Educator Jane Elliott reveals America is actually not the center of the world map and people are blown away

Maps help people navigate while providing a worldview of their surroundings. However, what if the projected sites on the maps we see are different from how they are in reality? A woman highlighted this widely discussed issue by suggesting that maps used at universities and schools in the United States may not adequately represent reality. The diversity educator Jane Elliott—featured on Popular Nation’s YouTube channel—made some astonishing claims that would change how you see America and the rest of the world. The 91-year-old former schoolteacher, famous for her "Blue Eyes Brown Eyes" experiment, shed light on why geographical maps were designed the way they are, serving certain traditional purposes.

In the video, Elliot brought a fresh perspective to the Mercator Map Projection, first presented by Flemish geographer and mapmaker Gerardus Mercator in 1569. While criticizing the commonly accepted cylindrical depiction of the world, she presented an alternative that did not place the US at the center.

“We’ve got it (the current map) all over the buildings, sidewalls. Every college and university has a Mercator Map somewhere [in a] wall-sized [format]. Think about this…this misinformation is used throughout the United States to teach about the size, shape, and location of all the important landmasses,” she remarked, laying down the map on the ground to illustrate its distortions.

Upon looking at the map she put on the ground at her home in Sun City, California, the show’s moderator remarked, “That’s very familiar.”

“Of course it is,” Elliot quipped before cutting one-third of the map from the left and placing it where it belonged. The expert drew a comparison between the actual map and the one commonly used in schools. She stated that if we follow the Mercator projection, there would be two Russias, two Chinas, and two Indias.

“They had to do it that way to place the United States in the middle of the map,” the expert claimed.

Elliot recalled a similar experience of removing the piece from the map at a record label’s headquarters in 1970. “I did this with a major record company in New York City. And an older man stood up in the back of the room and said, ‘Now, Elliot, you've gone too far.’ I said, ‘What's your problem?’ He responded, ‘You can't do that with the map.’” Additionally, he kept insisting that the US was no longer in the middle of the map, despite the educator's best efforts to explain it to him. “No,” he kept reiterating, “America isn't in the middle of the map anymore.”

“I said, ‘The United States never was in the middle of the map. You need to realize this depends on how you draw your map,’” Elliot added as she gave the heckler the lesson of his life. She began talking about how South America is actually nine times larger than Greenland. During her interview, she asked the host about her understanding of the Equator based on what her social studies teacher had taught. “Halfway between the North Pole and the South Pole on this map would be right about here,” the interviewer said while pointing to the map.

“And it means that Iowa has a semi-tropical climate. Well, you've been in Minnesota in the wintertime. You know that that's—it doesn't have a tropical climate,” Elliot explained. She then unveiled another map in which Greenland appeared significantly larger, along with many other notable differences compared to the Mercator Map. When the host asked her why such maps remain in circulation, the educator claimed, “It's because the Pope commissioned Mercator to create a map that showed the spread of Christianity. As a result, countries with predominantly white populations appear larger than those in the southern part of the world.”

The video has garnered nearly 440,000 views with varied reactions. "She brought up racism in Minnesota two months before George Floyd’s murder. We should all be listening to what she’s saying," pointed out @derekmedeiros. "This woman has been my hero since 10th grade when I found her 'Blue Eyes Brown Eyes' experiment and she helped open my eyes. Thank you for this interview. I've missed her exact opinion from this recent few years and I'm tearing up knowing she's still fighting," shared @unofficialraiyenji.

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