Earthsky Interviews
Private: Who are the U.S. poor?
April 10, 2007 - Human World
Here’s a map that shows the areas of the U.S. with the highest percentage of people living below the poverty level.
I was looking this map to see where the poor live. As I compared it to some of the other maps on the “same page”:http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/usgrid/maps.jsp, I realized that these maps were not only telling me where the poor lived, but who the poor are here in the U.S.
Scroll down and compare for yourself.
The three maps below show the parts of the U.S. with:
the highest percentage of African Americans; the highest percentage of Latinos and Hispanics; and the highest percentage of American Indians.
Who’s poor? A picture – or a few maps in this case – is worth a thousand words. For example, check out the darkest (poorest) part of the povery map, and then look at the American Indian map.
It makes me ask myself: here in the U.S., where we pride ourselves on equal opportunity for all, can we really say that we offer equal opportunity to everyone, regardless of minority status or ethnicity?
To get a better, closer, bigger look at any of these maps and more, go “here”:http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/usgrid/maps.jsp.
These maps are a few of a “pageful”:http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/usgrid/maps.jsp of U.S. Census Grid Maps, put together by “NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center”:http://sedac.ciesin.org/index.html and Columbia University’s “Center for International Earth Science Information Network”:http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/. “Here”:http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/usgrid/methods.jsp is the method that was used to put these maps together.
The data sets are from the year 2000. Keep in mind, that’s before hurricane Katrina.