Anti-Black Human Rights Violations: 1850-2010

The Anti-Black Index (ABI) is the product of about 20-25 years of data collection, conversations and attempts at building a measure that captures the changing experience of African Americans over time. Despite the countless hours spent on the project, we see the project and accompanying app as the beginning of something rather than its conclusion. For us, the project and app are more likely to generate questions rather than answer them, though it does provide lots of rich information as well. In answer to a few potential questions you might have:

• Is our approach the the only way to measure the human rights experience of black people in the US over time
  
  • No - we are predisposed to this general framework, but other attempts coming from different perspectives would be welcomed.
• Are these all the relevant data that could be brought to bear on the question? 
  
  • No - we are always working to acquire more and more fine-grained data.
• If no data are available, does it mean that there were no events of racism in that place? 
  
  • No - reporting of events like the ones we use is geographically and temporally uneven. Just because a place does not have enough data to generate an estiamte does not necessarily imply it is a "good" place.

More information about the ABI is available here. A discussion of the method and data used in the index is available here.

- Christian Davenport and Dave Armstrong