It came to my attention this morning (via Twitter) that a non-trivial number of people were taught in school that Eli Whitney - the inventor of the cotton gin - was not a white man from Massachusetts, but was, in fact, black.
I would like to use this space to state, unequivocally, that Eli Whitney was, without a doubt, white.
My name is Eli Whitney and I'm white as hell.
It seems as if there are two possibilities as to why this "myth" (and I use that word reeeeaaaally loosely) spread:
1) It was (and judging by some of the responses to Rembert Browne's tweet, seemingly continues to be) a case where a certain subsection of teachers were taught this when they were in school and are now unintentionally passing off incorrect information to their current students.
or
2) This was an intentional falsehood spread en masse. If it were a black man who invented the cotton gin, then whites could claim that they were less complicit in the expansion of the cotton South as well as the existing and subsequent horrors of slavery. If someone blamed whites for the South's reliance on enslavement and free labor, supporters of slavery could respond with "Well, actually" and shift the blame on a black man (and, by extension, black people in general).
While I hope the reasoning is the former, I unfortunately suspect that it is (for the most part) the latter.
On that note, Happy Black History Month, everyone! Let's all vow to learn and spread knowledge about African-American history; not just in February, but throughout the entire year as well. Please do not end up like this man.
(And don't forget, "Every month is White History Month" is always the correct response to a friend/relative/overly talkative stranger who histrionically exclaims something to the effect of "Why isn't there a White History Month!?!?")
Well for the sake of this blog, "map," to be exact:
Recognize that map? Of course you do. It's everywhere. Classroom walls, textbooks, atlases, basically any movie where a hacker or federal agent tracks the bad guy to his precise position on Earth. You've seen it.
The name of this familiar looking thing is a "Mercator projection." It was named by the man who created it (surprise, surprise), a 16th century mathematician/inventor/teacher/geographer/cartogropher named Gerardus Mercator who was born in what is modern day Belgium. When he wasn't paying the bills by inventing new instruments to aid in mathematics, Mercator produced maps on the side (a cool hobby for sure, but not nearly as badass as blogging about maps and people who have been dead for 400+ years). These works eventually led him to creating his biggest hit, the map projection you see above.
Your question: Cool history lesson, bro. What's the point?
My answer: The map up there that we've all seen, the one that shows us what the world we live on looks like... it's wrong. Like, massively wrong.
Full disclosure: I'm clearly not an expert on this, I suck at math, and the exact way that maps are projected out goes beyond my ability to understand without making my head blow up, so I'm not going to go into any great detail here since I wouldn't really have a single clue as to what I was talking about. I'm a bored guy writing about maps, not a multi-talented cartographer like our dead friend Gerardus Mercator.
The main points to understand here are exactly what map projections are and why doing them can cause problems, such as with the Mercator projection. A map projection is taking a spherical object such as a globe (fun fact: Earth is round (kind of)) and projecting its outer contents onto a flat surface. As cool as globes are, they don't fit in your back pocket during a hike or in the visor of your car as easily as foldable maps do. Maps also allow smaller and more detailed areas of land to be shown. If you're trying to traverse an area that you might be unfamiliar with, a map is your best bet. (Well, GPS is really your best bet, but lets not ruin the narrative here, okay?)
So it sounds simple right? Just make a globe with the layout of the world, cut if off, lay it flat, and BOOM brand new map. Except that doesn't actually work. Ever. No matter what method of projection you use to transfer from a sphere to a flat surface, there will always be distortions. And some of them can get pretty gnarly.
(If you don't believe this, you can try it yourself. Wrap paper around a globe or other round object, draw something on the paper, and then peel it off. See all the bends and crinkles in the paper and how what you drew looks all screwy? Yeah.)
Hey look! It's our friend the Mercator projection again. But this time, for your viewing pleasure, I included a different map projection as well. The new map on the right is called a "Winkel tripel projection," named after the (ahem, surprise, surprise) guy who created it, Oswald Winkel.
Take a few seconds and look at them. Ignore that one of them is rounded off and the other isn't. Look at the areas of land, specifically their shape and size. Notice anything?
(Hint: click on the pictures to view them at full size.)
And there's our problem with the Mercator projection. Africa is the second largest continent on Earth (after Asia) with an area of roughly 11.7 million square miles. That's over 2 million MORE square miles than all of North America and it accounts for over 20% of the landmass on the entire planet. Greenland, on the other hand, is about 836,000 square miles in size. You could combine the areas of North America and Greenland, throw in Peru for good measure, and still have some wiggle room before matching the size of Africa. Yet look at the way they're portrayed on the Mercator projection on the left. Now look at the Winkel tripel projection on the right.
Yeah, it blew my mind the first time I saw that too.
(And that's not all. The Mercator projection shows us that Alaska could eat entire chunks of South America for breakfast, except that in reality Brazil by itself is more than 2.6 million square miles larger than Alaska.)
"So which one is right?" you may be asking yourself, which is very convenient, because I have the answer. Sort of.
It's certainly not the Mercator projection. As you can see, as you get further from the equator, areas such as North America, Greenland, etc, start to get really distorted and stretch while areas closer to the equator, such as Africa and South America, start to get squeezed and shrink. So that means the Winkel triple projection is what Earth really looks like on a flat surface then, right? Again, sort of. Remember, no projection of a sphere onto a flat surface is without some kind of distortion. The Winkel tripel projection certainly isn't perfect, but it's leaps and bounds more accurate to what the world actually looks like than not only the Mercator projection, but some other map projections as well.
So if it's so skewed then why did it ever get used? When talking about maps, certain projections serve certain purposes more accurately than others. In the time of Gerardus Mercator, his projection was used for navigation, and since the Mercator projection is much more accurate on a smaller scale (as opposed to using it to represent the entire Earth), it offered sailors a more accurate way to know which directions to sail than the other maps of the day.
Yeah, but that was in the 1500's. We have satellites in space now and know exactly what the world really looks like. So why do we still use it? There's no good answer to that, because in all honesty, we shouldn't. Sailors still use it today because of the previously stated benefits it offers to navigating the oceans, but other than that, we have a lot of other, more accurate alternatives at this point. Plus, there's another less obvious angle to the effects of using an inaccurate map.
Assuming you didn't already know about all of this, think back to your perception of Africa and Greenland before you realized that what is arguably the most well known and influential map in our society (world?) is fundamentally flawed in its depiction of our planet. Greenland is enormous, Africa is kinda, sorta big, and North America is huge compared to South America. Now think about the associations you place on size differences. Do you think of something that is bigger as being not necessarily better, but more important? And that something smaller is lesser and there for not as important? Not everyone will agree with those statements. But looking at it from a global view, the Mercator projection (which has been the preeminent map of the past few hundred years) helped create, intentionally or unintentionally, a sort of psychological superiority of the people who live in the "big" areas versus the people who live in the "small" areas. Because of its usefulness in sailing, the usage of maps using the Mercator projection helped spur the move towards a more globalized world and its use matches up with the timeline of European dominance throughout the world, especially in the enslavement of indigenous people in the newly discovered lands in the west. This isn't to claim that Mercator created his map in an attempt to help secure European power by placing emphasis on those areas against those of the non-European world, but simply to point out the effect that something as innocuous seeming as a map can have on so many things beyond serving as a navigation tool.
The West Wing had a great scene about the inaccuracies and sociopolitical effects of the Mercator projection and the attempt to replace it with another projection called the "Gall-Peters projection." I didn't write about that projection because it's terrible (for a lot of different reasons) and it has been largely discredited in favor of more accurate projections.
So, in the end we have a map that we still use to this day, even though we know it's wrong. Is that a bad thing? Given that it still serves some purpose, I think it can be argued either way. I'm personally not a fan of it because of the effect that I believe its had on such a large part of world history over the past few centuries and the role it has unwittingly played in altering the perceptions of how people view the world we live in. The Winkel tripel projection and another similar one called the Robinson projection (guess who it was named after?), have become more mainstream and are either taking place of, or being shown along with the Mercator projection. Despite, and partially because of, it's inaccuracies, I think it will always be important to use the Mercator projection as a teaching tool, especially in the areas of history, politics, and sociology.
If you're still with me after all of this you're probably saying "What the hell is wrong with this guy? Why did he just spend three (or four) (edit: five?) hours writing about a map?" That's a completely valid question. The only real answer I can give you, other than it's something that interests me, is that a friend sent me this picture on Twitter and it reminded me of how much I hate the goddamn Mercator projection:
Thanks, Shane.
If you're some kind of weirdo and want to read more about this stuff, check these links out. Also, I almost certainly got some things wrong in this, so if this actually does interest you, you should totally fact check me and let me know what I boned up.
(This also doubles as a sort of sources cited page for me since I don't want to come across like I somehow knew most of this before I started researching it while writing.)
