Lab 7

This lab uses the 2000 Census data from www.census.gov and reveals the settlement patterns of various races living in the United States.



Asian American Census Map
This map shows the population density of Asians living in the United States in 2000. As we can see, the West Coast, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle are all home to burgeoning Asian populations; as well as New York. From this map, we can see that the highest populated areas is in California, with 30,84% of Asians living in CA. This is probably due to historical reasons since the 20th century; Asian immigrants have been flocking to the West coast due to better employment opportunities and room for economic mobility. And after the immigration act of 1965, even more Asians immigrated to the West coast and built communities.



African American Census Map
This map shows the population density of African Americans living in the United States in 200. In total, there are over 37 million African Americans in the U.S, which makes them the second largest minority group in the country. As we can see from the map, the counties that have the largest population density of blacks are in the South-Eastern parts of the United States. According to this map, the population in concentrated in areas like Virginia and Mississippi, while in other places, there aren’t many clusters of high population. We see, that the country with the highest population density has a percentage of 86.49%.



Some Other Race Census Map
This map shows the population density of other races, or those people who did not fall into white, black, Asian, and American Indian, in the United States. It’s interesting to see how diversified the west coast is compared to the east coast and the south. Places where there are diversified races, are all clustered together, like little pockets of diversity, whereas places that aren’t as diversified have low population density of “other races.” This reflects the human nature of going to a place that people can relate ethnically more with. Asians tend to groups with Asians, and other races tend to go with other races.

Conclusion:
While these maps are useful in giving a general overview of racial categories within the United States, it still lacks a lot of information about ethnic dispersion in America. First, these maps don’t show any trends from previous or future years, but rather shows us a frozen moment in racial population density in 2000. Secondly, it doesn’t really explain trends in ethnic dispersion, or give us any historical contexts. Lastly, it would be nice to have these census maps become more specific on the different types of ethnicities within a category. However, it does provide us with an easy way to understand the spatial components of the information we need. GIS visualizes the data and helps us bring thee data sets together. We could use these maps for a political campaign team to see what tactics they could use to gain their votes based on ethnicity.