In our modern, enlightened, and tolerant society, it seems increasingly evident that in the eyes of some people whites can't do anything without revealing what awful racists they are. Apparently the list of things that constitute white supremacist crimes against humanity now includes drawing world maps.
This came to my attention when I overheard someone claiming that America is bigger than Australia on world maps "because of ethnocentrism." This prompted me to do some quick Google searches, which revealed that the claim was completely unfounded. For one thing, most maps portray Australia and the lower 48 (or contiguous) states of America as being roughly the same size—because they are. In fact, the contiguous United States is a little bit larger, coming in at 3,119,884 square miles to Australia's 2,969,907 square miles. If one discounts the 160,820 square miles of massive lakes included in America's contiguous borders, the result is a much closer 2,959,064 square miles of land—very close to the Australian total (which does include some large lakes, like Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens of South Australia). So it was clear that portraying the United States as a close match and slight superior of Australia in size is a move rooted in geographical fact rather than ethnocentrism.
But looking up this claim made me wonder if there really were people out there who saw maps as racially motivated. That led me down the rabbit hole that ended at the obviously enlightened blog "stuff white people do" which included this article on how whites allegedly use world maps (specifically the popular Mercator Projection) to "imagine the world as literally eurocentric"[sic]. It was not the only one to do so. One need only search for "Mercator Projection ethnocentric" and dozens of results pop up, most citing episode 16 of the second season of The West Wing as their inspiration, and many of them from ostensibly academic websites one would expect to know better. So the resounding answer is yes: in our modern world real people, college educated people, actually think that maps are racist.
No matter where you look in these articles, all of the same complaints are listed, all focusing on the Mercator Projection. The map is ethnocentric because it literally places Europe near the center of the map. The center line, the prime meridian, even runs right through it! The map is white supremacist because it puts the countries of the white-majority Northern Hemisphere on top. And of course, the final and most oft stated proof that the Mercator Projection promotes racism is that it depicts white majority Europe and the United States as disproportionately enlarged—and even depicts that European isle of Greenland as bigger than the whole continent of Africa, when it's actually only 1/14th the size! The solution most of these writers will offer is the same: get rid of that abhorrent ethnocentric Mercator Projection and bring in the socially-conscious and far superior Peters Projection.
The problem is that in writing these articles the authors all really just proved one thing: they know less about maps than you can learn from fifteen minutes on Wikipedia.
Let's start with the size issue. In the Mercator Projection, white-majority Europe, the United States, and (especially) Greenland are all shown as bigger than black-majority Africa. Bigger equals better and more important, therefore the map is a clear product of and promoter of racism, right? Wrong. If this were true, than the biggest thing on the map should be Germany or Belgium, since its creator (Geradus Mercator) was Flemish. But instead the whole of Europe, most of North America, and even Australia are dwarfed by the colossus which is Greenland—a far northern island which in reality is much smaller than any of them. Was Mercator a secret proponent of Greenlandic supremacy then? Hardly. In Mercator's day Greenland was an almost total unknown, with only one coastline being portrayed with any accuracy on his original 1569 map. While in centuries past Greenland had been colonized by Europeans (or more specifically, Vikings), those colonies had failed, vanishing into historical oblivion to the point that some Europeans didn't even realize they'd existed and erroneously thought the frigid isle their ancestors had written off as a backwater a mere hundred years ago was actually some newly discovered land. Greenland was still inhabited of course, by native Inuit peoples, who make up 88% of the population of Greenland to this day. Worse still for this theory, however, is the enormous size of Antarctica, which appears to be large enough to comfortably swallow every other landmass on Earth (when it's really smaller than both Africa and Asia, being roughly the same size as South America). So unless the Mercator Projection is secretly a propaganda tool of Inuit supremacists and ethnocentric penguins, I think we can write this explanation off!
Instead of racism, the real explanation for the size inaccuracies of the Mercator Projection lies in the mathematics of cartography itself. The Earth is a sphere, but most maps are rectangles. Projecting a spherical surface onto a flat one presents an enormous challenge, and it simply cannot be done without some inaccuracies. Cartographers approaching the task of making a world map must choose which inaccuracies they're willing to tolerate and which they will not. Will they preserve the relative shapes and sizes of the contents at the cost of introducing huge gashes and discontinuities that make the map all but unusable for navigation? If they keep the map whole, will they distort the shapes of the landmasses by stretching or squashing them in order to preserve their relative size, or sacrifice their relative size for fidelity of shape? These decisions really depend on the purpose of the map. The purpose of Geradus Mercator's map was to create a world map which could be used for reliable navigation by early sailors (one so reliable that iterations of it continue to be used by mariners of all nationalities to this day). For that purpose, it was imperative to avoid as many gashes and discontinuities as possible (sailing off the edge of the map would mean difficulty finding where your course picked up on the other side). It was also necessary to preserve the shape of the coastlines, since these shapes would be used as points of reference for ocean-going navigation. To that end, size had to be sacrificed, but distorted size could easily be fixed by adjusting the scale—distorted shape and discontinuities would be much harder for a sailor to adjust to on the fly. That explains at least why the sizes of the various landmasses on the Mercator Projection are inaccurate, but why choose to enlarge the places he did? It's not a racial prejudice in favor of penguins. Rather, Mercator, like many 16th Century European cartographers, was motivated by geographical accuracy. While we in the 21st Century have adapted to the idea that many lines on our maps are arbitrary, the cartographers of Mercator's day were not prepared to accept this. Mercator needed a line of latitude to serve as the center-line for his map, the line off of which the rest of the map would scale up to preserve shape. He picked what was, in his view, the center-line of the world: the equator. The equator, of course, runs through Africa and South America, but not through Europe (so much for a Eurocentric worldview). Because these continents were the closest to Mercator's center-line, he was able to portray them with the greatest fidelity of size while maintaining the all-important shape of their coastlines. But as lands became further away from the equator, to the north or to the south, Mercator was forced to scale up their size in order to prevent their coastlines from becoming distorted and useless for navigation. As the map moved further and further from the equator, the necessary size distortions became larger and larger, culminating in a massive Greenland (due to its extremely high northerly latitude) and a mindbogglingly huge Antarctica (due to it being at the extreme southern end of the globe).
So the size distortions of the Mercator Projection were clearly not motivated by racism or European ethnocentrism. Some might argue that, even if these weren't the cartographer's motive they were certainly the effect his size distortions have had on the minds of young children, who see the larger size of northerly white-dominant nations compared to Africa and interpret the map as reinforcing white supremacist worldviews. To those people I would ask this: how many of these young children grow up to be Inuit supremacists or believe that Antarctica is by far the best and most important place in the world? If children can recognize that the hugely distorted size of Greenland and Antarctica doesn't make these lands and their inhabitants (or wildlife, in the case of Antarctica) inherently better than everyone else in the world (in their smaller-scaled lands), then surely they can recognize that the relatively small size difference between Europe, the United States, and Africa isn't an endorsement of white supremacy.
But what about that prime meridian, passing problematically right through Europe. The prime meridian—the designated line 0 in the longitude system—is, as we know, basically arbitrary. Surely Mercator's decision to place this arbitrary vertical center-line in Europe is a clear reflection of his ethnocentric worldview, right? Wrong again. Espousing this view reveals a fundamental ignorance of the history of cartography. While we today realize that where the longitudinal system begins and ends is an arbitrary decision, cartographers of 16th Century Europe did not. In fact, they expected that, just like the equator, the prime meridian would turn out to be a global line with a real geophysical significance. The consensus was that this line was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, just beyond the shores of Europe. Christopher Columbus fueled this consensus when he reported that in the mid-Atlantic his compass had pointed to true north (with no deflection due to the north pole and geomagnetic north pole not lining up), but the idea of a prime meridian in that area predated him by over a thousand years. In the year 150, the Greek mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer Ptolemy produced the Geographia, which became the foundation of all European map-making when it was reprinted by the Italians during the Renaissance. In it, Ptolemy became the first person to use a near-European Atlantic prime meridian. As a Greek living in lands far from this line, he wasn't motivated by racism but by practicality: lines of longitude counted west to east with the positional changes of the Moon by which they were mathematically determined, but the mathematics of Ptolemy's day lacked a system for negative numbers. The zero of the prime meridian was a necessary stopping point for his map, so he pushed it out into the western ocean to the farthest isles he'd heard about. Over a thousand years later, European cartographers continued to place the prime meridians of their maps in the same general area, revering Ptolemy's legacy and trusting that he'd been on to something after all by placing the 0 longitude line where he did. Mercator, as hopeful as any of them, followed suit, placing the prime meridian in the same general area as Ptolemy's, running through the Canary Islands, off the coast of Europe and West Africa. This happened to place both Europe and Africa fairly near to the center of the world, but the reasoning came down to history and the legacy of a Greek cartographer, rather than a Flemish man's ethnocentrism.
But today the prime meridian has shifted east. It now runs through Greenwich, England. Surely this is the result of racism? Well, not really, just an artifact of further history. You see, eventually, the European cartographers realized that the prime meridian didn't have a geophysical basis, and that Ptolemy's line and every other line before or since had been essentially arbitrary. The question then became whose arbitrary line would become the most widely used and thus eventually be adopted as the official prime meridian of the world. The answer was English astronomer Nevil Maskelyne. The reason wasn't that Nevil was white, but because in the 1760's he published a series of astronomical tables painstakingly charting the position of the Moon for use in navigation—which allowed cartographers and navigators to plot lines of longitude more accurately than ever before. He placed the prime meridian of his work through Greenwich, England, and due to the importance and influence of his work, it became the officially adopted prime meridian of the world. His choice of location wasn't entirely arbitrary, though, nor was it motivated by ethnocentrism. Rather, it was a pragmatic choice: Greenwich was the town where his observatory was located, and thus was the easiest place to start his intensive calculations. Thus, Greenwich became the prime meridian in his work and, by extension, the prime meridian of the adjusted Mercator Projection maps that would come after him. No racism was required.
But again, one might argue that even if the location of the prime meridian came about through developments of history and science rather than racial prejudice, it still communicates ethnocentrism to children today. Again, I would have to ask such people if they think these children will grow up to believe in the inherent superiority of Africans. The prime meridian passes through Greenwich, England and Europe, but it also passes through Accra, Ghana and Africa, and Africa is a lot closer to the intersection of the equator and the prime meridian—putting it dead center on most world maps. If the arbitrarily central location of Europe communicates white superiority today, then surely the even more central location of Africa fosters ideas of black supremacy, right? If we find the latter notion ridiculous, there's no reason we should hold the former in any seriousness either.
Only one complaint remains, the "ethnocentric" notion of putting white-dominant northern nations on top. Surely this idea holds, as the decision of which direction to put "up" is purely arbitrary, right? Well, again, history shows this to be false. Again, the idea of north being "up" goes back to Ptolemy's Geographia. No one's sure why Ptolemy put north at the top of his maps, but the best guess is that he knew less about sub-Saharan Africa (with which there was little trade, due to the desert's natural barrier) compared to Northern Europe. There wasn't any good racially biased reason for him to arrange the map like this, since the blacks of central and southern Africa would have been as strange to him as the blond Germanic tribes moving in from the northern reaches of Europe. He certainly would have had no reason to consider them his superiors. Of course when the Renaissance came, Ptolemy's work became the cornerstone of cartography in Europe and his every decision was seen as endowed with wisdom on the inner workings of the world, even the ones that later turned out to be arbitrary or made merely for convenience. Putting north at the top of his maps was one of these decisions, and the discovery of a geomagnetic north pole that attracted the needles of a compass seemed only to cement the brilliance of Ptolemy's map orientation in the minds of Europeans. Naturally, then, when Mercator made his projection, he did what every other European before (and most of them since) has done and put north at the top of his map—a decision determined by history rather than racial prejudice.
Still people might argue that even if Mercator's intentions were innocent, placing north on the top of the map still communicates the idea of white superiority. Again, I have to question how familiar these people really are with geography. Even if north did automatically equate to superiority once it was put at the top of the globe, the real demographics of the world would preclude children coming to the conclusion that white people were the best people. Rather, they'd decide that some white people (those in Canada, England, Scandinavia, and northern Russia) were pretty good, some were terrible reprobates (those in Australia), and scientists and explorers were sent to Antarctica because they were absolutely the worst people on Earth. And, of course, they'd be staunch Inuit supremacists, since Inuits are the predominant demographic on the most extreme northern areas of the Mercator Projection (along with the indigenous peoples of extreme northern Siberia, who would also be seen as better than whites). Since there is no movement among today's youth demonizing Australians and promoting Inuit ethnic superiority, we can safely conclude that children can tell the difference between using North-as-up as a convention and enforcing ethnocentrism.
The real question is, why can't academics tell the difference between conventions of cartography rooted in math and history and the propaganda tools of ethnocentrism? There the answer may be too much of The West Wing and not enough of real history. Take the proposed solution: the much-touted Peters Projection which is going to iron out all the "problematic" aspects of the Mercator Projection and become the map of a new, ethnically tolerant and enlightened world. If the authors of these pieces knew a little more about history and cartography (again not in-depth knowledge, just a very basic overview from a quick fact-check), they'd quickly realize they were being taken for a ride. The Peters Projection is more appropriately known as the Gall-Peters Projection. It was first created in 1855 by James Gall, who presented it along with a couple other projections. It joined the line of many similar equal-area projections which were interesting for their ability to preserve the relative size of the landmasses, but not particularly useful or influential because they introduced such distortions of shape that they were impractical for navigation. In 1974, however, the map was resurrected by German film-maker and multi-cultural historian Arno Peters, who claimed to have invented it himself and touted it as the most accurate and all-around best map ever made. Unsurprisingly, the cartographic community saw right through these claims, recognized the map as something they'd rejected as inaccurate and useless more than a hundred years ago, and blew him off. Peters, however, would not be dissuaded. He went after folks who were more socially inclined and less map-savvy and tried to win them over with arguments that his map was the best because it showed the continents in the correct relative size, trying to persuade them to buy and use his map instead of the more popular (and more accurate) Mercator Projection maps everyone was using. And why would they do that? Because, Peters argued, the Mercator Projection was racist! That's right, the TV shows, social justice warriors, and academics are all quoting almost verbatim from the sales pitch of a plagiarizing cartographer desperate to get people to buy "his" map. The worst part is that absolutely none of Peters' claims were true! The Mercator Projection, as we've seen, isn't racist in the slightest. The vaunted solution, the Peters Projection didn't really solve any of the Mercator's alleged problems. Oh, sure, it resized the United States and Europe to be less offensively enlarged—by making them some of the only places in the world were the map was accurate (the map distorts the shapes of landmasses more and more the further they are away from the 45th parallel, which runs through North America and Europe). It didn't do a thing about any of the other alleged offenses of the Mercator Projection though. The prime meridian is still running through Greenwich, England, and is dead-center of the map. North is still up. If Mercator's map promoted racism, Peters' did nothing to fix it. And of course, it wasn't even his map in the first place: it was Gall's, and it was just one of a dozen other equal-area map projections doing the exact same thing (and most of them doing it better)!
Why do so many academics, college students, educated social justice warriors, and other supposedly enlightened elites fall for this? Why are they still falling for it (the latest article I found, in my very brief search, was from June, 2016)? This is what worries and bothers me more than the pushing of a narrative that everything white people do is subtly racist (which is saying something, because that's a falsehood that bothers me a lot). These people are supposed to be a part of the best, the brightest, and the most educated in our society. The one most essential thing they should have picked up in their educational experience is the ability to apply critical thinking and sift through the glut of information at our fingertips today to sort fact from fiction. If anyone should be expected to have that skill, it is them. And yet in this area and others, I see such people falling victim to haphazardly constructed propaganda that anyone with access to Google can see through almost immediately. Even without access to Google, they should have been able to see through this one. Come on, seriously: this map is Eurocentric because it places Africa in almost the exact center, and white supremacist because it depicts every country with a white majority as being dwarfed by an island overwhelmingly populated by Inuits—how do you not see right through that?! The only answer I can think of is because they just aren't trying. Peters' propaganda tells them a story they want to hear, and they just don't critically think about it. It tells them a story about how all the white people before and around them are and have been racists, but they can fix it and bring about racial harmony by making a series of profoundly easy and basically meaningless choices with no impact other than to declare them as well-intentioned and ill-informed—choices like trading one distorted world map on their wall for another. Frankly, it's disappointing.
