Mona Chalabi's chart on Racial/Ethnic Categories in the U.S. Census drew me in because I have been researching the lack of data on people from multiple backgrounds in Canada and find it interesting how little data we have compared to the United States. I am aware of how tricky this data can be to quantify and thus understand why there is a lack of data. Still, the main point of the census is to count the population and allot resources such as housing, education, health care services and determine where government money goes and the programs they fund. When given a binary choice on the census, many citizens lose out because of the lack of data.
I find this data visualization quite paradoxical because it is both simple and complex. When looking at Chalabi's illustration, we can see she has labelled the x-axis as years and the y-axis by racial/ethnic categories using coloured folders to symbolize those categories. The more folders there are in a given year, the more racial/ethnic categories were found on the census. Speaking to the simplicity of this visualization, I prefer bar graphs because they are relatively straightforward to read, you can change data sets without affecting the others, and they don't feel too cluttered.
I would prefer this to be an interactive bar graph so that we could click through to more details in each category. While the visualization is straightforward in showing how racial/ethnic categories have changed on the census over the years, it fails to provide details about each ethnic category and time frame and might leave an unknown audience incognizant to the importance of how the census may categorize race/ethnicity. For example, I find it interesting that the Hispanic category was missing from 1960 to 1990, but I had to go out of my way to research why it wasn't there. Again, the complexity of tracking racial/ethnic data makes it difficult for us to navigate this issue, but I think there is a better way than what they've been doing.
While I think that at first glance, Chalabi's visualization does a good job at explaining how the categories changed over the years, it isn't as detailed as some of her other visualizations on the topic, such as her article WEB Du Bois: retracing his attempt to challenge racism with data in The Guardian. Given that it is an Instagram post, I understand that she was limited to an image with a short word count, but I would have liked to have seen a more in-depth article on her findings. Chalabi does link this visualization to an episode from her podcast Am I Normal? where she speaks to British Iraqi drag queen Amrou Al-Kadhi about navigating the contradictions of having multiple identities and what it means to not include more racial/ethnic categories on the census. Overall, I enjoyed Chalabi's creative take on data visualization.
