August 17, 2025 • 41 mins
Maps aren’t neutral. From redlining and colonial borders to Texas redistricting and ICE checkpoints, lines on a map are decisions—about who gets power, who gets protection, and who gets pushed out. In this episode, Zakiya and Titi talk with Dr. Joshua Inwood, a professor of geography and African American studies at Penn State, about the racial politics of cartography. They trace the history of mapmaking, explore The Green Book as a form of resistance, and unpack how today’s fights—like the border crackdown and redistricting battles in Texas—are part of a long tradition of drawing lines to control people.
Instagram post showing the true size of countries: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLsFqaPRj8a/?igsh=MWhncGs3ZnhndGE5eA==
Slavers of NY Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/slaversofny?igsh=MWI3Y2lpeHJyb2VsbA==
The Folded Map Project: https://www.foldedmapproject.com/
The Living Black Atlas: https://derekalderman.com/the-living-black-atlas/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm t T and I'm Zakiah, and this is Dope Labs.
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore
science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Tt. I've been thinking a lot about maps lately.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Every time I see a headline it's talking about border patrol, crackdowns, ice,
tensions at the borders, or even maps in the different context,
which is like I call these imaginary maps, but like
political maps, you know that follow different lines and redistricting,
it's clear that maps are not just neutral tools.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Right. I was reading this book it's called The Address Book,
and it basically says where you even get mapped in
a zip code that is like a better indicator of
like your lifetime earnings and success and health than other
factors that we may think, like what you're you were born, right,
that's wild to me, It is really wild.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
And it's clear that the lines that are drawn on
maps are tied to power and they've been used to
enforce who gets access, who gets surveiled, who gets shut out.
And it's not just history, it's happening right now. Like
you were saying with there's a lot of redistricting in Texas,
and it's all very confusing to me because I know
nothing about this. Yeah, and everybody shouting border, border, border,
(01:26):
and I'm like, baby, do you know what a border
really is?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Right? When did we start talking about this? So today
we're digging right into it, into the politics of map making,
borders and how these lines, both visible and invisible, shape
our lives.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
And we couldn't think of a better person to talk
to than doctor Joshua Enwood, a professor of geography and
African American Studies at my alma mater, the Pennsylvania State University.
His work dives into racialized cartographies and cartography is the
study of map. He also researches spatial justice and how
the Green Book functioned as a countermapping during Jim Crow,
(02:03):
Doctor Mwood, We're so excited to have you here.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Thanks so much.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
I really appreciate the invitation. And it's always great to
be with some Penn State alone. And all I can
say is, we.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Are Penn State. Oh here we go.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Okay, So let's start from the beginning. Maps feel natural
to us now, because I mean every device that we
have has a map function on it. But at some
point there had to be someone that decided, hey, let
me start drawing lines on a sheet of paper to
create this thing.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Before we were all looking at Google maps, you know,
and before that there was map quest. I don't know
if you remember that, but I had a lot of printouts, okay,
maps for like these hand drawn interpretations of the world. So,
doctor Enwood, can you start us broadly before we zoom in,
and just explain to us what maps mean to a society.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Well, you know, one of the ways I think we'd
kind of nice to jump into this conversation is to
think just really broadly for a second about geography. And
you know, one of the things I always tell my
undergraduate students, and I always tell my graduate students, and
I always tell anybody who will listen, is that geography is,
for most of us one of the most important things
in our lives that we don't really think critically about.
(03:18):
And the places you work, the places you live, if
you go to worship someplace, the community you grew up on.
It did not just magically happen. I did not just
appear out of the ether. But it's the result of
really particular economic systems, of political systems, of culture, and
(03:39):
it's this kind of coming together of all of these
different things that really produces space and place. And if
you think about it, maps being human inventions are the
invitation for us to think.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
About some of those power dynamics and some of.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Those economic dynamics that go into how we think about
geography and the way that we relate to these different
kind of places and spaces. And so the reality is
is that maps, in some kind of form or another
arguably have been around for as long as humans have
been on earth. And the reason for that is is
that you can communicate a lot of really complicated information,
(04:18):
and you can communicate a lot of spatial information in
a way that when it was paper maps was super portable.
And these maps and these ways of thinking are super
important to document experience, and it's a hugely important piece
of human history is how we think about these relationships
and how we think about how we engage with one another,
(04:38):
and maps reflect that.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Thinking about even little neighborhood maps, I used to drop
out like whose house was where? And how far and
like what's the shortest path? And I remember, I don't
know if anybody else did this, but I would just
try to make these little routes from where I live
to my school, and like I was making my own
little maps of my little world. And so before we
zoom out to bigger maps US, I have a little
(05:00):
bit more of a historical question, like is there you're saying,
as long as we know, but I think I tend
to think about like the globe or like a US map.
Are there, like any artifacts like that that are super
important that we should be thinking about for a time
scale or just know that maps have always been around.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
Well, I mean there's certainly some you know, if you
go back and you can look at in particular from
the era of kind of colonization and the era of imperialism.
I think for most of us, those are probably a
lot of the maps that we're familiar with. They're often
in history textbooks, there's sometimes in geography textbooks that are
often used to illustrate historical processes, age of explorers, or
(05:38):
whatever it is that you necessarily want to think about
and talk about.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
And so for a lot of us those maps are important.
But to give you a sense.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
Of what we talk about when we think about why
maps matter and how they reflect particular kinds of power dynamics,
there's a really famous map from the time.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Of the Crusades.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
What it does is it places Jerusalem in the center
of the world. And what it does is it means
that all of the rest of the world is situated
around that one central point. And so that reflects at
the time, really the kind of power of the Church
and also a time of Western intellectual thought which really
plays Jerusalem and Christianity at the center of the universe.
(06:24):
And so there's maps like that that we can start
to go back and look at and think about and
work through and really start to try to understand how
people were thinking about, in this case, not just their
relationship with one another, but their relationship in the broader cosmos,
and how it relates to some of the kind of
supernatural forces that they were thinking about or trying to
work through as it relates to early Christianity. One of
(06:47):
the first map makers was actually an ancient Greek named Ptolome,
and some of your listeners might know he was one
of the early Greek mathematicians who really figured out that
the Earth was round and not flat. I'm sure you
could go back and you could find maps in ancient
China that go back maybe even earlier and really think
about how some of the early Chinese dynasties were also
in relationship with each other, the Silk Road, those kinds
(07:10):
of things, and so maps are central to the human
experience and being a storytelling species. Maps are really central
to that process and how we think about how humans
can tell a spatial story. And humans are also a
species historically that have traveled and explore and push boundaries,
and of course this causes conflict, and we can talk
(07:30):
about that too, but that's a piece of wide cartography
and mat making is really important.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
You talk about Ptolemy and how in some ancient Chinese dynasties,
I'm sure that they were making maps, but who did
they dub the map makers? Was this like a special
job for only certain types of people that had a
certain pedigree, or how do they decide who has the
power to do that?
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Because it's a really powerful tool.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
You know, it goes back really into the development of
modern Western ways of thinking, at least in the context
of Anglo American geography. We're talking about, you know, the
fourteen fifteen, sixteen hundreds, when cartography, which is the science
of map making, really starts to get its kind of
intellectual outlines, and as that grows, it grows along with colonialism,
(08:22):
it grows along with imperialism, it grows along with colonization,
and it was really the role of a lot of
European monarchs and monarchies to try to map and understand
the world, and probably again map making being the center
of power. I don't know how many of your listeners
have ever been to Grantwich, England, but you can go
to the observatory there and you can think about the
(08:45):
establishment of the prime meridian.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Ooh, I remember when I learned what the prime meridian was.
It was a long time ago, but I remember it
feeling like meridian was a fancy word.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
I don't remember ever learning what the primary When he
said it, I was like, I don't know what you're
talking about.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Well, well, you know on the map there's the long lines,
those that are vertical, those are longitudinal lines, and then
there are the lines that go horizontal and those are
our latitudinal lines. So at the middle there's the equator,
and we talked about that so much throughout school. The
zero degree line, right, it splits our planet into the
north and south hemispheres. But the prime meridian is our
(09:23):
basically like your tall equator. It splits our planet into
our eastern and western hemispheres. Ah okay, so.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
It's the twelve o'clock six o'clock line on our big
clock of the world.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
And the reason that that's located there, and the prime
meridian that's located there, which is super important to map making,
is because of the needs of the British Empire at
the time and the role of British science and technology
and the way that it was connected to both the
growth of early capitalism in Britain but also the growth
of the British Imperial State. And so there's those kind
(09:57):
of technological advancements that also make map it's more accurate.
That kind of tie into a larger story of how
maps and not making connect to power and power relationships.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
There's a viral clip right now of woman talking about
she says when she travels, she says that she's going
to the far West if she's going to the United States,
and people laugh, and she was like, but when I
say Middle East, you don't laugh because it is accepted.
And I'm like, Middle East to who, right? And I
think this is just kind of very similar to the
same thing You're saying, and even in preparation for this episode,
(10:48):
I was thinking about this in the context of power
and what it means to be a member when you
start making these maps, and you said these maps tell stories,
there are also stories we tell about ourselves about what
groups we belong to. I belonged to the group on
this side of this river on the map, or this
side of this line on the map. And I was like,
you know what, I should start calling the United States
(11:10):
Northern Mexico. And I was like, I don't even remember.
I don't know what your history is. Like I was like,
but I don't even remember when did we bring in
Texas and all of these things. And so I went
back to the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hudalgo and I was
reading all of these things, and I was like, Hey,
this isn't even really our land, okay, you know, And
(11:33):
I think there's so much history. In the same way
that you say maps tell stories, they also can collapse.
You know a lot of stories as well. And when
we think about maps as tools of power, and we
think about somebody had to draw these things in the
same way that we talk about different groups of identities,
in a way I feel like maps could be more
(11:55):
of a social construct than an objective reality, because if
you think about it, the land itself doesn't change, just
what the value we assigned to it does exactly. And
so I'm curious, doctor Ewood, in your experience research classes
that you're teaching, do you find yourself leaning towards or
away from the idea of maps being more about human
(12:16):
decisions or do you find that you feel like they're
more about geography for you?
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Well, I mean, that's a really interesting kind of provocative question,
and I think, you know, as a way to make
me jump into this, you know, I always tell my
students being in the Northern Hemisphere, there's nothing that says
in reality that the North is always positioned at the
top of a map, right, And that in itself reveals
(12:42):
a particular kind of way of thinking about a set
of spatial relationships and reveals a kind of way of
what we think is.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Kind of important.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
And I had a chance to go to Australia a
few years ago, and if you go to Australia, most
of their maps actually have South on the top, and
it takes a minute to kind of think about those
kind of relationships and the way that we in the
Northern Hemisphere and in particularly in the West, really put
forward a vision of ourselves is the center of the universe.
And so why we might kind of chuckle at that
(13:10):
old map I mentioned earlier about how Jerusalem is the
center of the world and that this is really the
center orientation in a real sense, we still do the
same thing. We just placed North America or he placed
Western Europe, or he placed the Northern Hemisphere for most
of our maps and most of our globes as the
center of our attention.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
So it's not really about geography, it's about power and perspective.
So always like how Tom Cruise refuses to stand next
to the tall people in his movies, go back and
watch Top Gun Maverick, people either have to be sitting
down or be far away from him. John Hamm sitting
down throughout the entire movie.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
And you know, for me, the interesting piece of maps
is really about the power relationships and the human constructions
that they represent. And so an example that I using classes.
You know, there's different kind of projections for maps, and
I'm sure all of your listeners know. If you take
a globe and you flatten it out, if you want
(14:10):
to test this, you can peel an orange and you
flatten it out. There's going to be distortions and things
are not going to line up, And depending on the
different kind of projection you use, you're going to have
a different set of distortions in that map.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
And during the Cold War.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
A projection that was really favored by the US government
and in particular textbook makers who wrote textbooks or brown
geography was a Mercader projection. And probably view a lot
are familiar with that Mercader projection from your.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Time maybe in high school.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
And if you think about it and Mercader projections, they
tend to exaggerate the size of things in the far
northern part of the map and the far southern part
of the map. And so for example, Greenland off the
coast of Canada, and a Ricadi projection often looks as
big as Africa when it it would just fit into
a small piece of Africa. Well, the reason the US
(15:03):
government liked to use this projection is is it made
the Soviet Union look exceptionally large in comparison to the
United States and Western Europe. And so when you started
to talk about Cold War and geopolitics and you started
to want to represent the threat that the Soviet Union
presented to Western Europe and to the United States. A
(15:24):
mercator projection in a really subtle way, because it distorted
the Soviet Union, made it look much much larger in
land mass than it really was, was a really effective
tool for representing that geopolitical reality and the geopolitical reality
that the US government wanted to give to US society
(15:46):
and in particularly US school children. And so that's where
I think I'd really come down on that kind of
question and think about maps tell stories, and so when
you see a map, you want to ask yourself, what
is the story that this map maker is trying to
tell me? And the map on your phone is telling
(16:08):
you how to get from point A to point B,
but it's still telling you a story. It's still picking
a route, it's still making decisions about.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Where that route is, how it goes through the city.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
It's of course taking real time data in terms of
traffic and those kinds of things or whatever, but it's
still a story about how you should navigate a city
space or a country lane, or wherever it is that
you're traveling from.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
This is actually true.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
I recently saw a video on Instagram where someone was
using some type of software where you could grab a country,
or in part of the video, they grabbed Alaska and
you can drag it all over the world and see
what the actual size of those countries are. I'm gonna
drop a link in the episode description so that you
can see it on Instagram, and we'll probably make some
(16:53):
things on Instagram to show you what that looks like.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Maps when we think about inequality and how it's used
to enforce inequalities. We see that in the United States
with redlining and redistricting and things like that. Can you
talk more about how racism shapes the way that maps
have been created and used historically?
Speaker 4 (17:16):
Oh sure, I mean redlining for those listeners who maybe
don't know. Back historically, there are these Sandborn maps, and
they were insurance maps, and in particular fire insurance maps,
and every city had a Sandborn map when they had
different toads for the insurance risk of lending money in
different neighborhoods. If I remember right, I think green meant
(17:37):
like you were really safe. Yellow meant that you were
you had some risk if you lent money or provided
insurance in those neighborhoods and red was no money, no insurance,
it's a high risk for you to ensure property in
those neighborhoods. That's the process of redlining were quite literally,
(17:58):
banks and insurance companies would draw red lines around neighborhoods,
and one of the key criteria was the question of
race and who lived in that neighborhood, and neighborhoods that
were predominantly African American or other persons of color were
red lined, and it meant that there was no capital
or very little capital that would inflow into those neighborhoods.
(18:21):
And interestingly, in a lot of cities, one of the
ways that we can see the kind of historic realities
of redlining are those interstate maps that you often get
if you stop at a rest stop when you're traveling.
At least when I was a kid, used to get
like the little map, but the rest stop would be
about the state.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
And if you look at those maps, and you in
particularly look at where those highways.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
Are located in every American city really in the United States,
often those highways were cited in what they call blighted
neighborhoods that were often had a high number of racial
minorities who lived there. And so to give you a
sense in the city of Atlanta, which is where I
(19:03):
wrote my dissertation about, if you look at where they
built I seventy five through the heart of the city,
and you look at where they built I. Twenty, those
were historically significant African American neighborhoods, and the city built
those highways because the writing was on the wall in
the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, it was
(19:24):
pretty clear that Atlanta, Georgia, by the end of the
nineteen sixties, in the first part of the nineteen seventies,
was going to have a significant enough African American population
in that city that African Americans were going to be
able to elect an African American mayor in the city
of Atlanta. And the white power structure used highway construction
to try to remove black people from that community and
(19:48):
to keep Atlanta and the city government in the hands
of the white power structure for as long as they
possibly could. And what's true in Atlanta is true all
over the country. And so that's the power of maps.
I mean, the story of highways in America isn't a
story of getting people to go from point A to
(20:09):
point B in the fastest possible route, particularly in American cities.
It's what Debra Archer wrote in a Law Review article
what she titled white Roads through Black Bedrooms and the
role of highways in America and in segregation is a
hugely important story to tell, and you can tell that
(20:29):
with what, at the surface, for many people probably appears
as an innocuous highway map, but actually represents a story of.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Segregation and resegregation in American cities.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
This is a really good point, and it's something I
know from our time t T when we were in
grad school in Durham, Black Wall Street in Durham and
thinking about these great areas and we saw the fifteen
to five OHO one corridor go through there and be
built in totally disrupt neighborhoods. I can also remember even
in Greensboro where I grew up, when the highway came
(21:02):
through town and it was like we could walk to
the edge of our neighborhood and see where they were
building a highway.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
And I'm always curious about that. When I'm driving. Highways
feel like they should be straight, But do you ever
find yourself like on a windy part, and you're like,
why are we going out this way? Which neighborhoods do
we avoid? Which neighborhoods Even as I'm riding along, which
neighborhoods can I see directly to the houses and which
have those sound barriers and trees around them off of
the highway. I'm always interested in like that kind of dynamic.
(21:31):
And I think we've been talking doctor Mwood with you
about maps and looking at them to tell stories that
have happened in the past. And I'm really interested and
curious if you know anything about what's happening right now.
When we think about Google Maps or Apple Maps giving
you alternate routes through neighborhoods, is there any difference in
which neighborhoods traffic is pushed through, or even the impact
(21:53):
of it.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
To circle back a little bit to what we talked
about earlier in this idea of geographies about economics, it's
about politics, it's about cultures, but all of these kinds
of things. That's an example of how we produce space,
and we produce space to be used in particular kinds
of ways and in particular kinds of contexts, and the
(22:16):
production of space often gives access to some folks while
also at the same time denies access to other folks.
And so there was a group I was working with
in Mississippi. And we often think about the civil rights
movement as happening in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
and of course it did. But what's really interesting, and
(22:36):
I think a decade that we don't give enough attention to,
is the nineteen seventies. Because the nineteen seventies were a
time when all of the hard fought victories of the
civil rights movement were actually being put into practice across
the United States. And so this gentleman was a lawyer
in Mississippi. And so as schools become integrated in Mississippi,
(22:56):
what counties in Mississippi would do is they would be
a school kind of in the middle of nowhere, and
then they would design communities around that school, and they
would ensure that, because of zoning, houses had to be
a particular kind of size or had to be a
particular kind of look, and they would build these concentric
zones around there. And what they essentially were doing was
(23:19):
making it impossible for any poor Mississippian to have access
to this brand new school and an effect. What they
were doing was resegregating the Mississippi school the public schools
system without calling it the formal segregation that existed in
the nineteen forties, ninety fifties, ninety sixties, when groups like
the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee were fighting to integrate
(23:39):
those schools. And so that's why I often say that
geography is the most important thing in our lives that
most of us don't think about, because if you were
just to drive through that community, you would see a
bunch of really nice homes, You would see a bunch
of folks living in upper middle class lifestyle. You would
come to the school in the middle and if you
didn't really know what to think about, or if you
(24:00):
didn't really know kind of history of that, it would
just seem like a normal way that the school and
the community grew up together. But it was an actually
concerted effort to resegregate Mississippi schools in the nineteen seventies.
And there's all kinds of examples like that that go on,
including in the twenty first century, jerrymandering and the way
(24:20):
that we think about how we draw political boundaries, for example,
that totally relate to this idea of making geography and
also the power of maps and the power of zoning
and the power of local government to create space and
create particular kinds of representations of that space.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
For our listeners who don't understand that, could you speak
a little bit more explicitly about jerrymandering and these political
maps and zones and why this is a tool or
how this is a tool.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
Yeah, sure, I mean so, I'm sure most listeners or
maybe all listeners know. In the US House of Representatives,
unlike the Senate, where every state gets to senators regardless
of population, in the House of Representatives, political representation comes
down to a state's population, and a state with a
larger population like California, gets a lot more representatives in
(25:12):
the House of Representatives than a state of Wyoming, which
has one representative because they don't have very much population,
even though Wyoming is a huge state, and so different
states often do those political boundaries differently, and so in
New York, for example, there is I believe, a nonpartisan
commission that draws those political boundaries to try to create
(25:38):
competitive districts and to try to create a fair representation
of the population in the Congress, as we're witnessing in Texas.
Some states like Texas, it's a decision that's completely in
the hands of the legislature. And essentially what that means
is it's politicians picking their voters, not voters picking their politicians.
(26:03):
And there has been a long history in this country,
going back before the Civil Rights Movement, but after the
Civil rights movement as well of using political district drawing
power to create different districts, some districts that are going
to be safe Republicans, some that are going to be
safe democratic. And there's also been a history in this
(26:24):
country of using gerry mandarin to get particular kinds of
racialized outcomes in terms of representation. And so that's the
role that Jerrymanderin plays in the United States in terms
of a politics and of political representation.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
When we think about how our maps are drawn, there
have been communities you're a lot of your research is
based in this where they say I see your map,
I raise you another map. Things like the Green Book
that are created, so maps for safety and resistance. Can
you talk a little bit about the Green Book and
your research and what you've found, like its origins and
(27:14):
its purpose.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
So A big piece of I think what's interesting about
matt making and cartography, and in particular about the Black
experience in America is the role of black cartographers and
black cartography in the African American experience in the United States.
And you know, you can go back to someone like
Ida Wells Barnett, who was still active in Memphis, Sennessees
(27:37):
what will it be from the turn of the nineteenth
century to the twentieth century. She was really involved heavily
in the anti lynching campaigns that were going on in
the South. She's an example of an African American woman
in this case who used cartography and who used visual
representations of the black experience to advocate for anti lynching
(27:58):
legislation in the US. And then you can also think
about someone like WBD Boys and some of the stuff
that he did for I think it was the Chicago
World's Fair and the exposition there where he came up
with these infographics related to the African American experience. And
some of those infographics don't traditionally look like what we
think of as a traditional map, but they are a
cartographic expression of the black experience and provide a really
(28:23):
interesting snapshot of the black experience in the United States
at that time, and they're really powerful representations of the
black experience, and we're a real tool to both represent
the fact that African Americans in many cases were not
just surviving but thriving in parts of the United States,
(28:44):
but also show some disparities between white communities and black
communities as a way to advocate for more resources and
more equality. And so during the nineteen tens, twenties, thirties, forties,
fifties into the nineteen sixties, large parts of the United
States of America were segregated. And if you were an
African American motorist traveling, particularly in the US South.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
But also the reality is.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
In a sundown town in Illinois or Michigan, you would
not be welcome in hotels or restaurants or any of
the ways that many white Americans kind of took for
granted when they were traveling places to stay. And so
there's this guy, his name is Victor Green. He was
a postman in New York City. He began collecting people
(29:31):
would send him postcards. He would travel, he would collect
the names and addresses of homes throughout the United States
where black men, women, and children when they're traveling, say
through Naxville, Tennessee, could call up this private home and
they would have a place to stay or a place
to get a meal. And that Green Book really represents
(29:53):
a couple of things. One, it represents the ways in
which black folks were using again maybe not a traditional map,
but some geographic expertise and a kind of cartography to
navigate a contested terrain. But two, I think which is
also really interesting is because there's names and addresses and businesses.
(30:15):
It also represents because he produced green Books every year
or every few years, it really represents a really powerful
snapshot of African American capital and really important African American
communities throughout the United States that are also super important
to that broad history of the black experience in America.
(30:37):
And so the Green Book is not just a representation
of someone who is doing good civil rights work and
doing good community work. It's also a representation of the
dynamism and the complexity of black communities throughout the United States,
where in city after city after city, you had these
black Meca spaces where you had successful black businesses, you
(31:01):
had successful black doctors and lawyers and folks who owned
homes and who use their homes to facilitate travel across
the United States. And so that Green Book is really
an important document and an important set of addresses. And again,
if humans are storytelling species, an important book that tells
an important story about the black experience. Even though if
(31:24):
you found that, you might just look at a bunch
of addresses. I don't really understand necessarily now what's so
important about that, But that is what's important about it,
even in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yes, I love this, and I think it helps us
see maps as more than just this authority on navigation,
but seeing how maps can be about survival and belonging
and even justice or restoring some type of balance or
creating some safety. We talked about Ptolemy and I'm like,
who's the next Copernicus? Right, Like where we shift our
(31:53):
view and say, okay, you know we've been previously thinking
about maps and centering these kind of folks. You know,
what does it look like to add some justice and
some more civil rights and things like that into cartography.
And so doctor and what you've written about spatial justice,
I'm curious if you could give us like an overview,
(32:13):
like what does that mean?
Speaker 2 (32:14):
And how does that connect these ideas.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
I don't know if any of your listeners or I
don't know if y'all are familiar with this art project
that was going on in Chicago called the Folded Map Project.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yes, the Folded Map Project. That's there's this black woman
artist that's doing this, Tanika Lewis Johnson. Well, we have
to put a link to that in the description to
check it out.
Speaker 4 (32:34):
So in Chicago, the roads run north, south, east, west,
and so I guess the folks who are Cubs fans
and white Sox fans know there's a north side and
there's the south side. And historically the south side of
Chicago is historically African American. And so you can have
an address on a street and it can be say
North Addison Street, or it could be South Addison Street, Okay.
(32:56):
And what this artist does is they take a map
and they quite really take those two addresses and they
fold the map together, and then they take pictures of
the buildings or the houses or whatever is there at
those addresses. And it's an invitation to think about the
larger racial dynamics in Chicago, which, despite the fact that
(33:19):
it was in the north, probably a lot of listeners
know Martin Luther King in the nineteen sixties, nineteen sixty six,
nineteen sixty seven went to Chicago and he fought a
hard fought and long running battle to try to integrate
housing in Chicago, because Chicago is a very segregated city.
And the story that this map maker tells is two things. One,
it tells a difference between how again space is made.
(33:40):
Those geographies didn't just happen. You can see the difference
of buildings, different in structures in different parts of the city.
But it also tells the story of what geographer Ruth
Wilson Gilmour in some cases talks about as the kind
of organized abandonment of black spaces in the city, where
urban redevelopment and money flows in one direction and it
flows out of another direction. And so that is an
(34:04):
example of using map making, using cartography to tell a story,
but to also tell a story about the broad geographies
in which we live. And there's a project that I've
been working on with my colleague Derek Alderman at the
University of Tennessee, something that we've called the Living Black
out Lists. And the Living Black out List is not
(34:26):
a book that you can pick up off a shelf.
But what it is is is we are trying to
collect as many of these examples of how African American
men and women or African American communities are using cartography
and are using.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Geography to tell a story.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
About what it means to live as an African American
in the United States in the twenty first century. There's
another artist who I believe their name is Sonya Barrett,
and they're an artist in the UK who does a
lot of stuff with hair actually, and what they had
was in the United Kingdom, was in England. They had
(35:10):
a project called Braiding the Map, and what they did
is they created all these representations of the slave trade
through hair and really told a story about the importance
of the black experience to the making of Great Britain
and those inter relationships and those spatial relationships that exist
(35:33):
which make Britain Britain and which flow through race and
colonialism and enslavement. And so there's all these different ways
of thinking about how we can use cartography to tell
stories of spatial justice. And I think the reality is
we're living in a political moment in the United States,
and we're living in the twenty first century context where
what used to be maybe of interest to officials or
(35:57):
even institutions is now more politically dangerous, and it just
highlights how important it is for communities and individuals to
be able to tell.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Their own story.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
There's another project, which again is cartography like, but it
was a group of activists in New York City who
created these stickers and they would go through New York
City and they would put these stickers on buildings or
sidewalks or signs where enslaved people had lived, or where
families had lived who owned enslaved people.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
So I just looked this up and the project is
called Slavers of New York. And so they have this
sticker campaign or activists, artists, educators, and researchers designed stickers
that resemble New York street signs, and these stickers have
the names of historical figures who owned enslaved people, and
(36:49):
on those stickers they also include the number of people.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
That they had enslaved.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
So it fits right over a street sign, and they
put it all over New York. I think over a
thousand have been put up, and they get removed and
defaced and things like that by folks who are trying
to silence these you know, cartographers, but the aim is
to confront persistent invisibility of the history of enslaved people
(37:19):
in New York City. What a way to add some
context in like real time, you know, yeah, bring the
history forward.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
I like that, and it was a way of telling
the story of enslavement in New York City. Again, we
tend to think about slavery or something that happened down
South New York City was a really really important and
early moment in the growth of enslavement in the United States.
And trying to tell that story and try to tell
(37:46):
that cartography through this sticker program or putting stickers across
the city and then inviting people to read more about it.
It's another example of what we call the living black
out lists, which is telling this story that's super important
in the history of New York City.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
This was a really good conversation because it made me
think about maps in a different way. Absolutely, I think
that when I think about maps, I'm not thinking about
the power associated with in the way that it is
used even present day to marginalize certain communities further and
to deny people rights and to honestly reframe how we
(38:29):
view the world. Maps feel like an undersold or undervalued
single source of truth for some folks when it's possible that, well,
we see that it's not always, you know, just one way.
And I was also thinking about like when he mentioned
maps in the gas station, and I was like, when
(38:51):
it's the last time I saw a map in the
gas station? It was the last time I even looked
for one, because I'm constantly looking at my phone, and
if there's information and it's all digital, it feels like
we'll always have access to it. But as it changes,
what version of it do we have access to? Becomes
the question? You know, that's the thing we have to
think about. It felt like the Internet would be around forever,
(39:12):
but where's your black Planet page? It's so true because
even when you think of like how GPS has changed
over time, like now we have like GPS built into
cars and things like that, and remember when like if
someone would add like a new highway or new development
was put in a community and it didn't show up
on that map, right, you were messed up. And it's
(39:34):
because your technology in your car was behind. And so
now everybody's using you know, car playing things like that.
But that was a really great point that doctor Enwood
made where he was saying that you know, that is
what present day cartographers are working to combat, is the
loss of these maps to the technological age, and like,
(39:54):
as technology advances, being able to preserve these maps because if,
like he said, map are a storytelling mechanism, knowing our
history and knowing you know, how things have evolved is
so critical, so that we don't you know, repeat the
same mistakes, and so that we empower the folks that
have been silenced in the past. Preserving those maps is
(40:16):
activism such a great way to think about that so
so true. You can find us on X and Instagram
at Dope Labs podcast.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Tt is on X and Instagram at d R Underscore
t Sho.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
And you can find Takiya at z said so.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Dope Labs is a production of Leimanada Media.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Our senior supervising producer is Kristin Lapour and our associate
producer is Issara Sives.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Dope Labs is sound design, edited and mixed by James Barber.
Limanada Media is Vice President of Partnerships and Production is
Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart podcast is Katrina Norvio
marketing lead is Alison Kanter. Original music composed and produced
by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music
(41:10):
by Elijah Harvey. Dope Lab is executive produced by US
T T Show Dia and Kia Wattlei
I'm t T and I'm Zakiah, and this is Dope Labs.
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore
science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Tt. I've been thinking a lot about maps lately.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Every time I see a headline it's talking about border patrol, crackdowns, ice,
tensions at the borders, or even maps in the different context,
which is like I call these imaginary maps, but like
political maps, you know that follow different lines and redistricting,
it's clear that maps are not just neutral tools.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Right. I was reading this book it's called The Address Book,
and it basically says where you even get mapped in
a zip code that is like a better indicator of
like your lifetime earnings and success and health than other
factors that we may think, like what you're you were born, right,
that's wild to me, It is really wild.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
And it's clear that the lines that are drawn on
maps are tied to power and they've been used to
enforce who gets access, who gets surveiled, who gets shut out.
And it's not just history, it's happening right now. Like
you were saying with there's a lot of redistricting in Texas,
and it's all very confusing to me because I know
nothing about this. Yeah, and everybody shouting border, border, border,
(01:26):
and I'm like, baby, do you know what a border
really is?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Right? When did we start talking about this? So today
we're digging right into it, into the politics of map making,
borders and how these lines, both visible and invisible, shape
our lives.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
And we couldn't think of a better person to talk
to than doctor Joshua Enwood, a professor of geography and
African American Studies at my alma mater, the Pennsylvania State University.
His work dives into racialized cartographies and cartography is the
study of map. He also researches spatial justice and how
the Green Book functioned as a countermapping during Jim Crow,
(02:03):
Doctor Mwood, We're so excited to have you here.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Thanks so much.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
I really appreciate the invitation. And it's always great to
be with some Penn State alone. And all I can
say is, we.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Are Penn State. Oh here we go.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Okay, So let's start from the beginning. Maps feel natural
to us now, because I mean every device that we
have has a map function on it. But at some
point there had to be someone that decided, hey, let
me start drawing lines on a sheet of paper to
create this thing.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Before we were all looking at Google maps, you know,
and before that there was map quest. I don't know
if you remember that, but I had a lot of printouts, okay,
maps for like these hand drawn interpretations of the world. So,
doctor Enwood, can you start us broadly before we zoom in,
and just explain to us what maps mean to a society.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Well, you know, one of the ways I think we'd
kind of nice to jump into this conversation is to
think just really broadly for a second about geography. And
you know, one of the things I always tell my
undergraduate students, and I always tell my graduate students, and
I always tell anybody who will listen, is that geography is,
for most of us one of the most important things
in our lives that we don't really think critically about.
(03:18):
And the places you work, the places you live, if
you go to worship someplace, the community you grew up on.
It did not just magically happen. I did not just
appear out of the ether. But it's the result of
really particular economic systems, of political systems, of culture, and
(03:39):
it's this kind of coming together of all of these
different things that really produces space and place. And if
you think about it, maps being human inventions are the
invitation for us to think.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
About some of those power dynamics and some of.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Those economic dynamics that go into how we think about
geography and the way that we relate to these different
kind of places and spaces. And so the reality is
is that maps, in some kind of form or another
arguably have been around for as long as humans have
been on earth. And the reason for that is is
that you can communicate a lot of really complicated information,
(04:18):
and you can communicate a lot of spatial information in
a way that when it was paper maps was super portable.
And these maps and these ways of thinking are super
important to document experience, and it's a hugely important piece
of human history is how we think about these relationships
and how we think about how we engage with one another,
(04:38):
and maps reflect that.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Thinking about even little neighborhood maps, I used to drop
out like whose house was where? And how far and
like what's the shortest path? And I remember, I don't
know if anybody else did this, but I would just
try to make these little routes from where I live
to my school, and like I was making my own
little maps of my little world. And so before we
zoom out to bigger maps US, I have a little
(05:00):
bit more of a historical question, like is there you're saying,
as long as we know, but I think I tend
to think about like the globe or like a US map.
Are there, like any artifacts like that that are super
important that we should be thinking about for a time
scale or just know that maps have always been around.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
Well, I mean there's certainly some you know, if you
go back and you can look at in particular from
the era of kind of colonization and the era of imperialism.
I think for most of us, those are probably a
lot of the maps that we're familiar with. They're often
in history textbooks, there's sometimes in geography textbooks that are
often used to illustrate historical processes, age of explorers, or
(05:38):
whatever it is that you necessarily want to think about
and talk about.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
And so for a lot of us those maps are important.
But to give you a sense.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
Of what we talk about when we think about why
maps matter and how they reflect particular kinds of power dynamics,
there's a really famous map from the time.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Of the Crusades.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
What it does is it places Jerusalem in the center
of the world. And what it does is it means
that all of the rest of the world is situated
around that one central point. And so that reflects at
the time, really the kind of power of the Church
and also a time of Western intellectual thought which really
plays Jerusalem and Christianity at the center of the universe.
(06:24):
And so there's maps like that that we can start
to go back and look at and think about and
work through and really start to try to understand how
people were thinking about, in this case, not just their
relationship with one another, but their relationship in the broader cosmos,
and how it relates to some of the kind of
supernatural forces that they were thinking about or trying to
work through as it relates to early Christianity. One of
(06:47):
the first map makers was actually an ancient Greek named Ptolome,
and some of your listeners might know he was one
of the early Greek mathematicians who really figured out that
the Earth was round and not flat. I'm sure you
could go back and you could find maps in ancient
China that go back maybe even earlier and really think
about how some of the early Chinese dynasties were also
in relationship with each other, the Silk Road, those kinds
(07:10):
of things, and so maps are central to the human
experience and being a storytelling species. Maps are really central
to that process and how we think about how humans
can tell a spatial story. And humans are also a
species historically that have traveled and explore and push boundaries,
and of course this causes conflict, and we can talk
(07:30):
about that too, but that's a piece of wide cartography
and mat making is really important.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
You talk about Ptolemy and how in some ancient Chinese dynasties,
I'm sure that they were making maps, but who did
they dub the map makers? Was this like a special
job for only certain types of people that had a
certain pedigree, or how do they decide who has the
power to do that?
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Because it's a really powerful tool.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
You know, it goes back really into the development of
modern Western ways of thinking, at least in the context
of Anglo American geography. We're talking about, you know, the
fourteen fifteen, sixteen hundreds, when cartography, which is the science
of map making, really starts to get its kind of
intellectual outlines, and as that grows, it grows along with colonialism,
(08:22):
it grows along with imperialism, it grows along with colonization,
and it was really the role of a lot of
European monarchs and monarchies to try to map and understand
the world, and probably again map making being the center
of power. I don't know how many of your listeners
have ever been to Grantwich, England, but you can go
to the observatory there and you can think about the
(08:45):
establishment of the prime meridian.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Ooh, I remember when I learned what the prime meridian was.
It was a long time ago, but I remember it
feeling like meridian was a fancy word.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
I don't remember ever learning what the primary When he
said it, I was like, I don't know what you're
talking about.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Well, well, you know on the map there's the long lines,
those that are vertical, those are longitudinal lines, and then
there are the lines that go horizontal and those are
our latitudinal lines. So at the middle there's the equator,
and we talked about that so much throughout school. The
zero degree line, right, it splits our planet into the
north and south hemispheres. But the prime meridian is our
(09:23):
basically like your tall equator. It splits our planet into
our eastern and western hemispheres. Ah okay, so.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
It's the twelve o'clock six o'clock line on our big
clock of the world.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
And the reason that that's located there, and the prime
meridian that's located there, which is super important to map making,
is because of the needs of the British Empire at
the time and the role of British science and technology
and the way that it was connected to both the
growth of early capitalism in Britain but also the growth
of the British Imperial State. And so there's those kind
(09:57):
of technological advancements that also make map it's more accurate.
That kind of tie into a larger story of how
maps and not making connect to power and power relationships.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
There's a viral clip right now of woman talking about
she says when she travels, she says that she's going
to the far West if she's going to the United States,
and people laugh, and she was like, but when I
say Middle East, you don't laugh because it is accepted.
And I'm like, Middle East to who, right? And I
think this is just kind of very similar to the
same thing You're saying, and even in preparation for this episode,
(10:48):
I was thinking about this in the context of power
and what it means to be a member when you
start making these maps, and you said these maps tell stories,
there are also stories we tell about ourselves about what
groups we belong to. I belonged to the group on
this side of this river on the map, or this
side of this line on the map. And I was like,
you know what, I should start calling the United States
(11:10):
Northern Mexico. And I was like, I don't even remember.
I don't know what your history is. Like I was like,
but I don't even remember when did we bring in
Texas and all of these things. And so I went
back to the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hudalgo and I was
reading all of these things, and I was like, Hey,
this isn't even really our land, okay, you know, And
(11:33):
I think there's so much history. In the same way
that you say maps tell stories, they also can collapse.
You know a lot of stories as well. And when
we think about maps as tools of power, and we
think about somebody had to draw these things in the
same way that we talk about different groups of identities,
in a way I feel like maps could be more
(11:55):
of a social construct than an objective reality, because if
you think about it, the land itself doesn't change, just
what the value we assigned to it does exactly. And
so I'm curious, doctor Ewood, in your experience research classes
that you're teaching, do you find yourself leaning towards or
away from the idea of maps being more about human
(12:16):
decisions or do you find that you feel like they're
more about geography for you?
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Well, I mean, that's a really interesting kind of provocative question,
and I think, you know, as a way to make
me jump into this, you know, I always tell my
students being in the Northern Hemisphere, there's nothing that says
in reality that the North is always positioned at the
top of a map, right, And that in itself reveals
(12:42):
a particular kind of way of thinking about a set
of spatial relationships and reveals a kind of way of
what we think is.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Kind of important.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
And I had a chance to go to Australia a
few years ago, and if you go to Australia, most
of their maps actually have South on the top, and
it takes a minute to kind of think about those
kind of relationships and the way that we in the
Northern Hemisphere and in particularly in the West, really put
forward a vision of ourselves is the center of the universe.
And so why we might kind of chuckle at that
(13:10):
old map I mentioned earlier about how Jerusalem is the
center of the world and that this is really the
center orientation in a real sense, we still do the
same thing. We just placed North America or he placed
Western Europe, or he placed the Northern Hemisphere for most
of our maps and most of our globes as the
center of our attention.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
So it's not really about geography, it's about power and perspective.
So always like how Tom Cruise refuses to stand next
to the tall people in his movies, go back and
watch Top Gun Maverick, people either have to be sitting
down or be far away from him. John Hamm sitting
down throughout the entire movie.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
And you know, for me, the interesting piece of maps
is really about the power relationships and the human constructions
that they represent. And so an example that I using classes.
You know, there's different kind of projections for maps, and
I'm sure all of your listeners know. If you take
a globe and you flatten it out, if you want
(14:10):
to test this, you can peel an orange and you
flatten it out. There's going to be distortions and things
are not going to line up, And depending on the
different kind of projection you use, you're going to have
a different set of distortions in that map.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
And during the Cold War.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
A projection that was really favored by the US government
and in particular textbook makers who wrote textbooks or brown
geography was a Mercader projection. And probably view a lot
are familiar with that Mercader projection from your.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Time maybe in high school.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
And if you think about it and Mercader projections, they
tend to exaggerate the size of things in the far
northern part of the map and the far southern part
of the map. And so for example, Greenland off the
coast of Canada, and a Ricadi projection often looks as
big as Africa when it it would just fit into
a small piece of Africa. Well, the reason the US
(15:03):
government liked to use this projection is is it made
the Soviet Union look exceptionally large in comparison to the
United States and Western Europe. And so when you started
to talk about Cold War and geopolitics and you started
to want to represent the threat that the Soviet Union
presented to Western Europe and to the United States. A
(15:24):
mercator projection in a really subtle way, because it distorted
the Soviet Union, made it look much much larger in
land mass than it really was, was a really effective
tool for representing that geopolitical reality and the geopolitical reality
that the US government wanted to give to US society
(15:46):
and in particularly US school children. And so that's where
I think I'd really come down on that kind of
question and think about maps tell stories, and so when
you see a map, you want to ask yourself, what
is the story that this map maker is trying to
tell me? And the map on your phone is telling
(16:08):
you how to get from point A to point B,
but it's still telling you a story. It's still picking
a route, it's still making decisions about.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Where that route is, how it goes through the city.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
It's of course taking real time data in terms of
traffic and those kinds of things or whatever, but it's
still a story about how you should navigate a city
space or a country lane, or wherever it is that
you're traveling from.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
This is actually true.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
I recently saw a video on Instagram where someone was
using some type of software where you could grab a country,
or in part of the video, they grabbed Alaska and
you can drag it all over the world and see
what the actual size of those countries are. I'm gonna
drop a link in the episode description so that you
can see it on Instagram, and we'll probably make some
(16:53):
things on Instagram to show you what that looks like.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Maps when we think about inequality and how it's used
to enforce inequalities. We see that in the United States
with redlining and redistricting and things like that. Can you
talk more about how racism shapes the way that maps
have been created and used historically?
Speaker 4 (17:16):
Oh sure, I mean redlining for those listeners who maybe
don't know. Back historically, there are these Sandborn maps, and
they were insurance maps, and in particular fire insurance maps,
and every city had a Sandborn map when they had
different toads for the insurance risk of lending money in
different neighborhoods. If I remember right, I think green meant
(17:37):
like you were really safe. Yellow meant that you were
you had some risk if you lent money or provided
insurance in those neighborhoods and red was no money, no insurance,
it's a high risk for you to ensure property in
those neighborhoods. That's the process of redlining were quite literally,
(17:58):
banks and insurance companies would draw red lines around neighborhoods,
and one of the key criteria was the question of
race and who lived in that neighborhood, and neighborhoods that
were predominantly African American or other persons of color were
red lined, and it meant that there was no capital
or very little capital that would inflow into those neighborhoods.
(18:21):
And interestingly, in a lot of cities, one of the
ways that we can see the kind of historic realities
of redlining are those interstate maps that you often get
if you stop at a rest stop when you're traveling.
At least when I was a kid, used to get
like the little map, but the rest stop would be
about the state.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
And if you look at those maps, and you in
particularly look at where those highways.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
Are located in every American city really in the United States,
often those highways were cited in what they call blighted
neighborhoods that were often had a high number of racial
minorities who lived there. And so to give you a
sense in the city of Atlanta, which is where I
(19:03):
wrote my dissertation about, if you look at where they
built I seventy five through the heart of the city,
and you look at where they built I. Twenty, those
were historically significant African American neighborhoods, and the city built
those highways because the writing was on the wall in
the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, it was
(19:24):
pretty clear that Atlanta, Georgia, by the end of the
nineteen sixties, in the first part of the nineteen seventies,
was going to have a significant enough African American population
in that city that African Americans were going to be
able to elect an African American mayor in the city
of Atlanta. And the white power structure used highway construction
to try to remove black people from that community and
(19:48):
to keep Atlanta and the city government in the hands
of the white power structure for as long as they
possibly could. And what's true in Atlanta is true all
over the country. And so that's the power of maps.
I mean, the story of highways in America isn't a
story of getting people to go from point A to
(20:09):
point B in the fastest possible route, particularly in American cities.
It's what Debra Archer wrote in a Law Review article
what she titled white Roads through Black Bedrooms and the
role of highways in America and in segregation is a
hugely important story to tell, and you can tell that
(20:29):
with what, at the surface, for many people probably appears
as an innocuous highway map, but actually represents a story of.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Segregation and resegregation in American cities.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
This is a really good point, and it's something I
know from our time t T when we were in
grad school in Durham, Black Wall Street in Durham and
thinking about these great areas and we saw the fifteen
to five OHO one corridor go through there and be
built in totally disrupt neighborhoods. I can also remember even
in Greensboro where I grew up, when the highway came
(21:02):
through town and it was like we could walk to
the edge of our neighborhood and see where they were
building a highway.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
And I'm always curious about that. When I'm driving. Highways
feel like they should be straight, But do you ever
find yourself like on a windy part, and you're like,
why are we going out this way? Which neighborhoods do
we avoid? Which neighborhoods Even as I'm riding along, which
neighborhoods can I see directly to the houses and which
have those sound barriers and trees around them off of
the highway. I'm always interested in like that kind of dynamic.
(21:31):
And I think we've been talking doctor Mwood with you
about maps and looking at them to tell stories that
have happened in the past. And I'm really interested and
curious if you know anything about what's happening right now.
When we think about Google Maps or Apple Maps giving
you alternate routes through neighborhoods, is there any difference in
which neighborhoods traffic is pushed through, or even the impact
(21:53):
of it.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
To circle back a little bit to what we talked
about earlier in this idea of geographies about economics, it's
about politics, it's about cultures, but all of these kinds
of things. That's an example of how we produce space,
and we produce space to be used in particular kinds
of ways and in particular kinds of contexts, and the
(22:16):
production of space often gives access to some folks while
also at the same time denies access to other folks.
And so there was a group I was working with
in Mississippi. And we often think about the civil rights
movement as happening in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
and of course it did. But what's really interesting, and
(22:36):
I think a decade that we don't give enough attention to,
is the nineteen seventies. Because the nineteen seventies were a
time when all of the hard fought victories of the
civil rights movement were actually being put into practice across
the United States. And so this gentleman was a lawyer
in Mississippi. And so as schools become integrated in Mississippi,
(22:56):
what counties in Mississippi would do is they would be
a school kind of in the middle of nowhere, and
then they would design communities around that school, and they
would ensure that, because of zoning, houses had to be
a particular kind of size or had to be a
particular kind of look, and they would build these concentric
zones around there. And what they essentially were doing was
(23:19):
making it impossible for any poor Mississippian to have access
to this brand new school and an effect. What they
were doing was resegregating the Mississippi school the public schools
system without calling it the formal segregation that existed in
the nineteen forties, ninety fifties, ninety sixties, when groups like
the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee were fighting to integrate
(23:39):
those schools. And so that's why I often say that
geography is the most important thing in our lives that
most of us don't think about, because if you were
just to drive through that community, you would see a
bunch of really nice homes, You would see a bunch
of folks living in upper middle class lifestyle. You would
come to the school in the middle and if you
didn't really know what to think about, or if you
(24:00):
didn't really know kind of history of that, it would
just seem like a normal way that the school and
the community grew up together. But it was an actually
concerted effort to resegregate Mississippi schools in the nineteen seventies.
And there's all kinds of examples like that that go on,
including in the twenty first century, jerrymandering and the way
(24:20):
that we think about how we draw political boundaries, for example,
that totally relate to this idea of making geography and
also the power of maps and the power of zoning
and the power of local government to create space and
create particular kinds of representations of that space.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
For our listeners who don't understand that, could you speak
a little bit more explicitly about jerrymandering and these political
maps and zones and why this is a tool or
how this is a tool.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
Yeah, sure, I mean so, I'm sure most listeners or
maybe all listeners know. In the US House of Representatives,
unlike the Senate, where every state gets to senators regardless
of population, in the House of Representatives, political representation comes
down to a state's population, and a state with a
larger population like California, gets a lot more representatives in
(25:12):
the House of Representatives than a state of Wyoming, which
has one representative because they don't have very much population,
even though Wyoming is a huge state, and so different
states often do those political boundaries differently, and so in
New York, for example, there is I believe, a nonpartisan
commission that draws those political boundaries to try to create
(25:38):
competitive districts and to try to create a fair representation
of the population in the Congress, as we're witnessing in Texas.
Some states like Texas, it's a decision that's completely in
the hands of the legislature. And essentially what that means
is it's politicians picking their voters, not voters picking their politicians.
(26:03):
And there has been a long history in this country,
going back before the Civil Rights Movement, but after the
Civil rights movement as well of using political district drawing
power to create different districts, some districts that are going
to be safe Republicans, some that are going to be
safe democratic. And there's also been a history in this
(26:24):
country of using gerry mandarin to get particular kinds of
racialized outcomes in terms of representation. And so that's the
role that Jerrymanderin plays in the United States in terms
of a politics and of political representation.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
When we think about how our maps are drawn, there
have been communities you're a lot of your research is
based in this where they say I see your map,
I raise you another map. Things like the Green Book
that are created, so maps for safety and resistance. Can
you talk a little bit about the Green Book and
your research and what you've found, like its origins and
(27:14):
its purpose.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
So A big piece of I think what's interesting about
matt making and cartography, and in particular about the Black
experience in America is the role of black cartographers and
black cartography in the African American experience in the United States.
And you know, you can go back to someone like
Ida Wells Barnett, who was still active in Memphis, Sennessees
(27:37):
what will it be from the turn of the nineteenth
century to the twentieth century. She was really involved heavily
in the anti lynching campaigns that were going on in
the South. She's an example of an African American woman
in this case who used cartography and who used visual
representations of the black experience to advocate for anti lynching
(27:58):
legislation in the US. And then you can also think
about someone like WBD Boys and some of the stuff
that he did for I think it was the Chicago
World's Fair and the exposition there where he came up
with these infographics related to the African American experience. And
some of those infographics don't traditionally look like what we
think of as a traditional map, but they are a
cartographic expression of the black experience and provide a really
(28:23):
interesting snapshot of the black experience in the United States
at that time, and they're really powerful representations of the
black experience, and we're a real tool to both represent
the fact that African Americans in many cases were not
just surviving but thriving in parts of the United States,
(28:44):
but also show some disparities between white communities and black
communities as a way to advocate for more resources and
more equality. And so during the nineteen tens, twenties, thirties, forties,
fifties into the nineteen sixties, large parts of the United
States of America were segregated. And if you were an
African American motorist traveling, particularly in the US South.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
But also the reality is.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
In a sundown town in Illinois or Michigan, you would
not be welcome in hotels or restaurants or any of
the ways that many white Americans kind of took for
granted when they were traveling places to stay. And so
there's this guy, his name is Victor Green. He was
a postman in New York City. He began collecting people
(29:31):
would send him postcards. He would travel, he would collect
the names and addresses of homes throughout the United States
where black men, women, and children when they're traveling, say
through Naxville, Tennessee, could call up this private home and
they would have a place to stay or a place
to get a meal. And that Green Book really represents
(29:53):
a couple of things. One, it represents the ways in
which black folks were using again maybe not a traditional map,
but some geographic expertise and a kind of cartography to
navigate a contested terrain. But two, I think which is
also really interesting is because there's names and addresses and businesses.
(30:15):
It also represents because he produced green Books every year
or every few years, it really represents a really powerful
snapshot of African American capital and really important African American
communities throughout the United States that are also super important
to that broad history of the black experience in America.
(30:37):
And so the Green Book is not just a representation
of someone who is doing good civil rights work and
doing good community work. It's also a representation of the
dynamism and the complexity of black communities throughout the United States,
where in city after city after city, you had these
black Meca spaces where you had successful black businesses, you
(31:01):
had successful black doctors and lawyers and folks who owned
homes and who use their homes to facilitate travel across
the United States. And so that Green Book is really
an important document and an important set of addresses. And again,
if humans are storytelling species, an important book that tells
an important story about the black experience. Even though if
(31:24):
you found that, you might just look at a bunch
of addresses. I don't really understand necessarily now what's so
important about that, But that is what's important about it,
even in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yes, I love this, and I think it helps us
see maps as more than just this authority on navigation,
but seeing how maps can be about survival and belonging
and even justice or restoring some type of balance or
creating some safety. We talked about Ptolemy and I'm like,
who's the next Copernicus? Right, Like where we shift our
(31:53):
view and say, okay, you know we've been previously thinking
about maps and centering these kind of folks. You know,
what does it look like to add some justice and
some more civil rights and things like that into cartography.
And so doctor and what you've written about spatial justice,
I'm curious if you could give us like an overview,
(32:13):
like what does that mean?
Speaker 2 (32:14):
And how does that connect these ideas.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
I don't know if any of your listeners or I
don't know if y'all are familiar with this art project
that was going on in Chicago called the Folded Map Project.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yes, the Folded Map Project. That's there's this black woman
artist that's doing this, Tanika Lewis Johnson. Well, we have
to put a link to that in the description to
check it out.
Speaker 4 (32:34):
So in Chicago, the roads run north, south, east, west,
and so I guess the folks who are Cubs fans
and white Sox fans know there's a north side and
there's the south side. And historically the south side of
Chicago is historically African American. And so you can have
an address on a street and it can be say
North Addison Street, or it could be South Addison Street, Okay.
(32:56):
And what this artist does is they take a map
and they quite really take those two addresses and they
fold the map together, and then they take pictures of
the buildings or the houses or whatever is there at
those addresses. And it's an invitation to think about the
larger racial dynamics in Chicago, which, despite the fact that
(33:19):
it was in the north, probably a lot of listeners
know Martin Luther King in the nineteen sixties, nineteen sixty six,
nineteen sixty seven went to Chicago and he fought a
hard fought and long running battle to try to integrate
housing in Chicago, because Chicago is a very segregated city.
And the story that this map maker tells is two things. One,
it tells a difference between how again space is made.
(33:40):
Those geographies didn't just happen. You can see the difference
of buildings, different in structures in different parts of the city.
But it also tells the story of what geographer Ruth
Wilson Gilmour in some cases talks about as the kind
of organized abandonment of black spaces in the city, where
urban redevelopment and money flows in one direction and it
flows out of another direction. And so that is an
(34:04):
example of using map making, using cartography to tell a story,
but to also tell a story about the broad geographies
in which we live. And there's a project that I've
been working on with my colleague Derek Alderman at the
University of Tennessee, something that we've called the Living Black
out Lists. And the Living Black out List is not
(34:26):
a book that you can pick up off a shelf.
But what it is is is we are trying to
collect as many of these examples of how African American
men and women or African American communities are using cartography
and are using.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Geography to tell a story.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
About what it means to live as an African American
in the United States in the twenty first century. There's
another artist who I believe their name is Sonya Barrett,
and they're an artist in the UK who does a
lot of stuff with hair actually, and what they had
was in the United Kingdom, was in England. They had
(35:10):
a project called Braiding the Map, and what they did
is they created all these representations of the slave trade
through hair and really told a story about the importance
of the black experience to the making of Great Britain
and those inter relationships and those spatial relationships that exist
(35:33):
which make Britain Britain and which flow through race and
colonialism and enslavement. And so there's all these different ways
of thinking about how we can use cartography to tell
stories of spatial justice. And I think the reality is
we're living in a political moment in the United States,
and we're living in the twenty first century context where
what used to be maybe of interest to officials or
(35:57):
even institutions is now more politically dangerous, and it just
highlights how important it is for communities and individuals to
be able to tell.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Their own story.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
There's another project, which again is cartography like, but it
was a group of activists in New York City who
created these stickers and they would go through New York
City and they would put these stickers on buildings or
sidewalks or signs where enslaved people had lived, or where
families had lived who owned enslaved people.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
So I just looked this up and the project is
called Slavers of New York. And so they have this
sticker campaign or activists, artists, educators, and researchers designed stickers
that resemble New York street signs, and these stickers have
the names of historical figures who owned enslaved people, and
(36:49):
on those stickers they also include the number of people.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
That they had enslaved.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
So it fits right over a street sign, and they
put it all over New York. I think over a
thousand have been put up, and they get removed and
defaced and things like that by folks who are trying
to silence these you know, cartographers, but the aim is
to confront persistent invisibility of the history of enslaved people
(37:19):
in New York City. What a way to add some
context in like real time, you know, yeah, bring the
history forward.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
I like that, and it was a way of telling
the story of enslavement in New York City. Again, we
tend to think about slavery or something that happened down
South New York City was a really really important and
early moment in the growth of enslavement in the United States.
And trying to tell that story and try to tell
(37:46):
that cartography through this sticker program or putting stickers across
the city and then inviting people to read more about it.
It's another example of what we call the living black
out lists, which is telling this story that's super important
in the history of New York City.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
This was a really good conversation because it made me
think about maps in a different way. Absolutely, I think
that when I think about maps, I'm not thinking about
the power associated with in the way that it is
used even present day to marginalize certain communities further and
to deny people rights and to honestly reframe how we
(38:29):
view the world. Maps feel like an undersold or undervalued
single source of truth for some folks when it's possible that, well,
we see that it's not always, you know, just one way.
And I was also thinking about like when he mentioned
maps in the gas station, and I was like, when
(38:51):
it's the last time I saw a map in the
gas station? It was the last time I even looked
for one, because I'm constantly looking at my phone, and
if there's information and it's all digital, it feels like
we'll always have access to it. But as it changes,
what version of it do we have access to? Becomes
the question? You know, that's the thing we have to
think about. It felt like the Internet would be around forever,
(39:12):
but where's your black Planet page? It's so true because
even when you think of like how GPS has changed
over time, like now we have like GPS built into
cars and things like that, and remember when like if
someone would add like a new highway or new development
was put in a community and it didn't show up
on that map, right, you were messed up. And it's
(39:34):
because your technology in your car was behind. And so
now everybody's using you know, car playing things like that.
But that was a really great point that doctor Enwood
made where he was saying that you know, that is
what present day cartographers are working to combat, is the
loss of these maps to the technological age, and like,
(39:54):
as technology advances, being able to preserve these maps because if,
like he said, map are a storytelling mechanism, knowing our
history and knowing you know, how things have evolved is
so critical, so that we don't you know, repeat the
same mistakes, and so that we empower the folks that
have been silenced in the past. Preserving those maps is
(40:16):
activism such a great way to think about that so
so true. You can find us on X and Instagram
at Dope Labs podcast.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Tt is on X and Instagram at d R Underscore
t Sho.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
And you can find Takiya at z said so.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Dope Labs is a production of Leimanada Media.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Our senior supervising producer is Kristin Lapour and our associate
producer is Issara Sives.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Dope Labs is sound design, edited and mixed by James Barber.
Limanada Media is Vice President of Partnerships and Production is
Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart podcast is Katrina Norvio
marketing lead is Alison Kanter. Original music composed and produced
by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music
(41:10):
by Elijah Harvey. Dope Lab is executive produced by US
T T Show Dia and Kia Wattlei
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