The goal was two-fold: to be able to see broad patterns, akin to census race and ethnicity categories, as well as to highlight the diversity within these categories. The solution was simply to use color. Lots and lots of bright, shiny color arranged on a wheel—or as we like to think of it, a donut. The high saturation makes it easier to distinguish shades, and the shape is compact. Since the goal is qualitative interpretation, we’re not sacrificing anything this way.
Every category is assigned a unique color determined mainly by geography. Color families are roughly, but not precisely, aligned with census race and ethnicity categories. Starting at 12 o’clock and moving clockwise:
- Black or African-American is yellow.
- Specific sub-Saharan African nationalities are yellow-orange.
- Islands of the Caribbean are orange.
- Central and South America are shades of red.
- North American nations that predate European colonization vary from pink to fuchsia.
- Asia and the Pacific Islands are shades of blue and purple.
- Europe is green.
- White colonial identities, such as American, French Canadian, and Cajun, are lime green, just to the left of the 12 o’clock position.
Again, the goal here is not to be able to identify a category by its color (although with practice that is certainly possible for several dozen of the most common), but rather to identify color families and variation within color families. So first, what's the big picture? You can eyeball the relative importance of each regional heritage just from the color families, or, if you’re colorblind, from the location/pattern of shades (admittedly a much more difficult task; future use of these charts, though, will be accompanied by alternate means of interpretation as well).
In a few days, you will be able to find donuts like these for every congressional district in our Atlas of the 117th Congress—just head to the “Snapshot” column. Below we’ll discuss a few examples representing a variety of districts, with the district number in the middle of each graph, starting with a trio of starkly different locales: