Speaker 1: I'm t T and I'm Zakiah, and this is Dope Labs.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore
Speaker 1: science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Speaker 2: Tt. I've been thinking a lot about maps lately.
Speaker 1: Every time I see a headline it's talking about border patrol, crackdowns, ice,
Speaker 1: tensions at the borders, or even maps in the different context,
Speaker 1: which is like I call these imaginary maps, but like
Speaker 1: political maps, you know that follow different lines and redistricting,
Speaker 1: it's clear that maps are not just neutral tools.
Speaker 2: Right. I was reading this book it's called The Address Book,
Speaker 2: and it basically says where you even get mapped in
Speaker 2: a zip code that is like a better indicator of
Speaker 2: like your lifetime earnings and success and health than other
Speaker 2: factors that we may think, like what you're you were born, right,
Speaker 2: that's wild to me, It is really wild.
Speaker 1: And it's clear that the lines that are drawn on
Speaker 1: maps are tied to power and they've been used to
Speaker 1: enforce who gets access, who gets surveiled, who gets shut out.
Speaker 1: And it's not just history, it's happening right now. Like
Speaker 1: you were saying with there's a lot of redistricting in Texas,
Speaker 1: and it's all very confusing to me because I know
Speaker 1: nothing about this. Yeah, and everybody shouting border, border, border,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, baby, do you know what a border
Speaker 1: really is?
Speaker 2: Right? When did we start talking about this? So today
Speaker 2: we're digging right into it, into the politics of map making,
Speaker 2: borders and how these lines, both visible and invisible, shape
Speaker 2: our lives.
Speaker 1: And we couldn't think of a better person to talk
Speaker 1: to than doctor Joshua Enwood, a professor of geography and
Speaker 1: African American Studies at my alma mater, the Pennsylvania State University.
Speaker 1: His work dives into racialized cartographies and cartography is the
Speaker 1: study of map. He also researches spatial justice and how
Speaker 1: the Green Book functioned as a countermapping during Jim Crow,
Speaker 1: Doctor Mwood, We're so excited to have you here.
Speaker 3: Thanks so much.
Speaker 4: I really appreciate the invitation. And it's always great to
Speaker 4: be with some Penn State alone. And all I can
Speaker 4: say is, we.
Speaker 2: Are Penn State. Oh here we go.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's start from the beginning. Maps feel natural
Speaker 1: to us now, because I mean every device that we
Speaker 1: have has a map function on it. But at some
Speaker 1: point there had to be someone that decided, hey, let
Speaker 1: me start drawing lines on a sheet of paper to
Speaker 1: create this thing.
Speaker 2: Before we were all looking at Google maps, you know,
Speaker 2: and before that there was map quest. I don't know
Speaker 2: if you remember that, but I had a lot of printouts, okay,
Speaker 2: maps for like these hand drawn interpretations of the world. So,
Speaker 2: doctor Enwood, can you start us broadly before we zoom in,
Speaker 2: and just explain to us what maps mean to a society.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, one of the ways I think we'd
Speaker 4: kind of nice to jump into this conversation is to
Speaker 4: think just really broadly for a second about geography. And
Speaker 4: you know, one of the things I always tell my
Speaker 4: undergraduate students, and I always tell my graduate students, and
Speaker 4: I always tell anybody who will listen, is that geography is,
Speaker 4: for most of us one of the most important things
Speaker 4: in our lives that we don't really think critically about.
Speaker 4: And the places you work, the places you live, if
Speaker 4: you go to worship someplace, the community you grew up on.
Speaker 4: It did not just magically happen. I did not just
Speaker 4: appear out of the ether. But it's the result of
Speaker 4: really particular economic systems, of political systems, of culture, and
Speaker 4: it's this kind of coming together of all of these
Speaker 4: different things that really produces space and place. And if
Speaker 4: you think about it, maps being human inventions are the
Speaker 4: invitation for us to think.
Speaker 3: About some of those power dynamics and some of.
Speaker 4: Those economic dynamics that go into how we think about
Speaker 4: geography and the way that we relate to these different
Speaker 4: kind of places and spaces. And so the reality is
Speaker 4: is that maps, in some kind of form or another
Speaker 4: arguably have been around for as long as humans have
Speaker 4: been on earth. And the reason for that is is
Speaker 4: that you can communicate a lot of really complicated information,
Speaker 4: and you can communicate a lot of spatial information in
Speaker 4: a way that when it was paper maps was super portable.
Speaker 4: And these maps and these ways of thinking are super
Speaker 4: important to document experience, and it's a hugely important piece
Speaker 4: of human history is how we think about these relationships
Speaker 4: and how we think about how we engage with one another,
Speaker 4: and maps reflect that.
Speaker 2: Thinking about even little neighborhood maps, I used to drop
Speaker 2: out like whose house was where? And how far and
Speaker 2: like what's the shortest path? And I remember, I don't
Speaker 2: know if anybody else did this, but I would just
Speaker 2: try to make these little routes from where I live
Speaker 2: to my school, and like I was making my own
Speaker 2: little maps of my little world. And so before we
Speaker 2: zoom out to bigger maps US, I have a little
Speaker 2: bit more of a historical question, like is there you're saying,
Speaker 2: as long as we know, but I think I tend
Speaker 2: to think about like the globe or like a US map.
Speaker 2: Are there, like any artifacts like that that are super
Speaker 2: important that we should be thinking about for a time
Speaker 2: scale or just know that maps have always been around.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean there's certainly some you know, if you
Speaker 4: go back and you can look at in particular from
Speaker 4: the era of kind of colonization and the era of imperialism.
Speaker 4: I think for most of us, those are probably a
Speaker 4: lot of the maps that we're familiar with. They're often
Speaker 4: in history textbooks, there's sometimes in geography textbooks that are
Speaker 4: often used to illustrate historical processes, age of explorers, or
Speaker 4: whatever it is that you necessarily want to think about
Speaker 4: and talk about.
Speaker 3: And so for a lot of us those maps are important.
Speaker 3: But to give you a sense.
Speaker 4: Of what we talk about when we think about why
Speaker 4: maps matter and how they reflect particular kinds of power dynamics,
Speaker 4: there's a really famous map from the time.
Speaker 3: Of the Crusades.
Speaker 4: What it does is it places Jerusalem in the center
Speaker 4: of the world. And what it does is it means
Speaker 4: that all of the rest of the world is situated
Speaker 4: around that one central point. And so that reflects at
Speaker 4: the time, really the kind of power of the Church
Speaker 4: and also a time of Western intellectual thought which really
Speaker 4: plays Jerusalem and Christianity at the center of the universe.
Speaker 4: And so there's maps like that that we can start
Speaker 4: to go back and look at and think about and
Speaker 4: work through and really start to try to understand how
Speaker 4: people were thinking about, in this case, not just their
Speaker 4: relationship with one another, but their relationship in the broader cosmos,
Speaker 4: and how it relates to some of the kind of
Speaker 4: supernatural forces that they were thinking about or trying to
Speaker 4: work through as it relates to early Christianity. One of
Speaker 4: the first map makers was actually an ancient Greek named Ptolome,
Speaker 4: and some of your listeners might know he was one
Speaker 4: of the early Greek mathematicians who really figured out that
Speaker 4: the Earth was round and not flat. I'm sure you
Speaker 4: could go back and you could find maps in ancient
Speaker 4: China that go back maybe even earlier and really think
Speaker 4: about how some of the early Chinese dynasties were also
Speaker 4: in relationship with each other, the Silk Road, those kinds
Speaker 4: of things, and so maps are central to the human
Speaker 4: experience and being a storytelling species. Maps are really central
Speaker 4: to that process and how we think about how humans
Speaker 4: can tell a spatial story. And humans are also a
Speaker 4: species historically that have traveled and explore and push boundaries,
Speaker 4: and of course this causes conflict, and we can talk
Speaker 4: about that too, but that's a piece of wide cartography
Speaker 4: and mat making is really important.
Speaker 1: You talk about Ptolemy and how in some ancient Chinese dynasties,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that they were making maps, but who did
Speaker 1: they dub the map makers? Was this like a special
Speaker 1: job for only certain types of people that had a
Speaker 1: certain pedigree, or how do they decide who has the
Speaker 1: power to do that?
Speaker 2: Because it's a really powerful tool.
Speaker 4: You know, it goes back really into the development of
Speaker 4: modern Western ways of thinking, at least in the context
Speaker 4: of Anglo American geography. We're talking about, you know, the
Speaker 4: fourteen fifteen, sixteen hundreds, when cartography, which is the science
Speaker 4: of map making, really starts to get its kind of
Speaker 4: intellectual outlines, and as that grows, it grows along with colonialism,
Speaker 4: it grows along with imperialism, it grows along with colonization,
Speaker 4: and it was really the role of a lot of
Speaker 4: European monarchs and monarchies to try to map and understand
Speaker 4: the world, and probably again map making being the center
Speaker 4: of power. I don't know how many of your listeners
Speaker 4: have ever been to Grantwich, England, but you can go
Speaker 4: to the observatory there and you can think about the
Speaker 4: establishment of the prime meridian.
Speaker 2: Ooh, I remember when I learned what the prime meridian was.
Speaker 2: It was a long time ago, but I remember it
Speaker 2: feeling like meridian was a fancy word.
Speaker 1: I don't remember ever learning what the primary When he
Speaker 1: said it, I was like, I don't know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about.
Speaker 2: Well, well, you know on the map there's the long lines,
Speaker 2: those that are vertical, those are longitudinal lines, and then
Speaker 2: there are the lines that go horizontal and those are
Speaker 2: our latitudinal lines. So at the middle there's the equator,
Speaker 2: and we talked about that so much throughout school. The
Speaker 2: zero degree line, right, it splits our planet into the
Speaker 2: north and south hemispheres. But the prime meridian is our
Speaker 2: basically like your tall equator. It splits our planet into
Speaker 2: our eastern and western hemispheres. Ah okay, so.
Speaker 1: It's the twelve o'clock six o'clock line on our big
Speaker 1: clock of the world.
Speaker 4: And the reason that that's located there, and the prime
Speaker 4: meridian that's located there, which is super important to map making,
Speaker 4: is because of the needs of the British Empire at
Speaker 4: the time and the role of British science and technology
Speaker 4: and the way that it was connected to both the
Speaker 4: growth of early capitalism in Britain but also the growth
Speaker 4: of the British Imperial State. And so there's those kind
Speaker 4: of technological advancements that also make map it's more accurate.
Speaker 4: That kind of tie into a larger story of how
Speaker 4: maps and not making connect to power and power relationships.
Speaker 2: There's a viral clip right now of woman talking about
Speaker 2: she says when she travels, she says that she's going
Speaker 2: to the far West if she's going to the United States,
Speaker 2: and people laugh, and she was like, but when I
Speaker 2: say Middle East, you don't laugh because it is accepted.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, Middle East to who, right? And I
Speaker 2: think this is just kind of very similar to the
Speaker 2: same thing You're saying, and even in preparation for this episode,
Speaker 2: I was thinking about this in the context of power
Speaker 2: and what it means to be a member when you
Speaker 2: start making these maps, and you said these maps tell stories,
Speaker 2: there are also stories we tell about ourselves about what
Speaker 2: groups we belong to. I belonged to the group on
Speaker 2: this side of this river on the map, or this
Speaker 2: side of this line on the map. And I was like,
Speaker 2: you know what, I should start calling the United States
Speaker 2: Northern Mexico. And I was like, I don't even remember.
Speaker 2: I don't know what your history is. Like I was like,
Speaker 2: but I don't even remember when did we bring in
Speaker 2: Texas and all of these things. And so I went
Speaker 2: back to the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hudalgo and I was
Speaker 2: reading all of these things, and I was like, Hey,
Speaker 2: this isn't even really our land, okay, you know, And
Speaker 2: I think there's so much history. In the same way
Speaker 2: that you say maps tell stories, they also can collapse.
Speaker 2: You know a lot of stories as well. And when
Speaker 2: we think about maps as tools of power, and we
Speaker 2: think about somebody had to draw these things in the
Speaker 2: same way that we talk about different groups of identities,
Speaker 2: in a way I feel like maps could be more
Speaker 2: of a social construct than an objective reality, because if
Speaker 2: you think about it, the land itself doesn't change, just
Speaker 2: what the value we assigned to it does exactly. And
Speaker 2: so I'm curious, doctor Ewood, in your experience research classes
Speaker 2: that you're teaching, do you find yourself leaning towards or
Speaker 2: away from the idea of maps being more about human
Speaker 2: decisions or do you find that you feel like they're
Speaker 2: more about geography for you?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, that's a really interesting kind of provocative question,
Speaker 4: and I think, you know, as a way to make
Speaker 4: me jump into this, you know, I always tell my
Speaker 4: students being in the Northern Hemisphere, there's nothing that says
Speaker 4: in reality that the North is always positioned at the
Speaker 4: top of a map, right, And that in itself reveals
Speaker 4: a particular kind of way of thinking about a set
Speaker 4: of spatial relationships and reveals a kind of way of
Speaker 4: what we think is.
Speaker 3: Kind of important.
Speaker 4: And I had a chance to go to Australia a
Speaker 4: few years ago, and if you go to Australia, most
Speaker 4: of their maps actually have South on the top, and
Speaker 4: it takes a minute to kind of think about those
Speaker 4: kind of relationships and the way that we in the
Speaker 4: Northern Hemisphere and in particularly in the West, really put
Speaker 4: forward a vision of ourselves is the center of the universe.
Speaker 4: And so why we might kind of chuckle at that
Speaker 4: old map I mentioned earlier about how Jerusalem is the
Speaker 4: center of the world and that this is really the
Speaker 4: center orientation in a real sense, we still do the
Speaker 4: same thing. We just placed North America or he placed
Speaker 4: Western Europe, or he placed the Northern Hemisphere for most
Speaker 4: of our maps and most of our globes as the
Speaker 4: center of our attention.
Speaker 1: So it's not really about geography, it's about power and perspective.
Speaker 1: So always like how Tom Cruise refuses to stand next
Speaker 1: to the tall people in his movies, go back and
Speaker 1: watch Top Gun Maverick, people either have to be sitting
Speaker 1: down or be far away from him. John Hamm sitting
Speaker 1: down throughout the entire movie.
Speaker 4: And you know, for me, the interesting piece of maps
Speaker 4: is really about the power relationships and the human constructions
Speaker 4: that they represent. And so an example that I using classes.
Speaker 4: You know, there's different kind of projections for maps, and
Speaker 4: I'm sure all of your listeners know. If you take
Speaker 4: a globe and you flatten it out, if you want
Speaker 4: to test this, you can peel an orange and you
Speaker 4: flatten it out. There's going to be distortions and things
Speaker 4: are not going to line up, And depending on the
Speaker 4: different kind of projection you use, you're going to have
Speaker 4: a different set of distortions in that map.
Speaker 3: And during the Cold War.
Speaker 4: A projection that was really favored by the US government
Speaker 4: and in particular textbook makers who wrote textbooks or brown
Speaker 4: geography was a Mercader projection. And probably view a lot
Speaker 4: are familiar with that Mercader projection from your.
Speaker 3: Time maybe in high school.
Speaker 4: And if you think about it and Mercader projections, they
Speaker 4: tend to exaggerate the size of things in the far
Speaker 4: northern part of the map and the far southern part
Speaker 4: of the map. And so for example, Greenland off the
Speaker 4: coast of Canada, and a Ricadi projection often looks as
Speaker 4: big as Africa when it it would just fit into
Speaker 4: a small piece of Africa. Well, the reason the US
Speaker 4: government liked to use this projection is is it made
Speaker 4: the Soviet Union look exceptionally large in comparison to the
Speaker 4: United States and Western Europe. And so when you started
Speaker 4: to talk about Cold War and geopolitics and you started
Speaker 4: to want to represent the threat that the Soviet Union
Speaker 4: presented to Western Europe and to the United States. A
Speaker 4: mercator projection in a really subtle way, because it distorted
Speaker 4: the Soviet Union, made it look much much larger in
Speaker 4: land mass than it really was, was a really effective
Speaker 4: tool for representing that geopolitical reality and the geopolitical reality
Speaker 4: that the US government wanted to give to US society
Speaker 4: and in particularly US school children. And so that's where
Speaker 4: I think I'd really come down on that kind of
Speaker 4: question and think about maps tell stories, and so when
Speaker 4: you see a map, you want to ask yourself, what
Speaker 4: is the story that this map maker is trying to
Speaker 4: tell me? And the map on your phone is telling
Speaker 4: you how to get from point A to point B,
Speaker 4: but it's still telling you a story. It's still picking
Speaker 4: a route, it's still making decisions about.
Speaker 3: Where that route is, how it goes through the city.
Speaker 4: It's of course taking real time data in terms of
Speaker 4: traffic and those kinds of things or whatever, but it's
Speaker 4: still a story about how you should navigate a city
Speaker 4: space or a country lane, or wherever it is that
Speaker 4: you're traveling from.
Speaker 2: This is actually true.
Speaker 1: I recently saw a video on Instagram where someone was
Speaker 1: using some type of software where you could grab a country,
Speaker 1: or in part of the video, they grabbed Alaska and
Speaker 1: you can drag it all over the world and see
Speaker 1: what the actual size of those countries are. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: drop a link in the episode description so that you
Speaker 1: can see it on Instagram, and we'll probably make some
Speaker 1: things on Instagram to show you what that looks like.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: Maps when we think about inequality and how it's used
Speaker 1: to enforce inequalities. We see that in the United States
Speaker 1: with redlining and redistricting and things like that. Can you
Speaker 1: talk more about how racism shapes the way that maps
Speaker 1: have been created and used historically?
Speaker 4: Oh sure, I mean redlining for those listeners who maybe
Speaker 4: don't know. Back historically, there are these Sandborn maps, and
Speaker 4: they were insurance maps, and in particular fire insurance maps,
Speaker 4: and every city had a Sandborn map when they had
Speaker 4: different toads for the insurance risk of lending money in
Speaker 4: different neighborhoods. If I remember right, I think green meant
Speaker 4: like you were really safe. Yellow meant that you were
Speaker 4: you had some risk if you lent money or provided
Speaker 4: insurance in those neighborhoods and red was no money, no insurance,
Speaker 4: it's a high risk for you to ensure property in
Speaker 4: those neighborhoods. That's the process of redlining were quite literally,
Speaker 4: banks and insurance companies would draw red lines around neighborhoods,
Speaker 4: and one of the key criteria was the question of
Speaker 4: race and who lived in that neighborhood, and neighborhoods that
Speaker 4: were predominantly African American or other persons of color were
Speaker 4: red lined, and it meant that there was no capital
Speaker 4: or very little capital that would inflow into those neighborhoods.
Speaker 4: And interestingly, in a lot of cities, one of the
Speaker 4: ways that we can see the kind of historic realities
Speaker 4: of redlining are those interstate maps that you often get
Speaker 4: if you stop at a rest stop when you're traveling.
Speaker 4: At least when I was a kid, used to get
Speaker 4: like the little map, but the rest stop would be
Speaker 4: about the state.
Speaker 3: And if you look at those maps, and you in
Speaker 3: particularly look at where those highways.
Speaker 4: Are located in every American city really in the United States,
Speaker 4: often those highways were cited in what they call blighted
Speaker 4: neighborhoods that were often had a high number of racial
Speaker 4: minorities who lived there. And so to give you a
Speaker 4: sense in the city of Atlanta, which is where I
Speaker 4: wrote my dissertation about, if you look at where they
Speaker 4: built I seventy five through the heart of the city,
Speaker 4: and you look at where they built I. Twenty, those
Speaker 4: were historically significant African American neighborhoods, and the city built
Speaker 4: those highways because the writing was on the wall in
Speaker 4: the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, it was
Speaker 4: pretty clear that Atlanta, Georgia, by the end of the
Speaker 4: nineteen sixties, in the first part of the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: was going to have a significant enough African American population
Speaker 4: in that city that African Americans were going to be
Speaker 4: able to elect an African American mayor in the city
Speaker 4: of Atlanta. And the white power structure used highway construction
Speaker 4: to try to remove black people from that community and
Speaker 4: to keep Atlanta and the city government in the hands
Speaker 4: of the white power structure for as long as they
Speaker 4: possibly could. And what's true in Atlanta is true all
Speaker 4: over the country. And so that's the power of maps.
Speaker 4: I mean, the story of highways in America isn't a
Speaker 4: story of getting people to go from point A to
Speaker 4: point B in the fastest possible route, particularly in American cities.
Speaker 4: It's what Debra Archer wrote in a Law Review article
Speaker 4: what she titled white Roads through Black Bedrooms and the
Speaker 4: role of highways in America and in segregation is a
Speaker 4: hugely important story to tell, and you can tell that
Speaker 4: with what, at the surface, for many people probably appears
Speaker 4: as an innocuous highway map, but actually represents a story of.
Speaker 3: Segregation and resegregation in American cities.
Speaker 2: This is a really good point, and it's something I
Speaker 2: know from our time t T when we were in
Speaker 2: grad school in Durham, Black Wall Street in Durham and
Speaker 2: thinking about these great areas and we saw the fifteen
Speaker 2: to five OHO one corridor go through there and be
Speaker 2: built in totally disrupt neighborhoods. I can also remember even
Speaker 2: in Greensboro where I grew up, when the highway came
Speaker 2: through town and it was like we could walk to
Speaker 2: the edge of our neighborhood and see where they were
Speaker 2: building a highway.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And I'm always curious about that. When I'm driving. Highways
Speaker 2: feel like they should be straight, But do you ever
Speaker 2: find yourself like on a windy part, and you're like,
Speaker 2: why are we going out this way? Which neighborhoods do
Speaker 2: we avoid? Which neighborhoods Even as I'm riding along, which
Speaker 2: neighborhoods can I see directly to the houses and which
Speaker 2: have those sound barriers and trees around them off of
Speaker 2: the highway. I'm always interested in like that kind of dynamic.
Speaker 2: And I think we've been talking doctor Mwood with you
Speaker 2: about maps and looking at them to tell stories that
Speaker 2: have happened in the past. And I'm really interested and
Speaker 2: curious if you know anything about what's happening right now.
Speaker 2: When we think about Google Maps or Apple Maps giving
Speaker 2: you alternate routes through neighborhoods, is there any difference in
Speaker 2: which neighborhoods traffic is pushed through, or even the impact
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 4: To circle back a little bit to what we talked
Speaker 4: about earlier in this idea of geographies about economics, it's
Speaker 4: about politics, it's about cultures, but all of these kinds
Speaker 4: of things. That's an example of how we produce space,
Speaker 4: and we produce space to be used in particular kinds
Speaker 4: of ways and in particular kinds of contexts, and the
Speaker 4: production of space often gives access to some folks while
Speaker 4: also at the same time denies access to other folks.
Speaker 4: And so there was a group I was working with
Speaker 4: in Mississippi. And we often think about the civil rights
Speaker 4: movement as happening in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
Speaker 4: and of course it did. But what's really interesting, and
Speaker 4: I think a decade that we don't give enough attention to,
Speaker 4: is the nineteen seventies. Because the nineteen seventies were a
Speaker 4: time when all of the hard fought victories of the
Speaker 4: civil rights movement were actually being put into practice across
Speaker 4: the United States. And so this gentleman was a lawyer
Speaker 4: in Mississippi. And so as schools become integrated in Mississippi,
Speaker 4: what counties in Mississippi would do is they would be
Speaker 4: a school kind of in the middle of nowhere, and
Speaker 4: then they would design communities around that school, and they
Speaker 4: would ensure that, because of zoning, houses had to be
Speaker 4: a particular kind of size or had to be a
Speaker 4: particular kind of look, and they would build these concentric
Speaker 4: zones around there. And what they essentially were doing was
Speaker 4: making it impossible for any poor Mississippian to have access
Speaker 4: to this brand new school and an effect. What they
Speaker 4: were doing was resegregating the Mississippi school the public schools
Speaker 4: system without calling it the formal segregation that existed in
Speaker 4: the nineteen forties, ninety fifties, ninety sixties, when groups like
Speaker 4: the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee were fighting to integrate
Speaker 4: those schools. And so that's why I often say that
Speaker 4: geography is the most important thing in our lives that
Speaker 4: most of us don't think about, because if you were
Speaker 4: just to drive through that community, you would see a
Speaker 4: bunch of really nice homes, You would see a bunch
Speaker 4: of folks living in upper middle class lifestyle. You would
Speaker 4: come to the school in the middle and if you
Speaker 4: didn't really know what to think about, or if you
Speaker 4: didn't really know kind of history of that, it would
Speaker 4: just seem like a normal way that the school and
Speaker 4: the community grew up together. But it was an actually
Speaker 4: concerted effort to resegregate Mississippi schools in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4: And there's all kinds of examples like that that go on,
Speaker 4: including in the twenty first century, jerrymandering and the way
Speaker 4: that we think about how we draw political boundaries, for example,
Speaker 4: that totally relate to this idea of making geography and
Speaker 4: also the power of maps and the power of zoning
Speaker 4: and the power of local government to create space and
Speaker 4: create particular kinds of representations of that space.
Speaker 2: For our listeners who don't understand that, could you speak
Speaker 2: a little bit more explicitly about jerrymandering and these political
Speaker 2: maps and zones and why this is a tool or
Speaker 2: how this is a tool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, I mean so, I'm sure most listeners or
Speaker 4: maybe all listeners know. In the US House of Representatives,
Speaker 4: unlike the Senate, where every state gets to senators regardless
Speaker 4: of population, in the House of Representatives, political representation comes
Speaker 4: down to a state's population, and a state with a
Speaker 4: larger population like California, gets a lot more representatives in
Speaker 4: the House of Representatives than a state of Wyoming, which
Speaker 4: has one representative because they don't have very much population,
Speaker 4: even though Wyoming is a huge state, and so different
Speaker 4: states often do those political boundaries differently, and so in
Speaker 4: New York, for example, there is I believe, a nonpartisan
Speaker 4: commission that draws those political boundaries to try to create
Speaker 4: competitive districts and to try to create a fair representation
Speaker 4: of the population in the Congress, as we're witnessing in Texas.
Speaker 4: Some states like Texas, it's a decision that's completely in
Speaker 4: the hands of the legislature. And essentially what that means
Speaker 4: is it's politicians picking their voters, not voters picking their politicians.
Speaker 4: And there has been a long history in this country,
Speaker 4: going back before the Civil Rights Movement, but after the
Speaker 4: Civil rights movement as well of using political district drawing
Speaker 4: power to create different districts, some districts that are going
Speaker 4: to be safe Republicans, some that are going to be
Speaker 4: safe democratic. And there's also been a history in this
Speaker 4: country of using gerry mandarin to get particular kinds of
Speaker 4: racialized outcomes in terms of representation. And so that's the
Speaker 4: role that Jerrymanderin plays in the United States in terms
Speaker 4: of a politics and of political representation.
Speaker 1: When we think about how our maps are drawn, there
Speaker 1: have been communities you're a lot of your research is
Speaker 1: based in this where they say I see your map,
Speaker 1: I raise you another map. Things like the Green Book
Speaker 1: that are created, so maps for safety and resistance. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about the Green Book and
Speaker 1: your research and what you've found, like its origins and
Speaker 1: its purpose.
Speaker 4: So A big piece of I think what's interesting about
Speaker 4: matt making and cartography, and in particular about the Black
Speaker 4: experience in America is the role of black cartographers and
Speaker 4: black cartography in the African American experience in the United States.
Speaker 4: And you know, you can go back to someone like
Speaker 4: Ida Wells Barnett, who was still active in Memphis, Sennessees
Speaker 4: what will it be from the turn of the nineteenth
Speaker 4: century to the twentieth century. She was really involved heavily
Speaker 4: in the anti lynching campaigns that were going on in
Speaker 4: the South. She's an example of an African American woman
Speaker 4: in this case who used cartography and who used visual
Speaker 4: representations of the black experience to advocate for anti lynching
Speaker 4: legislation in the US. And then you can also think
Speaker 4: about someone like WBD Boys and some of the stuff
Speaker 4: that he did for I think it was the Chicago
Speaker 4: World's Fair and the exposition there where he came up
Speaker 4: with these infographics related to the African American experience. And
Speaker 4: some of those infographics don't traditionally look like what we
Speaker 4: think of as a traditional map, but they are a
Speaker 4: cartographic expression of the black experience and provide a really
Speaker 4: interesting snapshot of the black experience in the United States
Speaker 4: at that time, and they're really powerful representations of the
Speaker 4: black experience, and we're a real tool to both represent
Speaker 4: the fact that African Americans in many cases were not
Speaker 4: just surviving but thriving in parts of the United States,
Speaker 4: but also show some disparities between white communities and black
Speaker 4: communities as a way to advocate for more resources and
Speaker 4: more equality. And so during the nineteen tens, twenties, thirties, forties,
Speaker 4: fifties into the nineteen sixties, large parts of the United
Speaker 4: States of America were segregated. And if you were an
Speaker 4: African American motorist traveling, particularly in the US South.
Speaker 3: But also the reality is.
Speaker 4: In a sundown town in Illinois or Michigan, you would
Speaker 4: not be welcome in hotels or restaurants or any of
Speaker 4: the ways that many white Americans kind of took for
Speaker 4: granted when they were traveling places to stay. And so
Speaker 4: there's this guy, his name is Victor Green. He was
Speaker 4: a postman in New York City. He began collecting people
Speaker 4: would send him postcards. He would travel, he would collect
Speaker 4: the names and addresses of homes throughout the United States
Speaker 4: where black men, women, and children when they're traveling, say
Speaker 4: through Naxville, Tennessee, could call up this private home and
Speaker 4: they would have a place to stay or a place
Speaker 4: to get a meal. And that Green Book really represents
Speaker 4: a couple of things. One, it represents the ways in
Speaker 4: which black folks were using again maybe not a traditional map,
Speaker 4: but some geographic expertise and a kind of cartography to
Speaker 4: navigate a contested terrain. But two, I think which is
Speaker 4: also really interesting is because there's names and addresses and businesses.
Speaker 4: It also represents because he produced green Books every year
Speaker 4: or every few years, it really represents a really powerful
Speaker 4: snapshot of African American capital and really important African American
Speaker 4: communities throughout the United States that are also super important
Speaker 4: to that broad history of the black experience in America.
Speaker 4: And so the Green Book is not just a representation
Speaker 4: of someone who is doing good civil rights work and
Speaker 4: doing good community work. It's also a representation of the
Speaker 4: dynamism and the complexity of black communities throughout the United States,
Speaker 4: where in city after city after city, you had these
Speaker 4: black Meca spaces where you had successful black businesses, you
Speaker 4: had successful black doctors and lawyers and folks who owned
Speaker 4: homes and who use their homes to facilitate travel across
Speaker 4: the United States. And so that Green Book is really
Speaker 4: an important document and an important set of addresses. And again,
Speaker 4: if humans are storytelling species, an important book that tells
Speaker 4: an important story about the black experience. Even though if
Speaker 4: you found that, you might just look at a bunch
Speaker 4: of addresses. I don't really understand necessarily now what's so
Speaker 4: important about that, But that is what's important about it,
Speaker 4: even in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: Yes, I love this, and I think it helps us
Speaker 1: see maps as more than just this authority on navigation,
Speaker 1: but seeing how maps can be about survival and belonging
Speaker 1: and even justice or restoring some type of balance or
Speaker 1: creating some safety. We talked about Ptolemy and I'm like,
Speaker 1: who's the next Copernicus? Right, Like where we shift our
Speaker 1: view and say, okay, you know we've been previously thinking
Speaker 1: about maps and centering these kind of folks. You know,
Speaker 1: what does it look like to add some justice and
Speaker 1: some more civil rights and things like that into cartography.
Speaker 1: And so doctor and what you've written about spatial justice,
Speaker 1: I'm curious if you could give us like an overview,
Speaker 1: like what does that mean?
Speaker 2: And how does that connect these ideas.
Speaker 4: I don't know if any of your listeners or I
Speaker 4: don't know if y'all are familiar with this art project
Speaker 4: that was going on in Chicago called the Folded Map Project.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Folded Map Project. That's there's this black woman
Speaker 2: artist that's doing this, Tanika Lewis Johnson. Well, we have
Speaker 2: to put a link to that in the description to
Speaker 2: check it out.
Speaker 4: So in Chicago, the roads run north, south, east, west,
Speaker 4: and so I guess the folks who are Cubs fans
Speaker 4: and white Sox fans know there's a north side and
Speaker 4: there's the south side. And historically the south side of
Speaker 4: Chicago is historically African American. And so you can have
Speaker 4: an address on a street and it can be say
Speaker 4: North Addison Street, or it could be South Addison Street, Okay.
Speaker 4: And what this artist does is they take a map
Speaker 4: and they quite really take those two addresses and they
Speaker 4: fold the map together, and then they take pictures of
Speaker 4: the buildings or the houses or whatever is there at
Speaker 4: those addresses. And it's an invitation to think about the
Speaker 4: larger racial dynamics in Chicago, which, despite the fact that
Speaker 4: it was in the north, probably a lot of listeners
Speaker 4: know Martin Luther King in the nineteen sixties, nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty seven went to Chicago and he fought a
Speaker 4: hard fought and long running battle to try to integrate
Speaker 4: housing in Chicago, because Chicago is a very segregated city.
Speaker 4: And the story that this map maker tells is two things. One,
Speaker 4: it tells a difference between how again space is made.
Speaker 4: Those geographies didn't just happen. You can see the difference
Speaker 4: of buildings, different in structures in different parts of the city.
Speaker 4: But it also tells the story of what geographer Ruth
Speaker 4: Wilson Gilmour in some cases talks about as the kind
Speaker 4: of organized abandonment of black spaces in the city, where
Speaker 4: urban redevelopment and money flows in one direction and it
Speaker 4: flows out of another direction. And so that is an
Speaker 4: example of using map making, using cartography to tell a story,
Speaker 4: but to also tell a story about the broad geographies
Speaker 4: in which we live. And there's a project that I've
Speaker 4: been working on with my colleague Derek Alderman at the
Speaker 4: University of Tennessee, something that we've called the Living Black
Speaker 4: out Lists. And the Living Black out List is not
Speaker 4: a book that you can pick up off a shelf.
Speaker 4: But what it is is is we are trying to
Speaker 4: collect as many of these examples of how African American
Speaker 4: men and women or African American communities are using cartography
Speaker 4: and are using.
Speaker 3: Geography to tell a story.
Speaker 4: About what it means to live as an African American
Speaker 4: in the United States in the twenty first century. There's
Speaker 4: another artist who I believe their name is Sonya Barrett,
Speaker 4: and they're an artist in the UK who does a
Speaker 4: lot of stuff with hair actually, and what they had
Speaker 4: was in the United Kingdom, was in England. They had
Speaker 4: a project called Braiding the Map, and what they did
Speaker 4: is they created all these representations of the slave trade
Speaker 4: through hair and really told a story about the importance
Speaker 4: of the black experience to the making of Great Britain
Speaker 4: and those inter relationships and those spatial relationships that exist
Speaker 4: which make Britain Britain and which flow through race and
Speaker 4: colonialism and enslavement. And so there's all these different ways
Speaker 4: of thinking about how we can use cartography to tell
Speaker 4: stories of spatial justice. And I think the reality is
Speaker 4: we're living in a political moment in the United States,
Speaker 4: and we're living in the twenty first century context where
Speaker 4: what used to be maybe of interest to officials or
Speaker 4: even institutions is now more politically dangerous, and it just
Speaker 4: highlights how important it is for communities and individuals to
Speaker 4: be able to tell.
Speaker 3: Their own story.
Speaker 4: There's another project, which again is cartography like, but it
Speaker 4: was a group of activists in New York City who
Speaker 4: created these stickers and they would go through New York
Speaker 4: City and they would put these stickers on buildings or
Speaker 4: sidewalks or signs where enslaved people had lived, or where
Speaker 4: families had lived who owned enslaved people.
Speaker 1: So I just looked this up and the project is
Speaker 1: called Slavers of New York. And so they have this
Speaker 1: sticker campaign or activists, artists, educators, and researchers designed stickers
Speaker 1: that resemble New York street signs, and these stickers have
Speaker 1: the names of historical figures who owned enslaved people, and
Speaker 1: on those stickers they also include the number of people.
Speaker 2: That they had enslaved.
Speaker 1: So it fits right over a street sign, and they
Speaker 1: put it all over New York. I think over a
Speaker 1: thousand have been put up, and they get removed and
Speaker 1: defaced and things like that by folks who are trying
Speaker 1: to silence these you know, cartographers, but the aim is
Speaker 1: to confront persistent invisibility of the history of enslaved people
Speaker 1: in New York City. What a way to add some
Speaker 1: context in like real time, you know, yeah, bring the
Speaker 1: history forward.
Speaker 4: I like that, and it was a way of telling
Speaker 4: the story of enslavement in New York City. Again, we
Speaker 4: tend to think about slavery or something that happened down
Speaker 4: South New York City was a really really important and
Speaker 4: early moment in the growth of enslavement in the United States.
Speaker 4: And trying to tell that story and try to tell
Speaker 4: that cartography through this sticker program or putting stickers across
Speaker 4: the city and then inviting people to read more about it.
Speaker 4: It's another example of what we call the living black
Speaker 4: out lists, which is telling this story that's super important
Speaker 4: in the history of New York City.
Speaker 1: This was a really good conversation because it made me
Speaker 1: think about maps in a different way. Absolutely, I think
Speaker 1: that when I think about maps, I'm not thinking about
Speaker 1: the power associated with in the way that it is
Speaker 1: used even present day to marginalize certain communities further and
Speaker 1: to deny people rights and to honestly reframe how we
Speaker 1: view the world. Maps feel like an undersold or undervalued
Speaker 1: single source of truth for some folks when it's possible that, well,
Speaker 1: we see that it's not always, you know, just one way.
Speaker 1: And I was also thinking about like when he mentioned
Speaker 1: maps in the gas station, and I was like, when
Speaker 1: it's the last time I saw a map in the
Speaker 1: gas station? It was the last time I even looked
Speaker 1: for one, because I'm constantly looking at my phone, and
Speaker 1: if there's information and it's all digital, it feels like
Speaker 1: we'll always have access to it. But as it changes,
Speaker 1: what version of it do we have access to? Becomes
Speaker 1: the question? You know, that's the thing we have to
Speaker 1: think about. It felt like the Internet would be around forever,
Speaker 1: but where's your black Planet page? It's so true because
Speaker 1: even when you think of like how GPS has changed
Speaker 1: over time, like now we have like GPS built into
Speaker 1: cars and things like that, and remember when like if
Speaker 1: someone would add like a new highway or new development
Speaker 1: was put in a community and it didn't show up
Speaker 1: on that map, right, you were messed up. And it's
Speaker 1: because your technology in your car was behind. And so
Speaker 1: now everybody's using you know, car playing things like that.
Speaker 1: But that was a really great point that doctor Enwood
Speaker 1: made where he was saying that you know, that is
Speaker 1: what present day cartographers are working to combat, is the
Speaker 1: loss of these maps to the technological age, and like,
Speaker 1: as technology advances, being able to preserve these maps because if,
Speaker 1: like he said, map are a storytelling mechanism, knowing our
Speaker 1: history and knowing you know, how things have evolved is
Speaker 1: so critical, so that we don't you know, repeat the
Speaker 1: same mistakes, and so that we empower the folks that
Speaker 1: have been silenced in the past. Preserving those maps is
Speaker 1: activism such a great way to think about that so
Speaker 1: so true. You can find us on X and Instagram
Speaker 1: at Dope Labs podcast.
Speaker 2: Tt is on X and Instagram at d R Underscore
Speaker 2: t Sho.
Speaker 1: And you can find Takiya at z said so.
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Speaker 1: Our senior supervising producer is Kristin Lapour and our associate
Speaker 1: producer is Issara Sives.
Speaker 2: Dope Labs is sound design, edited and mixed by James Barber.
Speaker 2: Limanada Media is Vice President of Partnerships and Production is
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