Juneteenth: A Critical Examination and Conversation
How do we understand the world around us? One thing happening this year in the US are more discussions around greater recognition of Juneteenth, a holiday that occurs on June 19th. I was stopped in my tracks by this thread:
Included in the discussion is a response to the sentiment of “not my holiday.” It ends with a question: what would society look like if everyone in the US had to think about this? From an ethical perspective: who do we choose to remember and what history is ours? Federal holidays enshrine our values and frankly, for too long, Juneteenth hasn’t been my holiday.
As an analyst and ethicist, I had to examine this. This time, I sought a collaborator. So, I asked Candra McRae, CEO of Lumodis and myth buster extraordinaire if she’d join me in collaborating on the viz and this post. I’ve admired Candra’s deep examinations into a number of issues. She spends her time on research and seeks to bust commonly held myths on issues.
Candra: I wanted to collaborate on this viz for two reasons. First, Juneteenth is a holiday that has dual meaning – on one hand it is a commemoration of freeing the enslaved in this country; on the other hand, it is a reminder and call to action that freedom and justice are still delayed and distant dreams for Black Americans. Secondly, Juneteenth is not a relatively well known holiday and is missing entirely from the US educational curriculum for reasons that reflect the unwillingness to acknowledge and need to sanitize the totality of our past as a country. It’s always been relegated to being just a Black holiday (think Kwanzaa) vs. taking its rightful place as a day of reflection and action that we ALL observe. Plus, if we can enshrine the legacy of Christopher Columbus with a federal holiday – we can tip our hat to creating one commemorating the liberation of Black Americans from slavery.
It also goes without saying that I’m a fan of Bridget’s work – stunning vizzes and a heart for data ethics made it a collaboration I was honored to be a part of.
Review of Idea and Learnings
Candra: I was interested in understanding the delay. History classes I took across my academic life hammered home how wonderful the Emancipation Proclamation was and the mythology of President Lincoln as an ardent abolitionist that would go to war to rescue people from the atrocity that was slavery. So, if all of that was true…why did it take 2.5 years for people to learn that they were free? Why did the Emancipation Proclamation only apply to certain states and, even if it was enforceable on Day 1, would have left 451,000 people in bondage?
To understand Juneteenth, the delays, and timeline of the abolition of slavery in America, I wanted to scratch off some of the veneer of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation to figure out what actually happened.
Bridget: Candra’s research helped me find Visualizing Emancipation hosted by the University of Richmond. With grant funding, the PI and other investigators scoured resources for events and locations. While the primary focus is the map and geographic trends, there were insights hidden in the narrative I wanted to bring forward.
It highlighted a pattern we know: violence escalates with change and status threats. For our viz, I wanted to bring these parts forward.
Collaborating and Data
Bridget: We needed to do a lot of planning, research, and design. So, we want into Mural, which allowed us to create plans and ideas like this:
I lucked out here. Candra is super organized and a veteran at data journalism. She deftly took an idea immediately to a form we heavily incorporated in our final work.
Candra: I started with a timeline of major events related to slavery in this country (even when it was just a cute little British colony) to help ground me.
Then, I wanted to understand the how many Black lives were subjected to the brutal institution of slavery at the time of the Civil War (~4 Million, which doesn’t count the millions of lives that preceded them). So, I manually brought in data from the 1860 US Census by state and identified which states were within and outside the scope of the Emancipation Proclamation. In hindsight, I should have scraped it – but, I was being lazy and didn’t want to do any further cleansing or transformation.
Organizing helps me keep the story clear. Sometimes when you’re digging in data, you’ll find a nugget that you just want to talk that’s a little tangential to the primary story you want to tell. I do a mental fit test to see how it helps tell the primary story, and if it doesn’t, I put it in the virtual parking lot for exploration at another time…unless I get inspired to build a story around that data finding and scrap the original theme/flow (which happens sometimes)
Bridget: While Candra worked on compiling data from articles and other resources, I leveraged Alteryx to pull down over 4,000 events.
As it was raw HTML, I spent a bunch of time understanding how it was structured and how to pull out as much as possible. Regex would be better, but I was short on time, so I split and parsed. It felt easier, even if it wasn’t logical.
Data sorted, it was on to design.
Design
Candra: I wanted to show how many years Black people in America spent enslaved in one view without scrolling and I wanted the reader to be able to count the generations in bondage (each curve represents a generation – there are 10). The white space on the timeline was intentional because I wanted the reader to visually feel the time pass slowly between the onset of slavery and its abolition. I only give a reprieve from the empty line at America’s founding (1776) and the 1787 convention to highlight missed opportunities this young nation had to affirm the humanity of Black people, but instead chose to compromise its own enshrined values: equality and freedom.
I didn’t want to fill the timeline with a bunch of events and design noise to take away from the stark reality that for 247 years human beings were sold and born into slavery, systematically robbed of their dreams, hopes, and ability to realize the promise of America.
Bridget: The last segment’s data came from a project dedicated to mapping emancipation.
In addition to a map, I wanted to call out the events hidden in the details, as well as the longitudinal trends. Candra found the abstracted sound wave chart from another work of mine and suggested we use that. It’s abstracted, but haunting. One thing to note about this data: it still comes from headlines and content written predominantly by white authors at the time and is still a subset of what happened. A few times, incomplete names and counts existed in the data – too inconsistent to center around, but information I wanted witnessed. We did alias certain categories (created by those transcribing the data in 2012) as the original names of the grouped events failed to center the humanity of our data points, despite being focused on emancipation. To me, this is all the more reason that Juneteenth needs enshrined federally: even with the best of intentions, we still perpetuate these harms.
Call to Action
Bridget: One obstacle I ran into continuously was finding accessible data. I found references to Emancipation Records, but they’re not openly accessible for viz. The project I used provided a KML with enriched info that not immediately accessible to either Tableau or Alteryx. Some of this goes back to data ethics conversations about data representing our values, as well as how we archive and preserve historical data for use.
Candra’s explorations and research also highlighted to me the dangers of what’s often deemed “moderation” or “staying neutral.” In ethics classes, we were taught you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Inaction is still a decision that perpetuates harm.
The mapping data is a testament to the Black lives risked for freedom and the horrors of slavery. Within this data are the memories of people who fled towards what they hoped was a better life and risked everything to find out. I wanted their names brought forward and remembered as much as possible. Far too many names are still forgotten.
Candra: Ditto to everything Bridget just said. Realize there is no such thing as neutrality when discussing topics around justice and freedom. To quote Desmond Tutu, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
The only other thing I would add as a call to action is to contact your Congressional representatives and sign the petition to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.
