While thinking about the racial composition of the Twin Cities area and the Castile tragedy, I happened to run across a link to a post on Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish with some slightly out of date relevance – a fantastic map of racial composition in the United States based on the 2010 Census, built by Dustin Cable at theUniversity of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. Andrew was referencing a Wired article:
White people are shown with blue dots; African-Americans with green; Asians with red; and Latinos with orange, with all other race categories from the Census represented by brown. Since the dots are smaller than pixels at most zoom levels, Cable assigned shades of color based on the multiple dots therein. From a distance, for example, certain neighborhoods will look purple, but zooming-in reveals a finer-grained breakdown of red and blue–or, really, black and white.
“There are a lot of moving parts in this process, so this can cause different shades of color to appear at different zoom levels in really dense areas, like you see in NYC,” Cable explains. “I played around with dot size and transparency for a while and settled on the current scheme as being adequate.” You can read more about Cable’s methodology here, but it comes down to this: When you’re dealing with 300 million dots at varying levels of zoom, getting the presentation just right is as much an art as a science.
So here’s the Twin Cities area, with Lauderdale / Falcon Heights in the center of the picture, at max zoom:
It gives an idea of how white and asian the Twin Cities area remains. Here’s a direct link to the map.
