BY DEREK H. ALDERMAN AND JOSHUA F.J. INWOOD, March 8, 2021
How can maps fight racism and inequality?
The work of the Black Panther Party, a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a new movie and a documentary, helps illustrate how cartography—the practice of making and using maps—can illuminate injustice.
As these films show, the Black Panthers focused on African American empowerment and community survival, running a diverse array of programming that ranged from free school breakfasts to armed self-defense.
Cartography is a less documented aspect of the Panthers’ activism, but the group used maps to reimagine the cities where African Americans lived and struggled.
The Black Panthers’ proposed police districts for the city of San Francisco, created in 1966 or 1967. [Image: FoundSF]
In 1971, the Panthers collected 15,000 signatures on a petition to create new police districts in Berkeley, California—districts that would be governed by local citizen commissions and require officers to live in the neighborhoods they served. The proposal made it onto the ballot but was defeated.
In a similar effort to make law enforcement more responsive to communities of color, the Panthers in the late 1960s also created a map proposing to divide up police districts within San Francisco, largely along racial lines.
The Black Panthers are just one chapter in a long history of “counter-mapping” by African Americans, which our research in geography explores. Counter-mapping refers to how groups normally excluded from political decision-making deploy maps and other geographic data to communicate complex information about inequality in an easy-to-understand visual format.
Maps are not ideologically neutral location guides. Mapmakers choose what to include and exclude, and how to display information to users.
These decisions can have far-reaching consequences. When the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s set out to map the risk associated for banks loaning money to individuals for homes in different neighborhoods, for example, they rated minority neighborhoods as high risk and color-coded them as red.
The result, known as “redlining,” contributed to housing discrimination for three decades, until federal law banned such maps in 1968. Redlining’s legacy is still evident in many American cities’ patterns of segregation.
Colonial explorers charting their journeys and city planners and developers pursuing urban renewal have also used cartography to represent the world in ways that further their own priorities. Often, the resulting maps exclude, misrepresent, or harm minority groups. Academics and government officials do this too.
Counter-maps produce an alternative public understanding of the facts by highlighting the experiences of oppressed people.
Black people aren’t the only marginalized group to do this. Indigenous communities, women, refugees, and LGBTQ communities have also redrawn maps to account for their existence and rights.
But Black Americans were among the earliest purveyors of counter-mapping, deploying this alternative cartography to serve a variety of needs a century ago.
Mapping is part of the broader Black creative tradition and political struggle.
Over the centuries, African Americans developed “way-finding” aids, including a Jim Crow-era travel guide, to help them navigate a racially hostile landscape and created visual works that affirmed the value of Black life.
The Black sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois produced maps for the 1900 Paris Exposition to inform international society about the gains African Americans had made in income, education, and land ownership since slavery and in face of continuing racism.
Similarly, in 1946, Friendship Press cartographer and illustrator Louise Jefferson published a pictorial map celebrating the contributions of African Americans—from famous writers and athletes to unnamed Black workers—in building the United States.
An early 20th-century NAACP map showing lynchings between 1909 and 1918. The maps were sent to politicians and newspapers in an effort to spur legislation protecting Black Americans. [Image: United States Library of Congress]
In the early 20th century, anti-lynching crusaders at the NAACP and Tuskegee Institute stirred public outcry by producing statistical reports that informed original hand-drawn maps showing the location and frequency of African Americans murdered by white lynch mobs.
One map, published in 1922 in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, placed dots on a standard map to document 3,456 lynchings over 32 years. The Southeast had the largest concentration. But the “blots of shame,” as mapmaker Madeline Allison called them, spanned the country from east to west and well into the north.
These visualizations, along with the underlying data, were sent to allied organizations such as the citizen-led Commission on Interracial Cooperation, to newspapers nationwide, and to elected officials of all parties and regions. The activists hoped to spur Congress to pass federal anti-lynching legislation—something that remains to this day unfinished business.
Much anti-lynching cartography was inspired by the famed activist and reporter Ida B. Wells, who in the early 1880s made some of the first tabulations of the prevalence and geographic distribution of racial terror. Her work refuted prevailing white claims that lynched Black men had sexually assaulted white women.
Pichai and Google's slide designers are creating brain-friendly presentations. Cognitive scientists say it's impossible for us to multitask as well as we think we can. The brain cannot do two things at once and do them equally well. When it comes to presentation design, we can't read text on the screen and listen to the speaker while retaining all of the information. It can't be done.
University of Washington biologist John Medina has done extensive research into persuasion and how the brain processes information. His advice is to burn most PowerPoint decks and start over with fewer words and more pictures. According to his book, Brain Rules, "We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10 percent of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65 percent."
If you want to create visually interesting slides, less is more. Slide design guru Nancy Duarte recommends following a three-second rule. If viewers do not understand the gist of your slide in three seconds, it's too complicated. "Think of your slides as billboards," says Duarte. "When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus, which is the road, to process a billboard of information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you're saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them."
When is the last time you saw a billboard with a bullet-point list? Bullet points are the easiest design to create on a PowerPoint slide and the least effective.
In his book TED Talks, Chris Anderson writes, "Those classic PowerPoint slide decks with a headline followed by multiple bullet points of long phrases are the surest single way to lose an audience's attention altogether.... When we see speakers come to TED with slide decks like this, we pour them a drink, go and sit with them at a computer monitor, and gently ask their permission to delete, delete, delete."
According to Anderson, each bullet point becomes its own slide. A bullet point might become one sentence on a slide or be replaced entirely with a photo. In Pichai's Google presentation on A.I., slide number five carried the theme. There were five words on the slide: "Mobile first to A.I. first."
Pichai's slide obeyed the TED rule--delete, delete, delete. It works for Google. It will work for you.
