The remarkable racial segregation of Washington, D.C., in 1 map

The men and women responsible for running our government happen to live in one of the most racially segregated big cities in the United States.

That's made abundantly clear when you look at the interactive map below, courtesy of the good folks at Quorum.

The vast majority of Census tracts on the east side of D.C. are overwhelmingly black, while the vast majority of western tracts are overwhelmingly white. Many of the tracts in southeastern D.C. have less than 1 or 2 percent white residents, while many western ones are less than 5 or 10 percent black, with very few Hispanic or Asian-American residents either.

Of course, D.C. isn't alone in its racial segregation. Plenty of big cities are similarly sorted. In fact, the D.C. Metro area scores 88th out of 318 metropolitan areas on the University of Michigan's dissimilarity index, when you compare the black and white populations.

The Hispanic population is more evenly spread out between east and west, as you'll see if you play with the maps above. (Hispanics comprise about 10 percent of D.C.'s population.)

What sets D.C. apart from many Metro areas that rank ahead of it, though, is that it has very large populations of both black and white residents. The D.C. Metro area is about one-quarter black, and the city proper is about half African American, with more blacks than whites. Only a few other major metropolitan areas that rank ahead of D.C. on the dissimilarity index -- Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis and Atlanta -- are as heavily African American.

So while D.C. might not be as segregated as some others ranking above it, its segregation is very apparent. As the images show, it almost divides the city right down the middle.