Visualizing the Inequities
Elgin Cleckley, University of Virginia
Data on the effects of COVID-19 in communities of color became apparent at the beginning of April. ProPublica reported on the situation in Milwaukee on April 3, where the virus emerged from an affluent white suburb and then took hold in the city’s African American community. African Americans make up almost half of Milwaukee County’s 945 cases and 81% of its 27 deaths in a county whose population is only 26% black.¹ At the time, the source also noted that Milwaukee is one of the few places in the United States tracking the racial breakdown of people infected by the novel virus. Currently, a quick search finds COVID data dashboards for St. Louis, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New Orleans, all with similar, unsettling data.² On May 22, Milwaukee County’s COVID Dashboard stated out of 241 deaths, deaths of African Americans are the highest at 114.³
Systematic racism is at the root of this data, as the virus further weakens communities, exacerbating pre-existing inequities. These communities have gravitated to jobs in sectors viewed as reliable paths to the middle class — health care, transportation, government, food supply — which are now deemed “essential,” rendering them unable to stay home.⁴ No references to systematic racism exist in the data dashboards we have now become accustomed to as the pandemic evolves, and will continue to monitor, as states move to Phase One openings. These data dashboards fail to sway perception to incite action — and must expand from cumulative numbers to, as noted by Silas Munro, infographic activism.⁵ Such designs also require graphic empathy to grow support of local grassroots public health and provide more in-depth detail on the pandemic’s effects on communities of color.
An example of infographic activism with graphic empathy recently launched in Charlottesville, Virginia, from the Democracy Initiative’s Center for the Redress of Inequity through Community-Engaged Scholarship (short title The Equity Center).⁶ The Equity Center’s cross–University of Virginia and community team played a significant role in lobbying emergency support funding for laid-off contract workers as the pandemic hit this small city. The Center builds on the equity work of community partners in this complicated cultural landscape of Jefferson, forced displacement, and systematic injustices against of the African American population — where memories linger from the infamous Unite the Right and supremacist events in 2017. The Center’s empathic data visualization digital platform https://virginiaequitycenter.github.io/cvilleequity_covid/SIP/ displays the efforts of grassroots organizing by the local Food Justice Network (who ensured students are fed during the pandemic) and the mapping of inequities by the Jefferson School City Center’s African American Heritage Center. The platform allows viewers to click on a county/region of central Virginia and obtain data demonstrating current burdens of sheltering in place. Graphically, the imagery resonates with a 120-year-old example — even influencing the Equity Center’s logo.
The data portraits of the all-black team of W.E.B. DuBois, in collaboration with Booker T. Washington, Thomas Calloway, and students from Atlanta University’s The Georgia Negro: A Social Study are a precedent model for infographic activism, with graphic empathy. The graphics document the slave trade, middle passage, and emancipation as part of the 1900 Paris Exposition (Exposition des Negres d’Amerique) along with A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America. The series innovatively argued for the equality of African Americans living under Jim Crow in Georgia — the most populous state for African Americans at the time. UX designer Jason Forrest states that the visualizations were a “targeted attempt to sway the world’s elite to acknowledge the American Negro to influence cultural change in the USA from abroad.”⁷ Forrest notes a quote from DuBois’s 1968 autobiography on the exhibition:
“The American Negro deserves study for the great end of advancing the cause of science in general. No such opportunity to watch and measure the history and development of a great race of men ever presented itself to the scholars of a modern nation. If they miss this opportunity — if they do the work in a slipshod, unsystematic manner — if they dally with the truth to humor the whims of the day, they do far more than hurt the good name of scientific truth the world over, they voluntarily decrease human knowledge…”⁸
DuBois speaks of the connective ability of his empathic data visualizations — where line, shape, form, composition, and color tell individual and collective visual narratives of African Americans in the face of Jim Crow and the shadow of enslavement. These qualities live on in the Equity Center’s work, continuing DuBois’s perspective into collective human knowledge needed for this period of polarization and alternative facts, pushing against doubt to tell of the historical and current effects of the pandemic in communities of color. Munro presciently states that these visualizations offer prototypes of design practices vital for our contemporary world, for social innovation, social justice, and decolonization of pedagogy.¹⁰
Back in Charlottesville, The Equity Center plans to include introductory interactive graphics on the platform detailing the systematic historical inequities of this region, framing the data. When the platform goes live, their work stands to humanize Charlottesville’s communities of color who continue essential work — driving city buses, delivering food and working (without PPE) on construction projects that never halted during sheltering in place. In the face of hard data, such empathic design thinking of the Equity Center keeps the spirit captured in DuBois and collaborators, providing an essential empathic data visualization model for the infographic activism required for our entry into the next phase of the pandemic. A recent test (in which I participated) with an aligned group of national design activists, proved a quick understanding of the use of color, line, and scale made clear the historical past and current impacts of the pandemic.
The systematic inequities propelling this data and the experimentation period ahead has the potential to develop into information fatigue or manipulation of the truth. The Equity Center’s infographic activism makes this current context clear — also supporting an empathic narrative series on the Charlottesville Tomorrow public service journalism platform titled Soundboard, the Historical Roots of COVID-19’s Impact in Charlottesville.¹¹ The Center’s rigorous design process successfully moves beyond data dashboards, and quick day-to-day information digital platforms and assorted news reports into a new system for our time. For matters of public health, and the smart decision making ahead, their system assures that this vital information remains public and understandable for all audiences. The Center’s activism continues to charge youth programming, local COVID testing for essential workers, and discussions on the Charlottesville’s Confederate Statues with the Albemarle County Office for Equity and Diversity. We can take comfort (which is rare at this time) that such a persuasive model exists to help those who need it the most.
2. Ibid.
3. https://county.milwaukee.gov/EN/COVID-19
5. Battle — Baptiste, Whitney and Russert, Britt. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Boston: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018): 45.
6. https://virginiaequitycenter.org/
8. Ibid.
10. Battle — Baptiste, Whitney and Russert, Britt, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: 50.
