Have you ever looked at a city map and wondered why some neighborhoods suddenly feel completely different? It’s not just a random coincidence or a matter of personal taste. In fact, local governments spent decades playing a sneaky game of real-life SimCity to keep Black families segregated.
Local planners and federal officials used sneaky cartographic tricks, from weird border detours to highway planning, to enforce racial segregation and choke off Black wealth. As author Richard Rothstein wrote in The Color of Law, “the government was not following preexisting racial patterns; it was imposing segregation where it hadn’t previously taken root.” This wasn’t accidental; it was a deliberate blueprint to divide us.
The sneaky trick of municipal underbounding
Municipal underbounding is one of the most toxic cartographic tricks you’ve probably never heard of. It happens when a town draws its borders in a bizarre zigzag to intentionally exclude nearby Black neighborhoods. By keeping these communities outside city limits, local governments legally starved them of basic public resources.
Look at Moore County, North Carolina, where wealthy, white golfing towns like Southern Pines and Aberdeen created a “tortured maze” of borders. Planners literally drew lines around Black enclaves such as Jackson, Hamlet, and Midway, leaving holes in the map. While white residents enjoyed clean water and trash pickup, adjacent Black residents had to watch garbage trucks roll past their streets to serve white neighborhoods.…