Answer to Map #14a
Geography Awareness Week 2016

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Answer: This week’s choropleth depicts the percentage of the residents of each community district in New York City who identify as white (non-Hispanic). Districts with higher percentages of white residents are colored in the darkest purple, while those areas with the lowest percentages of white residents appear in the lighest pink.

The data used to make this map came from the New York City section of the “Pedia Cities” website. On this map, the darkest shade of purple incidates a community district in which over 80% of the residents identify as white. The whitest community district is the third district of Staten Island, the southernmost district in New York, where 85.45% of the population is white. The second darkest shade of purple on this map indicates districts where between 70% and 80% of the population is white, and each successive lighter shade denotes a decrease of 10%.

Fourteen community districts in New York City have populations where less than 10% of the population is non-Hispanic white. The lowest percentage is in the second district of the Bronx (across the East River from Queens), where 1.34% of the population is white. The vast majority of people in this district are Hispanic or Latino (75.03%), while a significant minority are African-American (21.9%).

One interesting district is the third district of Manhattan (in the southeastern part of the island), which sticks out on our choropleth for having a smaller white percentage than the neighboring districts. In this district, only 32.33% of the population is white. The main reason for this low number is that this district contains New York’s main Chinatown; accordingly, 33.48% of the population is of Asian ancestry.

In general, this choropleth clearly reflects neighborhoods that are associated with particular ethnicities or nationalities. Several neighborhoods in southern Queens are known for having large concentrations of immigrants from Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. Accordingly, these districts have significantly higher percentages of white people than do the surrounding areas.

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