One tends to categorise the Internet– and on a broader scale, technology– as an innovation of recent memory. In the history of technology as in conventional history, it’s customary to attribute sweeping innovations with the works of one man (like Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell) and their teams and predecessors are left by the wayside. The history of the Internet as we’ve been covering in our class was not the result of the Great Man high school history covets. When we covered the manifold players in the creation of the Web, it was a refreshing reminder that innovation– like the Internet– is long, complex, collaborative, messy– and beautiful. I look forward to gaining the tools to become a better scholar and process history more thoroughly.
I had the pleasure to peruse the Mapping Inequality Project this week. Never has the systemic racism of 20th-century America been so fun to scroll through. The entire project comes chiefly from primary sources: the records of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The authors of the site optimise HOLC reports to their localities in an organic way, compiling the data from the reports into visual and textual media. The quantification of the data is simple; HOLC officials divided their cities into neighbourhoods with letter grades, so the authors translated the letter grades into concentric rings of colours representing each city. It’s difficult to discern the significance of these rings even after becoming acquainted with the legend, but they do the job and you’ll never have to stare at many numbers or percentages. The presentation of the visuals is clean and easy to grasp most of the time– though the site’s zoom tool is obscenely laggy.
The Mapping Inequality Project is a fascinating glimpse into what exactly segregation means and its forms. The authors endeavour to show that the poisonous racism so talked about in public discourse, so devastating to communities, manifests itself as a calm, calculated banker’s lexicon. The loan evaluators use code words such as ‘blighted’, ‘infiltration’, ‘heterogenous’, or ‘subversive elements’ to express their prejudices; an evaluator derides an East Los Angeles neighbourhood as ‘a “melting pot” area… literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements’ and thus grades it poorly, excluding the area from much-needed loans. HOLC was a success, ‘seen as both a savior to the housing sector and a force for racial segregation’ (Nelson et al).
One extrapolates from this that a generation is made from their weakest moments, and because the Great Depression was such a low point for that generation, the New Deal’s weaknesses reverberated all the stronger. Because housing loan appraisers deemed certain neighbourhoods certain letter grades, those neighbourhoods were not eligible for the redemption of the New Deal, precluded from prosperity.
Sources:
Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed September 2, 2019, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining//#loc=13/32.067/-81.105&maps=0&city=savannah-ga&area=C12&text=intro&adviewer=sidebar.
Posner, Miriam, director. How Did They Make That? How Did They Make That, UCLA Digital Humanities, 4 Apr. 2014, archive.org/details/howdidtheymakethat.
While I didn’t get the project that you got I have to say the way it was described I now wish I also got it. You made it seem very interesting to go through first hand examples of modern racism in America. Also the way the actual site is set up seems to be very well done and understood. It gives an incite into the the minds of those who viewed race differently from modern times.