Somali, and Hmong here.

[1]
[http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm](http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm)

~~~
dj-wonk
Re: "rather odd blank spots on a closely zoomed-in view"...

> The locations of the dots do not represent actual addresses. The most
> detailed geographic identifier in Census Bureau data is the census block.
> Individual dots are randomly located within a particular census block to
> match aggregate population totals for that block. As a result, dots in some
> census blocks may be located in the middle of parks, cemeteries, lakes, or
> other clearly non-residential areas within that census block. No greater
> geographic resolution for the 2010 Census data is publicly available (and
> for good reason).

[http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-
Map#park...](http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map#parks)

------
C7E0F338E42448
man I am so tired of races. divided and labeled in every possible context.
what the hell is white anyway. a mixture of millions of unknown origins, only
you happen to come out with a pale skin.

~~~
oftenwrong
It is the "floating signifier" after all.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRk9MZvOd2c](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRk9MZvOd2c)
(NSFW)

~~~
dj-wonk
Part 1 of 7 (linked above) is 10 minutes long and worth watching. It is NSFW
only because of the intro clip from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. The series
of videos contains an introduction by kruger97 (his Youtube name; I don't know
his real name), then an interview with Stuart Hall, then a speech by Hall.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_(cultural_theorist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_\(cultural_theorist\))
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier)

------
ctdonath
To those dots can we easily add local population density, and income?

------
nightcracker
Indeed, I have never seen such a collection of slow-loading pictures.

------
malloreon
I never know where "Indian" fits in these breakdowns.

~~~
viewer5
Looking at my university's campus, I'm pretty positive this map files them
under the "Asian" category.

------
steren
What a clickbait title

~~~
mxfh
Especially since this map is around since August 2013.
[http://flowingdata.com/2013/08/12/racial-dot-
map/](http://flowingdata.com/2013/08/12/racial-dot-map/)

NYT did one in 2010:
[http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer](http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer)
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2008383](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2008383))

Other static versions as of 2010: [http://flowingdata.com/2010/09/20/race-and-
ethnicity-by-mapp...](http://flowingdata.com/2010/09/20/race-and-ethnicity-by-
mapped-by-block/)

Too bad the tileserver of the density map by Brandon Matt Anderson is
currently broken:
[http://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html](http://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html)
but you could still get gourgeous prerendered images here:
[http://bmander.com/dotmap/store.html](http://bmander.com/dotmap/store.html)

------
dpweb
Our goal should be a society _without_ racial distinction.

------
igl
°o(Apartheid is huge in america!) I have some business ideas! Racially
segregated car sharing! Racially segregated clothing (ok that one might be too
flooded already) Racial Segregation -- the Magazine(!) DOWN VOTE NOW!

