A Journey Toward Antiracist Geospatial Practices: Getting Started

Introduction and Series Overview

In response to significant interest in the intersection of antiracism, geography, and GIS, this series of articles will delve into the complex legacy of geographic practices and their role in shaping racial disparities. We'll explore how biased planning practices have lasting impacts and how modern geospatial practices can perpetuate or dismantle these legacies.

What Will Your Geographic Legacy Be?

As we navigate this journey, each article will prompt you to consider your impact: Will your work in geography and GIS contribute to equity or uphold the status quo? Stay tuned as we uncover the layers of this critical conversation.

Getting Started

Today, we begin by discussing the legacy, geographic practices, and the consequences of working without an antiracist approach (aka status quo). This context will illuminate the opportunity and need for equity in geography and GIS. In short, this part of our exploration is about recognizing that:

1. Geography Is Not Neutral: Geography shapes lives and not always for the better.
2. Geography Is Scalable: GIS and GeoAI scale geographic approaches and their impacts.
3. Geography Can Create Equity: Geo practitioners have an opportunity, a duty, and the privilege to help design a racially just world.

Now, let's talk about legacy.

Legacies Persist and Grow

The term 'legacy' often brings to mind heritage and inheritance, the valuable foundation one gains through the efforts of their predecessors.?

• Family Legacies: Like the current generation of a family benefiting financially and socially from the strides of their parents, grandparents, and elders going back generations (e.g., Still Just a Dream, Economic Security, Wealth Implications on Health).?
• Tech Legacies: Like the current generation of technologists benefiting from the hard work and lessons learned of past generations of coders who wrote programs in machine language, enabling the current generation to write code in abridged versions of their native human languages.?(e.g. )
• Our Legacies: Like the results of our efforts today that will pass on as the foundation the next generations of our families, professions, and communities will build on.?

Benefits and Burdens of Geographic Legacies

We often celebrate and leverage the benefits of geography’s legacies. However, we must also contemplate and correct the burdens of geographic legacies.

Let's explore a few examples.

Geospatial Data Informs Our Future

• Benefit: Early digitizers mapped roads, sidewalks, building footprints, and water infrastructure, making it relatively easy to create a map today and navigate from Philly to DC using your phone.
• Burden: Racist geographic approaches like inequitable zoning, racial covenants, biased urban planning, and other segregationist practices continue to enrich some communities while overburdening others.?
• Why Antiracism Matters: Without antiracist geographic approaches, we will build more and more geospatial data assets on a racist foundation. A foundation that will guide present-day and future geo practices in cities, rural communities, and neighborhoods across the country.

Geospatial Automation Scales Impact

• Benefit: Automatic reprojection features realign data from one coordinate system to another, making it easy to create and share geospatial data across the globe.?
• Burden: Geopolitically biased projection systems diminished perceptions of colonial targets and acquisitions while elevating and overemphasizing colonizers.
• Why Antiracism Matters: Without antiracist geographic approaches, we will continue to fuel unconscious and conscious bias among geo-practitioners. Moreover, geospatial automation like GeoAI will replicate and scale the impacts of racist geographic practices and biased data for communities worldwide.

Geography Holds the Power for Change

Geographic approaches have the power to shape communities and impact lives around the world. We need to discuss and address the realities of racism in geography to effectively leverage geographic approaches, technology, and communities of practice to eliminate the harms we've inherited.?

What will your geographic legacy be?

Legacy is a living, breathing influence that continues to shape our present and future. So, what will your geographic legacy be?

• Your Work: Will your maps and analysis perpetuate or eliminate racial disparities?
• Your Team: Will your team's work be informed by staff and stakeholders equitably reflect communities of color?
• Your Organization: Will your organization invest equitably to eliminate racial disparity or follow the status quo and grow racial disparities through inaction?