CONTIGUOUS STATE PRIVILEGE
This week, I’m ruminating about the erroneous state of maps.
I used to be oblivious to the privilege that I had as a middle-aged, rotund, white woman from the great state of Utah. Sure, I’d seen disclaimers in magazine advertisements and commercials, but I was only dimly aware that there were others who did not have the same access to resources that I had. Then I moved far, far away and discovered how spoiled I was.
Even though I still lived on American soil within one of the fifty states, a number of options were denied to me after I moved to Fairbanks, Alaska. For example, McDonald’s dollar menu items were two dollars and the $1.00 store was renamed the $1.50 Store. Many Amazon vendors refused to ship to Fairbanks and IKEA was 1,500 air miles away. Oh, the agony!
People who lived in the Alaskan Bush had an even harder time. Here’s a tip for any of you lonely hearts out there: show up in Galena or Unalakleet with a fresh banana and you will have friends, and possibly a mate, for life. Residents in the warm, lush, climes of Hawaii have a similar problem, except for the lack of fresh bananas, and I blame cartographers.
You see, Alaskans and Hawaiians are victims of contiguous-state privilege because many maps of the USA pretend like it’s 1958. America is a union of fifty states, not the forty-eight you see on most online and printed maps of the USA. Even when Alaska and Hawaii are shown on a map, they’re stuck in the lower left hand corner and are the wrong size. I’ve yet to see a map of the USA that showed Alaska and Hawaii in proportion to the rest of the 48 contiguous states. You know why, because over a third of the map would be Alaska and Hawaii, and the rest of the states would be smushed to the right of the map with state borders grotesquely molded beyond recognition.
The fam and I have since moved back to Utah where we enjoy the privileges inherent with living in the lower 48, and I’m campaigning to bring attention to contiguous-state privilege. Alaska and Hawaii are the most recent states to be admitted to the Union and have had the least amount of exposure on American maps.
Therefore, if any two states are going to be removed from a map of the USA it should be two of the original thirteen colonies. They’ve had more than their fair share of the spotlight – to be precise almost 250 years worth. Besides, they’re so small, no one would notice. But, cartographers would argue, the fact they are so puny would make little difference in the scale of the map, so Alaska and Hawaii would still receive short shrift. Ok, then, let’s lop off Florida and Texas. Most of the country agrees they’re not necessary anyway. Problem solved.
~ Emery Lamb
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