Created by Camaal Moten
The American flag is a symbol of unity, liberty, and justice for all. It can sometimes be seen tattered and torn from a traumatic event, but the star spangled banner yet waves. I used that metaphor to illustrate the proportion of Blacks and Whites who worked in “professions” as an occupation similar to Plate 27 of W.E.B. Du Bois’s "American Negro" exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Each stripe represents a decade of census data and is oriented like an inverted bar chart where the y-axis starts at the base of the stars. The length of each bar represents the proportion of the segment (race and/or gender). For example, a single flag illustrates the proportion of Black people who had “professional” occupations from 1850 - 2010. The bottom of the flag represents the 100% mark. All the stars and stripes at the top are purely decorative, but reinforce the concept of this being national statistics.
Describe process: I was inspired to dive into W.E.B. Du Bois's visualization after stumbling upon a book called, "W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America" by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert. The entire book was amazing, but I found myself drawn to Plate 27 (Occupations of Negroes and Whites in Georgia). It illustrated how Black people were not much different than Whites, during a time when other exhibits depicted Blacks as subhuman savages from African jungles. The power of data visualization during this time blew me away. It sparked curiosity and I wondered how those proportions looked today. I started recreating Plate 27, but across several decades and noticed a burst in “professions.” This led me to focus on specific occupational categories over time and create the visualization you see today.
As I travelled back in time through the data, I was reminded of how we survived slavery, wars, race riots, massacres, pandemics, Jim Crow laws, lynching, and so much more. It was illegal for Black people to read, write, or gather in groups. We were seen as nothing more than property to be bought and sold. I could not help, but put myself in W.E.B. Du Bois’s shoes when he was trying to show the progress we made at the turn of the century. We were more than slaves.
Centuries of data will never be included in a visualization like this, because we were not counted in the census as a person. With everything that’s been thrown at us over the years, we are still trending upward and each one of our hopes, pursuits, and dreams matters.
