'Maps in the News' is an ongoing series examining how news organizations use maps to communicate and miscommunicate spatial stories, analyzing both cartographic design and the reporting that frames it. In this first entry, I examine a piece that does an extraordinary job humanizing and mapping the lasting effects of racial segregation in Detroit.
In this article, Einhorn and Lewis explore the geography of segregation and its ongoing legacy in communities across the United States through the lens of Detroit, MI. The national story of segregation, redlining, and white flight, if not told carefully, can easily become a faceless, amorphous, impersonal accident of the times. By using Detroit as a lens through which to view this national issue, these journalists personalized and humanized this important story. Through extensive investigation and interviews, the journalists were able to expose not just the major spatial actors like local to national governments and businesses, but the personal experiences of folks from both sides of the segregation line. Though “both sides” is often used to undermine the position of the oppressed and marginalized in society, the authors skillfully exposed how color blind racism, white privilege, generational wealth, red lining, and white flight operated and the enduring spatial inequality that resulted through the words of the perpetrators and victims of these white supremacist systems.
Accompanying Einhorn and Lewis’s story is an interactive map tour contextualizing the area of Detroit in focus. The map application vastly enhances the story being told by clearly showing the geography of racial segregation in the city and the lasting effects of redlining. The map visually emphasizes important elements with a simple, responsive, and intuitive scroll-through design that walks the reader through each layer of map detail step-by-step with key information highlighted through color or callouts. The map’s design is self-explanatory and evident, requiring virtually no legend or instructions/onboarding: the user simply scrolls through the story with the map scrolling across their display to reveal the contextualizing geography precisely where it is relevant to the story without complications from multiple layers or data filtering options. A cursory review also showed the map to have relatively few accessibility issues.
The story of segregation can be a difficult one to navigate in a way that humanizes those on both sides of the racial segregation lines, but the team behind this article and its accompanying map demonstrate what’s possible. Their work combined almost three dozen interviews, conversations with experts, academic scholarship, land and business records, archival materials, primary sources, as well as demographic, population, and real estate data. This extensive investigation allowed the authors to create journalistic product that handled the sensitive subject of racial segregation responsibly, used data analysis and cartography to great effect in reconstructing the spatial reality of racial segregation, and—in light of that reality—allowed the human actors involved latitude to represent themselves and speak candidly, for better or worse.