It started with a click.

I was searching for a birthday present for my mother — born in 1937, raised on a tobacco farm, rode a mule to school — when I stumbled across a bright, bustling map of Arkansas on Etsy. The colors popped; the illustrations had a disarmingly naive charm. Place names curled around cartoonish figures in joyful motion.

The map radiated rustic optimism: A logger with a massive crosscut saw worked the Ozarks, cotton pickers dotted the Delta, and steamboats puffed along the Mississippi. A fisherman cast his line, a couple danced in square-dance garb, and pigs smiled from hillsides. Across the state, industries were rendered as cheerful symbols — lumber, livestock, agriculture — each boiled down to its most whimsical icon.

But scattered among the corn and timber were Black laborers drawn in the unmistakable style of minstrel caricature: dark skin exaggerated, lips overdrawn, eyes wide, grins frozen in place. They picked cotton, stirred boiling vats, hoisted bales — always working, always smiling, their identities collapsed into servitude. Though drawn in the same breezy cartoon style as the rest, these figures carried disproportionate visual weight. What first looked like a playful educational poster revealed itself as a visual fable about race and labor, in which joy was reserved for some and toil — always smiling — for others.

The image felt eerily familiar, like something glimpsed on a library wall or schoolroom bulletin board decades ago. Then I looked again.

There was a man in overalls baling cotton, another playing a banjo, both rendered with the same grinning inhumanity. And in the Tennessee map I clicked on next, there stood a white-robed Klansman — cartoonish but unmistakable, presented without menace, as if he were just another regional type. The effect was deeply unsettling — not just for the casual racism of the imagery but for the sense that the artist, Ruth Taylor White, hadn’t meant any harm at all.

Her maps, after all, were meant to be “gay” in the older sense of the word: lively, instructive, innocent.

Disturbed yet intrigued, I clicked again — on Georgia, where I was born and where my mother lives in Savannah. Then on Delaware, where apparently there were enough Black residents to warrant minstrelized imagery in the margins. I navigated through state after state, watching a visual shorthand for America unfold. With each map, my unease deepened. Minnesota, I noticed, lacked Black caricatures, but featured stereotypical depictions of Native Americans, feathered and frozen in a premodern past. Even in their absence, the racial hierarchies endured. The iconography varied, but the underlying message remained consistent.

That message — of subtle erasure and encoded racial hierarchy — didn’t vanish with White’s generation.

A few years ago I discovered a 1955 edition Rand McNally Elf book titled “Five Little Bears.” (The 1955 edition was at least the third printing of the book; it was originally published 20 years earlier.) It had been an artifact of my wife’s childhood, a book she retrieved from her father’s basement after he died. By contemporary standards, it’s shockingly racist.

The........

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