Race and ethnicity in the Bay Area

Race and ethnicity, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley

Originally uploaded by Eric Fischer

I was recently up in Portland and having a conversation with someone and he made the comment about, for all Portland's Awesome Sauce, it's not the most racially or ethnically diverse city around. I said the same could be said about San Francisco, and that's sort of where the conversation ended.

Then, I stumbled across this, which is just a great way of using imagery to tell a story. Eric Fischer did this based on Bill Rankin's map of Chicago. To quote his legend, "Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000."

As you can see, most of the Bay Area is white, with almost all Black populations living in the East Bay and South San Francisco. I'm sure this map has much more Green (Asian) than many - and the sparsely populated north of San Francisco is Marin County, where I live. To almost nobody's shock, it's pretty much white (Robin Williams used to "joke" that the rainbow tunnels on the way into Marin were "Negro Detectors").

Sadly, as a commenter points out, the most integrated spot in Marin, and almost in the entire map, is a little circle ... that's San Quentin Prison.