Professor Pamela Oliver Department of Sociology

Census Maps

Seeing segregation on line

A. National Segregation Maps

http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/geo/courses/geo200/usa_maps.html This site has many national maps showing the distribution of many ethnic groups, and also includes maps of "absence of" groups.

B. Census Bureau (make your own maps)

The Census Bureau has an on-line mapping tool that is really cool, although it seems to go down pretty often. If it is down when you try it, try again later.  Here's what to do:
1) to get to the control page use this URL:
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ThematicMapFramesetServlet?_lang=en
[if this link does not work, go to http://factfinder.census.gov and from there click on the "maps and geography" choice and from there click on the "thematic maps" choice]
This brings you up to the country as a whole.  It comes up to persons per square mile.

To navigate to what you want from here, find the navigation line near the top, just under the label "Thematic Maps".  The line looks like this:
You are here:  Main All Data Sets Data Sets with Thematic Maps Geography Themes Results

2) To look for racial distributions, click on the "themes" choice.  The best way to get racial distributions is to scroll down to the sections that are "percent who are . . . "  For Hispanic/Latino, use "percent who are Hispanic or Latino."  For the racial groups, decide whether you want the percent who said they were only one race or whether you want to include mixed race people in your percentage. I recommend looking for "percent who are Black alone or in combination with another race" OR "percent who are Asian alone or in combination with another race" Although you can also get a clear look at the patterns by just choosing "percent who are Black [Asian etc} alone". The "alone" groups are listed before the "in combination" groups.
If you do this with the national map, it will show you the whole country by state.

3) On the national map, you'll see a box where you can click for "united states by ____"  it defaults to state, but you can break it down to smaller units such as county, metro area (which greys out rural areas), Congressional district, or 3-digit zip code. The zip code areas are hard to read as they are very small in metro areas.

4)  To get down to smaller geographic units, you can pick a state or county or metropolitan area or "place" (that is, a city or town) by going to the "geography" choice.  (Metropolitan areas are counties and groups of counties that have cities in them. The city of Milwaukee is a part of Milwaukee County; the Milwaukee Metropolitan Area is a 4-county area.) Once you pick the unit, you can navigate to a specific one, first through state and then to the specific choice. You may have to re-select you theme choice, as I think it always comes back to population per square mile by default. For county or metro area, I think you get the best view by selecting "block groups" as the level.

5) Pay attention to the legend.  The meaning of the different colors changes every time you redraw a map.  The darkest is always the highest concentration of a given group, but sometimes that "high" concentration is only 20% and other times it is close to 100%.

6)  Once you play with this a little and learn how to use it, it is VERY instructive about residential segregation patterns!

7) From the "Factfinder" main menu, you will discover that you can find a lot of other statistics about US places, in number form. You can download them into spreadsheets. Information on how to find things in the system can be found in the help files: https://ask.census.gov

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Questions or Comments? Email Oliver -at- ssc -dot- wisc -dot- edu. Last updated October 10, 2009 © University of Wisconsin.