In the previous section of reading in Laura Vaughan’s, Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography, she mostly explored maps where segregation was a choice, and not a result of helplessness. In the section for today, we dive into cases where spatial segregation is enforced, and judged on the basis of race and socioeconomic status. This can perhaps best be represented by redlining, a topic we visited a few weeks earlier. In 1933, in order to regulate the risks for mortgage loans the Federal Home Owners’ Loan Incorporation ranked neighborhoods from A through D, color-coded green, blue, yellow, red, meaning ‘Best, Still Desirable, Definitely Redlining, and Hazardous’. Most black neighborhoods were color coded red, which essentially doomed them if they weren’t already. These maps became “self-fulfilling prophecies” (156), making neighborhoods into the poverty areas (low resource, low opportunity, etc) that they had been judged as. As such, redlining was both a reflection and perpetuation of racism/prejudice, manifested in spatial form. An abstract attitude became tangible, a practice that would further exacerbate the abstract in physical forms such as economic, racial, and social marginalization.
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