employment by race and industry, Highlighting innovative industries
What appears to be a colorful abstract painting is really a bar chart. There are 5 major vertical bars that correspond to racial categories from left to right. Each bar is segmented with colors that represent an industry. Within these segments of industry we highlight the proportion of that industry that represents “innovative industries” with a clear gloss overlay. Some colors are silkscreen and some are impressions of wood block or spit bite etching that are cut to form and collaged to achieve the seamless butting of colors and bars. We also took license to reshape the square segments to push the form further from a simple bar chart. The term “Advanced Industries” is taken from a Brookings Institute study published in 2015, “America’s Advanced Industries: What Are They?, Where Are They? and Why Do They Matter?” At the time Du Bois made his data portraits there were few major industries being tracked by the U.S. Census than are today and of those Black people found themselves employed in about 6. There are now hundreds of industries for which Black employment is significant. Given that level of granularity we consolidate these down to 9 for the sake of being legible. Additional considerations is the diversity of the of the country itself. To see a relative picture of Black employment one needs to consider how other race categories compare. Lastly, we incorporate “advanced industries” which account for 21st Century jobs that did not exist for Du Bois. We recognize that Black people account in these tech forward jobs, even while we may see low numbers as result of further systemic issues. Brookings defines these “advanced industries” as having both “a high number of workers in STEM professions and high levels of R&D spending”