If you nerded out on Nate Silver this past election, you may get a kick out of a series of maps King County has created. They show key demographic features of the county specifically related to income, race, ethnicity, and other social justice relevant measures. They’re meant to be used by county staff for community engagement, program planning, and equity analyses, but also to help members of the communities understand the way the county is put together better.
what exactly is social justice?
I noticed this small disclaimer.
“Note: Because the American Community Survey is a
small sample, margins of error are high, and these
data should be used with caution as a generalized
of Median Household Income.”
These maps are hard to decipher. Is it a particularly Seattle thing that everything is displayed on a scale of grey and green?
“what exactly is social justice?”
+1
As I understand it, “social justice” refers to justice as it pertains to race, class, and similar topics. So “do those from lower socio-economic classes have access to educational opportunities equal to those at higher socio-economic classes, so that they would have a fair chance at similar achievement” would be a social justice question.
It doesn’t have to relate to “justice” in the “criminal justice” sense, but it can. For example, looking at how crack cocaine cases are prosecuted differently from powdered cocaine (and how that relates to how these two forms of the same drug are used by the black and the white communities, leading to inequities in which races go to jail for effectively the same crime) is a “social justice” issue.
On the same web page as the map is the King County “Equity and Social Justice Annual Report” published in August, which helps in understanding how the County is working on social justice concerns.