WEB Du Bois: retracing his attempt to challenge racism with data
The Guardian: The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today
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- Original illustration (left) created by WEB Du Bois, and updated version (right) by Mona Chalabi
Mona Chalabi has updated WEB Du Bois’ visualizations with recent data, while staying faithful to the design of the original illustrations.
I thought about DuBois while drawing these. Not just his outstanding craft (how did he manage to get those lines so straight? Those labels so neat?) but how he would feel to look at data 117 years later about the “present condition” of black Americans.
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- “Yes, the fact that black illiteracy has fallen to 1.6% does seem like progress. But even as late as 1979, illiteracy among black Americans was still four times higher than it was for white Americans.”
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- “The story is bleak. [Today] For every dollar a black household in America has in net assets, a white household has 16.5 more.”
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- “At first glance, this looks like another story of progress. It’s not.”
See also
- Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States — compiled from the census of 1860.
- Slavery Evolved: From slavery to mass incarceration — Slavery did not end in 1865, it evolved.
- The divided states of America: A cartogram of the 2016 election results — Benjamin Hennig is a geographer whose work looks at social inequalities.
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