American ancestry map

For dumb reasons, there are people in power who like to put down immigrants. However, for most people in the United States, you don’t have to look back very far to see where we came from. For the New York Times, Albert Sun, Jeff Adelson, and Larry Buchanan mapped American ancestry:

The lines of American ancestry today are not neatly drawn, and groups overlap and spill into one another. Some people don’t answer the census questions about their origins at all. For others, it’s complicated. Descendents of enslaved people, for example, may identify themselves as African American because they are unable to trace their roots to a specific place.

Many areas have truly mixed populations, with people of several different ancestries nearly equally represented.

Based on data from the American Community Survey, the shade of each region is a mix of colors that correspond to the mix of ancestries.