Mapping Ethics Blog post- Marie Amelse

When reading and exploring the Equal Justice Initiative and then the Monroe & Florence Work Today websites they at first seem to be relaying the same message, with varying different minor details and framings, however “Racism in the Machine” Hepworth and Church do a great job on contrasting these two different visualizations and representations of racial violence from the dawn of the civil war onward. At first they do not seem that different from each other, but after digesting both and especially after also reading from Hepworths and Church’s analysis, you can see how stark the differences really are. In the end they presented and even chose data in different ways even when seemingly portraying the same idea.

Monroe & Florence Work were especially aware of sourcing and defining their data, and it is clear the current website also shares this sentiment. The Work’s were very deliberate in searching for the validity of lynchings, as a result this website is honest in communicating that their database is likely underreporting the incidents of lynching. The Work Today website also includes education information on different definitions of lynching.

Here, this window shows an option to show both a “Strict definition” and a “Broader definition”. Even within their website there is transparency that the same message end up looking very different based on definitions the statistics revolve around.

On the other hand the Equal Justice Initiative ( EJI) is not as clear on the definitions of what the graphs and statistics show. Although it is clear that the numbers focus on the deep south. Below is one of the main slides on the Lynching in America webpage. Interestingly in span of time which spanned over 70 years there was only “2 reported” lynchings in California and “1 reported” lynchings in Michigan. This contrasts with the data from the Work website which reports 26 for both states in that same time range under the “Broader definition”.

Above, is the Lynching map shown on the EJI website. As Hepworth and Church, the EJI has a strong emphasis on the deep south, almost portraying racism as clustered and almost solely being perpetrated in the South. Below is is a 100 year span from the Work website, which presents the continental US all together, and while the mob violence is concentrated in the South, it is shown to be an issue that is present throughout the U.S.

Another thing that was a variable that Hepworth and Church presented was even who these different data bases considered who lynchings could be perpetrated against. The Work Today website made it clear it was a racially motivated crime that could be committed by white mobs against any racial minority, EJI on the other hand sole focused on lynchings against African Americans. Can this mitigate historical violence against Native Americans, Asian-Americans, or other racial minorities? In this case it is especially important to take into account the larger goals of who creates these data sets. EJI, for instance is focused on fighting mass incarceration, and especially fight the inequality against Black Americans within the criminal justice system. The publisher of the Monroe & Florence Work Today website is #PlainTalkHistory, whose focus is to tell the multicultural and multiracial history of the US that can too oftenly be ignored in popular US history lessons. Knowing these things on the creators can add more context to the maps and messages they create.