I'll take a couple of litres of that myself, but I'll pour one out for Arno Peters... after I've filtered it through my kidneys 1st
Return of Horrible Educational Maps
- Thread starter Westphalian
- Start date
Eparkhos
Banned
That's genuinely the dumbest thing I've seen today. Like, do they think time-travelling white supremacists went back to 1569 to tell some Dutch guy 'Yeah, hey, make your maps like this, trust us, it'll make us look better in the future."
Just to pile on the bandwagon here, that statistic is flat-out wrong. Africa is just over 30 million square km and North America is 24 million. Yes, Africa is larger, but 3 times? That's just ridiculous.
I think it's very likely that bias has influenced the map projections that people choose to display. Regardless if whether the map was first designed with that in mind, racism likely is a factor in why many people and governments saw it as a good map projection in recent centuries. Sometimes the effect is conscious, sometimes unconscious, but the result is that the choice of projection conveys a message of what parts of the world the author (and the displayer) think are more worthy of being displayed. And considering how entrenched racism is throughout the systems we live in, I think it's justified to view the mercator projection as a colonial tool that seeks to minimize some people and elevate others.
Well, the use of the Mercator as a general-purpose map is certainly problematic and misleading, and has no doubt led to false conceptions in many peoples' heads about spatial relationships...
That being said... sadly the "Mercator" is the only projection that many, even educated people, can name off-hand. Also, it fills up a wall or a pull-down screen in a classroom really well.
In the cold-war era, it also had the dubious benefit of showing an enormous, looming, threatening Soviet Union with a tiny little continental US somewhere in the middle
That being said... sadly the "Mercator" is the only projection that many, even educated people, can name off-hand. Also, it fills up a wall or a pull-down screen in a classroom really well.
In the cold-war era, it also had the dubious benefit of showing an enormous, looming, threatening Soviet Union with a tiny little continental US somewhere in the middle
Crazy Boris
Banned
...Or maybe people just use the most common projection used at the time because its the most common projection used at the time, since Mercator is great for navigation and navigation was the primary usage of maps for a long time.
Occam's Razor; what makes more sense: people use it because it's convenient and widespread or there's some secret conspiracy by Greenlandic ultranationalists to make Ecuadorians feel insecure about the size of their country.
Don't add fuel to this fire, sometimes a map is just a map. and by sometimes I mean pretty much always.
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I think this is a coup by the space-time KKK manipulated by the Vatican and the Israeli government. 🤪
What drives me crazy is that I've already heard history teachers explain it to me.
Anyway, as soon as you try to represent a sphere on a flat surface, there is bound to be an error.
Lol, imagine believing it was “intentional” of anything other than plotting direction.
@Crazy Boris @BrobDingnag @Comte de Dordogne @Help
One of the many ugly things about systemic racism is that people can perpetuate it without necessarily having any sort of hateful agenda. Bias can be reinforced through absent-mindedness. That's why we need to think critically about the tools and structures we create, and listen to the people who are most affected by it.
Imagine that you are a teacher, with a map displayed on your classroom wall. A group of students come to you after class and express that they find the map insulting, since it marginalizes their homelands and emphasizes the homelands of people who have been pillaging their homelands for centuries and telling their people that they are inferior. Without the historical context, it might seem like they are making a mountain out of molehill, but when the map comes as part of a package of hundreds of years of dehumanization and exploitation, it re-opens those wounds. So, what would you do as the teacher. Would you tell them that they are wrong to be offended, since the map was build for navigation, even though it's sitting on the wall of a classroom, not in front of the steering wheel of a ship? Are you saying that having a navigational map on the wall is more important than challenging structural racism and creating an inclusive learning environment?
And if you're worried that the group of students who approached you are not representative of the diversity of students, then invite more students and teachers to the discussion. Have a conversation about maps and other displays on the walls, and what their effect is, regardless of intentions. And in this discussion, it is absolutely essential to remember that the classroom doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is embedded in a society that is saturated with racism at so many levels. We can change that, and we have to. And we aren't going to get there by dismissing criticism with "it wasn't intentional" or "it's good for navigation".
When someone points out a mistake that you made without meaning to, and you agree that the it was a mistake and you shouldn't have done it, does it make sense to keep on doing this thing because, well, the first time you did it, it was an accident? No. It makes sense to stop doing the problematic behavior now that you've been made aware of it. An unintentional wrongdoing becomes deliberate when you keep doing despite being alerted to its wrongfulness. As for adding fuel to the fire, that brings to mind a certain quote:
“Sometimes, when a person’s house is on fire and someone comes in yelling fire, instead of the person who is awakened by the yell being thankful, he makes the mistake of charging the one who awakened him with having set the fire.”
- Malcolm X [1]
So, I leave you with this question, am I adding fuel to the fire, or am I drawing your attention to a fire that is already raging, so that together we can put it out and rebuild the house so that it will no longer incinerate its own residents?
[1] Source: "Judas and the Black Messiah", quoted in The Michigan Daily. https://www.michigandaily.com/film/judas-and-the-black-messiah-says-screw-the-neoliberals/ February 10, 2021.
I don't know what to say... I mostly feel like you're asking me for help putting out a candle with a bucket of water.
I want to believe you are honest but the concepts you are using are way over my head. It seems to be common in the Anglo-Saxon world to approach subjects in this way but I can never understand them.
But I'm not sure if answering you here in detail is a good idea, the thread is not meant to.
Not to mention that old maps portrayed Antarctica as a colossal "here there be dragons" land even larger that it was. Which is possibly the corrupt influence of the Penguin lobby.
I don't think the usage of the Mercator map is at all related to the numerous important issues regarding the racism present in institutions. All maps suffer distortion of the globe, and so all maps have issues with them (globes are not used because of the space and higher material costs). The question becomes do you want a rectangular map, or one with a weird shape? Most pick rectangles to avoid cuts in the viewed map, which is understandable. The reason Mercator is used is because those who pick it prefer a warped map with size altered instead of shape and longitude (in addition to tradition because sailing was important before), whereas the other is not viewed as helpful to those aspects. The Mercator projection also translates well to computers, since it can be copied over infinitely by following latitude and longitude. Racism is not a factor, and I don't see most people being petty enough to take pride in a map projection because of racism.
Eparkhos
Banned
You're not just adding fuel to the fire, you're committing arson to justify role-playing as a firefighter. I was going to write a full-length response, but frankly your premise is so stupid that it's not worth my time. Your entire argument is predicated on the belief that the Mercator projection was created by white supremacists/colonialists/people you don't like, and that those who use it presently are either members of that cohort or are mere ignorant rubes who need to be freed from the bondage of ignorance by you and your fellow intellectual liberators, a worldview which is quite flawed. I'm not going to waste any more time deconstructing your wall of text sentence by sentence, but suffice to say that it has replaced the initial map as the dumbest thing I have read in the last twenty-four hours.
Now, I won't claim to know what @Miranda Brawner is thinking, but I'm pretty sure I read the same post as you and it doesn't imply that. What I got from it was that she's suggesting the use of the Mercator projection could be received as a, for lack of a better word, microaggression, regardless of the intentions behind its use or its creation; and that we shouldn't dismiss those feelings out of hand but try to work towards a solution. I'll get to the first half below, but as for the second, I'd like to think we can all agree that self-reflection and trying to understand other people's perspectives are good things (not to mention being anti-racist). Frankly, your response seems entirely disproportionate, not to mention rude.
Now, my take on the Mercator projection: I can supply anecdotal evidence that Mercator maps have left people with a similarly distorted sense of geography when it comes to places in the far north (mainly Greenland), and I think it's worth considering that a lot of the long-distance marine navigation that this projection was designed to aid was associated with colonial projects. You can't walk from Spain to Peru, after all. However, as to whether Mercator maps actually promote a white supremacist mindset or are insulting to people from countries closer to the equator than Europe, I just don't know. I mean that literally, by the way: I'm not aware of any research into this, and personally I think it's something that's worth looking into.
It seems to me you are using a looking glass to find fires, but it's sun outside so you start them yourself.