that excerpt of the Detroit map brought back a flood of memories since my home for much of the 80s was just a few blocks northwest of it and goes a long way to illustrate how a honky like me got to be such a hip hop head. this was pre-PE’s black nationalism and License to Ill was large, so none of the black kids thought it was weird at all that white kids were into rap. I moved, the rap scene changed, and I found out that most white people my age didn’t have much exposure to it. I know this is only tangentially related but it seriously was a huge touchstone for me and this map is like an infographic of my life.
also, the lack of further zoom and the horrible choice of non-contrast-y brown for the “other ethnicity” color really undercuts that you’re seeing (or should be seeing) a lot of brown dots in my old neighborhood, the Chaldean families were prominent. Metro-Detroit’s Arab population is large enough that the ads at the airport and on the buses are also in Arabic, but those pixels I’m assuming must be there are blending into the oranges, reds, blues, and greens. Come to think of it, the Chaldean’s might identify as white on the census? Not sure how Arabs are identified by the map, but point being I know there’s more to the story than it’s showing in this case.
