Mapping the Tyranny of the Minority

This map locates the districts represented by the "suicide caucus" holding the rest of us hostage. It accompanies this pointed post at The New Yorker.

"As the above map, detailing the geography of the suicide caucus, shows, half of these districts are concentrated in the South, and a quarter of them are in the Midwest, while there’s a smattering of thirteen in the rural West and four in rural Pennsylvania (outside the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Naturally, there are no members from New England, the megalopolis corridor from Washington to Boston, or along the Pacific coastline.

These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.

[. . .] While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.

The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district).

The members themselves represent this lack of diversity. Seventy-six of the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them are white.

As with Meadows, the other suicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.

In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed."

Rebecca Solnit & Rebecca Snedeker Unfathomable CIty - A New Orleans Atlas

I am not sure how Rebecca Solnit manages to turn out so much work or such uniformly high quality. But she does. And I am grateful. This forthcoming atlas of New Orleans promises to be provocative and beautiful. You can find publication details here.

Mapping Racial Segregation in the US

This map shows the distribution of population by race in Rochester derived from 2010 census figures. Red dots = Whites, Blue dots = Blacks. You can find analogous maps of other American cities here; many of those map Asian and Hispanic populations as well.* While compelling visually the reality they reveal is not pretty.  For some analysis look here.
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P.S.: "Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other, and each dot is 25 residents." The designer here, by the way, is Eric Fischer.

Follow the Money

Source.

Atlas of Radical Cartography

Mapping Ghosts ~ Rendition Fights, 2001-2006
© Trevor Paglen & John Emerson

Some time ago I posted on a Los Angeles based artist Lize Mogel who'd collaborated on a terrific data map that documented the costs and distribution of mercenaries (euphemistically known as 'private security contractors'). Mogel has pursued a related collaborative project, co-edited with Alexis Bhagat, entitled An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Aesthetics & Protest Press). The book, just out, "pairs artists, architects, designers, and collectives with writers to explore the map’s role as political agent. These (10) ten mapping projects and critical essays take on social and political issues from globalization to garbage." I look forward to getting a copy of the book and maps. It seems to me that this sort of project can provide invaluable resources for helping people visualize large-scale processes that often, by design or otherwise, go undetected.

Interestingly, the Atlas is not just a book, but also an exhibition and it will be making a stop nearby. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, not Rochester, but in what seems like an interesting new performance space called Redhouse Arts Center in Syracuse. The exhibition is up now and will show through March 12th. There will be an artists's reception this Thursday (21 February, 5-8 pm) and a Round-table Discussion this Friday (22 February, 6-8 pm); the scheduled participants in the latter are Alexis Bhagat, Lize Mogel, Daniel Tucker, Nadxi Mannello, Jonnell Allen.