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Week07-RaceInAmerica

README.md

A grid of hand-drawn visualizations by W.E.B. Du Bois from his series "Data Portraits"

RACE IN AMERICA

TLDR

⚠️ Since this is a multi-week project, details for each week are in separate files! Links in the TLDR section above ⚠️

“Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year... Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part.” – Congressperson John Lewis

ASSIGNMENT

For our next assignment, we will investigate another important, wide-ranging issue: race in America. We'll dig deeper into contextual research, find data to explore, and create a multi-part visualization that tells a small part of this complex story. The potential approaches here are vast: current issues like the disproportionate killing of Black people by the police and ensuing protests over the past few years or anti-Asian violence during the pandemic; historical movements for racial justice; borders and immigration law; Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory policies; the uneven impact of climate change on communinities of color... this barely scratches the surface. Intersectionality expands this even further, showing us the myriad ways that race connects with other aspects of identity like gender, class, sexuality, and disability.

Data visualization has played an important role when discussing race in America. Ida B. Wells, born enslaved in 1862, began a national anti-lynching campaign when mobs lynched three of her friends and destroyed her press. Her book A Red Record was the first to collect nation-wide data about lynching. In the late 1800s, W.E.B. Du Bois created over 60 hand-drawn visualizations showing topics ranging from the routes of slave trade to Georgia, the number of Black students in different school courses, and the monetary value of Black-owned property. Of course, visualization hasn't always played a positive role. For hundreds of years, we have used photographs and diagrams to make false claims about intelligence and other traits based on physical appearance. There is also a long history of redrawing maps to move Native people from their land and gerrymander voting districts to suppress minority voting. Data visualization also helps us see where data isn't recorded: for example, police departments in the U.S. aren't required to report fatal police shootings, making it tremendously difficult to understand the scope of the problem (though some amazing efforts have been made to do so).

We'll start with contextual research: reading and researching possible topics, as well as finding data that can be sources for stories to tell. This research thread will continue as we create prototypes, refine them, and realize finished projects. We'll also look at how to weave together multiple visualizations with other elements to tell complex stories, ultimately resulting in printed "data zines."

Your project will have a few key components:

  • Use any kind of data, visualized with Illustrator and/or other tools as you see fit
  • Include at least three separate visualizations as well as text, quotes, images, video, etc that weave a story about your topic
  • A printed and bound "data zine"
  • Published data with citations to the original sources

Above: a collection of some of the hand-drawn visualizations by W.E.B. Du Bois from his "Data Portraits" project, circa 1900

A NOTE

For many Americans, racism and the accompanying issues of discrimination, uneven laws and their enforcement, police violence, and other harms are a daily reality. For others, the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, and many, many others sparked a new or renewed call for racial justice. When we talk about "race in America" this doesn't necessarily mean racism, though the two are intertwined more often than not.

Race is seen today as a human construction, deeply problematic and often connected to related terms like people or communities, ultimately forming personal or cultural identity. And, while it is an important focus at the moment, "race" refers not just to Black Americans or even people of color but all Americans. It's also worth noting that race is a human construction and has no basis in biology but that doesn't prevent it from being a very real force in our society. This complex term, which has overlap with ideas like ethnicity and culture, is all the more reason for us to spend time digging deep into this topic.

The title of this assignment uses the word "America," also an intentionally broad term. While many people in the USA call our country America and its people Americans, the term more broadly refers to anyone living in or from North or South America.

As we work on this project, you may find these conversations difficult, but that's what makes it important. Over the next few weeks, I ask you to be honest; to listen to each other, the voices you read, and your research; and to give yourself mental space to process, try to understand, and re-present the data and stories you find. If at any point in our conversations you need to take a beat, please do so. And if you have suggestions for making this conversation or assignment better, don't hesitate to send me a note or speak up during class.

INSPIRATION

RESOURCES

DATA SOURCES