a few days ago I was hanging out with a friend, a South Asian immigrant who grew up mostly in England but has lived in the States for a decade. She made an offhand reference to how much she hated England ... something I had never heard from her before, although we've been friends for about seven years.
I pressed on the point and she--shocked that she's never ranted to me yet--explained that, although (especially since 9/11) there's a lot of anti-South Asian prejudice in the States, it's nowhere near the level of daily hatred and harrassment a South Asian in the UK faces. Last time she was home, it took only 18 hours for her to get her first racial slur hurled from a car.
In the course of her rant, she mentioned a map that had greeted her on the front page of The Independent during one trip home. This was a race map that didn't show percentages of racial groups in England, but rather the chance that random pedestrians on the street would bump into someone of a different ethnicity. (facepalm/) Naturally, this led to a much more dramatically "colored" map than a simple population percentage map would have been.
Of course, I went looking for the map and it wasn't up at The Independent's site, but urban cartography had it in the archives. Here 'tis, above. And here's the explanation of the "method" used to produce such a highly colorized map.
Think about this for a minute. They're not going by absolute numbers, which is to say, how many people, or what percentage of people are what ethnicity. They're going by probability: what is the chance that people on the street will bump into someone of a different ethnicity. Depending on how they choose to do this (and they don't identify the "experts" doing it) they could be seriously inflating the impression of diversity--or danger--in these areas.
Additionally, they're talking about people meeting on the street. Is there any controlling for ethnic factors like the women of one community not going out as often as the women of another community? Or for the fact that a lot of these communities are concentrated in ethnic enclaves, so you wouldn't actually meet them on the street unless you went into their enclaves?
What this is, is an incendiary map intended to stoke racial suspicion. It's about the daily experience and perception of otherness. Think about the wording: what are your chances of meeting an outsider on the street! They're everywhere! On your streets! Look at how much chance you have of meeting an outsider on the street all over England! England is stained! Publicly stained!
Basically, they're counting on their readership not understanding the math, and especially how math and perception work together in sociological issues such as these.
Just an example of how maps can obscure and obfuscate as much as they illuminate.
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