Race, Income, and Borders in Chicago

For this blog post, I decided to look at two maps of Chicago, one that shows the race distribution and one that shows household incomes. Looking at the map of race, there appears to be fairly distinct lines between the different races with very few areas of overlap. While some of the lines are blurred with a good bit of mixing, some of the other lines are very clearly defined. Here is that map...

As you can see, there are distinct white, black, hispanic, and asian neighborhoods. Next, we can turn our attention to a map of income. As you could probably guess, the areas with a strong white presence tend to have higher household incomes than any of the other races. Here is that map...

Besides the fact that income seems to be strongly correlated to race, it is also interesting to note that in general, household income is higher in the suburbs than in the heart of the city (except for an isolated portion in the north). This is probably because many successful professionals prefer to commute to work in the city during the day, and escape the hustle and bustle to live in their safe, quiet, white, suburban neighborhoods at night.

While it is interesting to look at the clearly uneven distribution of wealth between the races, it is also significant to look at the point these maps are making about borders in a broader sense. Take a quick look at this video that accompanied the maps...

After watching this, I got thinking about how we create unnecessary borders. By creating maps that have solid, hard lines we create an unrealistic sense of division. Yes, there may be some borders that are absolutely clear, but many of the borders here have some sort of gradient to them. There is actually more racial mixing in Chicago than some maps would have us believe. This shows that as humans, we naturally put up walls around ourselves, even if in reality those borders don't really exist. And it is these imaginary borders that we create that allow racism, suspicion, and inequality to persist in this country. If we could just take our blinders off and see what is actually around us, we might be surprised to see who  we're living with and what unique and interesting things we can learn from and about them.