Ally Action Project Week 25: Mapping Equality

World maps have been influencing people, leaders, and countries for centuries to show culturally white groups as dominant. The world map most commonly used was created by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It is based on a cylinder rather than a sphere, and distorts the shapes of land the farther from the middle. This particular map was designed to highlight the western world by enlarging North America and Europe. Greenland is displayed roughly the same size as Africa, even though Africa is about 14x larger. The Scandinavian countries show larger than India, though India is 3x larger. The most divisive versions of the Mercator projection move the equator from the middle to the bottom of the map, cutting off the southern hemisphere. Humans are conditioned to value top over the bottom and larger over smaller. The results of this map have oppressed the non-European countries in the southern hemisphere for over 450 years.

Taking 3D globe maps and applying to 2D rectangular maps presents a challenge on how to project the land while keeping it area-correct. Some area-correct maps are the Gall-Peters and the AuthaGraph projections. James Gall created the map projection in 1855 and Arno Peters improved upon the projection in 1973. The countries along the equator are elongated, but is area-correct. The AuthoGraph projection was created by Hajime Narukawa, who took the world map and flipped it around, adding angles to keep the map a rectangular size.

The Boston School district famously changed to the Gall-Peters projection in 2017 in an effort to remove the Eurocentric view. Some US schools have changed to other world map projections that are not area-correct. Our action is to let our school boards know that we need change. Please identify and email your local school board, who can influence the curriculum being taught.