So many colored dots.

What color dot are you? This is a hypothetical question as it does not need answering, but I found a website that visualizes the many colors of Smyrna. Smyrna, in a phrase I use, is white bread. Yes there are people of other ethnicities, but for the most part this is a Caucasian community and it is hard to argue against that point.

If you look hard you can find some of the ethnicity that I feel makes a community better. There is a small Buddhist run restaurant in town and if you go there at the right time you will see a metal serving tray out by the bushes. When I saw it the tray had a few bowls of noodles, a couple of bowls of fruit and a small sweet. When I asked the hostess she said it was an offering for the spirits. White bread doesn't do that now days.

There are of course white churches and black churches, but there are also churches populated by Karen refugees from Myanmar. The All Saints Episcopal Church one time they had a great garden behind their church along Nissan blvd that was tended by these refugees.  I’m not sure if they still do it, but it is something to look into if interested.

Now to know they are there is different from seeing them and getting to know them as people. That is a step that is up to you, but you can visualize them through the modern science of cartography…map making. The website "The Racial Dot Map" is something that I find fun to look at and see how the numbers look.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

This is Smyrna broken down with about 25,000+ small dots, each one representing a person. It is pretty close to reality with just a small issue of the Nissan Plant. It seems that they have about 100 dots evenly scattered across the Nissan Plant area...I hope Nissan knows they might have illegal squatters.

The numbers and information used to create this grand map is from the 2000 census. At the time Smyrna had a population of 25,569. We are currently up to 40,000 plus and rising.

Wiki gives the ethnic breakdown as this.

87.23% White

7.82% African American

0.29% Native American

1.21% Asian

0.08% Pacific Islander

1.81% from other races

1.56% from two or more races

Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.31% of the population.

Somewhere in this one dot per person map there might be a dot for you. I find the patterning interesting as you can see the fields, the largest apartment complexes, and the general neighborhoods that are going towards a non-white majority.

Take a moment if you wish and find a restaurant that puts food out for the spirits or has food that is hard to pronounce. Find the richness of Smyrna one colored dot at a time.