Map frenzy

Sometimes one unintentionally hits a nerve. So it was this week when scrolling through my Twitter timeline I saw a map posted by a US academic I follow; just as a comment in response I put up another map. Here they are -

If I’d wanted to get a full flavour taste of the culture war in the US I couldn’t have done better; over 50,000 impressions and a representative array of comments from the hostile (essentially the US Census Bureau was racist for making such a map) to the scientific and including a score from Americans who had little idea they were so German. Well, there may or may not be a correlation there, but the important thing is we’re six months into this pandemic and we still don’t fully understand it. So anything that might point to risk is relevant.

I’d like to see more maps. I’d like to see maps of poverty, overcrowding, extent of medical insurance, housing tenure and other potential factors. I’d like to know more about those lands and reservations in which native Americans have been so badly hit – their populations were devastated by coronaviruses caught from Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. You can never have too many maps. 

And for the apparently huge cohort of Americans who have never seen a map of their own ancestry made by their own government before, well, glad to have been of assistance in improving your knowledge. Knowledge often leads to wisdom.