Problem:

The Anti-Discrimination Center is a New York-based nonprofit that works to prevent and remedy all forms of housing, employment, education, and public accommodation discrimination through advocacy, litigation, education, outreach, monitoring, and research. Because a primary mission of the center is fighting housing discrimination and segregation in the United States, the organization wanted to understand the prevalence of segregation.

Solution:

Social Explorer used its platform and custom data to create three maps of the United States, showing the degree of racial segregation for African-Americans; ethnic segregation for Hispanics; and the degree to which a racial or ethnic groups makes up the largest percentage of any given geography. 

(The maps allow for visualization at state, county, Census tract, and block-group levels. A block is the proverbial atom of the Census – a unit of Census tracts that generally contain between 600 and 3,000 people and are used to draw political boundaries every 10 years.) 

Outcome:

The visualization created for the Anti-Discrimination Center was a viral hit and was used as the basis for a story by the Huffington Post. A first visualization led to so much traffic that the organization’s website was overwhelmed. A second version was more successful, hosted directly on Social Explorer. A new version of the visualization was developed, using 2020 Census data.

Author: Frank Bass