The Racial Equity Data Lab is a space for equity champions to combine their own expertise on their community’s experiences, assets, and needs with the deeply disaggregated data in the Atlas using Tableau Public.

In the Lab you can:

1. Access Tableau 

Visit our Using Tableau page to set up your own account to use the Tableau Public app or work directly in the Tableau Public site using your internet browser.

2. Create Your Own $15/Hour Fact Sheet

Download our starter viz to create and customize a $15/hour fact sheet for your geography. The Step-by-Step Guide provides instructions on how to select your geography, customize the elements of the $15/hour fact sheet, explore the data, and incorporate your own expertise on why a $15/hour minimum wage matters for racial equity in your community.

3. Access Data

Access Tableau-ready data sets to download Tableau starter workbooks for Atlas indicators. The Housing Burden starter workbook and Median Wages starter workbook include built-in features such as example charts, filters, and parameters to allow users to explore the data by year, geography, race, sex, nativity, and ancestry. 

4. Design Your Own Data Visualizations

Using Data Visualization Basics and best practices, create a data visualization that illustrates key data points, identifies underlying causes and drivers of inequity, and lifts up powerful equity solutions.

5. Explore Equity Data Visualizations

Explore our Gallery page to view other racial equity data visualizations built through the Lab. 

The National Equity Atlas is a one-stop-shop for data and policy ideas to advance racial equity and shared prosperity. Our focus is providing equity metrics that are deeply disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, nativity, ancestry, and income for the largest 100 cities, 150 regions, all 50 states, and the United States as a whole.

We built this site to democratize data and make the facts accessible and actionable to everyone — including the grassroots organizations that possess invaluable firsthand knowledge of inequities yet often lack the resources to gather, analyze, and display the quantitative data so crucial to policy campaigns to address them. At the click of a button, you can see how your community is doing in comparison to other communities according to our Racial Equity Index and 30 relevant, useful, field-tested indicators of racial and economic equity.

Now we are thrilled to share the latest innovation in our suite of data and policy tools: the Racial Equity Data Lab. The Lab is a new space on the Atlas designed to help equity advocates and campaign leaders to build  custom Atlas-powered  dashboards, data displays, and maps. The Lab has everything you need to tell your community’s equity story: ready-to-use datasets, data visualization basics, and a step-by-step guide to get you started. It also includes a starter visualization that you can use as a template to create a $15/hour factsheet for your community.

Ready to dig in to the National Equity Atlas? Here are the essential features to help you explore the indicators and unlock the power of our unparalleled data disaggregation.

Next, explore the individual indicators in the Atlas. Once you are on the page for any indicator, the first interactive element you will find is the Indicator and Geography Selection Toolbar. This toolbar allows you to choose which of our 30 indicators you want to explore for any of the 272 geographies in the National Equity Atlas. To do so, follow these five steps:

• MASTER IT: Change the geography and pull up the trend data for a community. What groups are growing and which are shrinking?

2. Chart Breakdowns and Filters: Explore the Data

The Chart Breakdown and Filters feature is the true engine for data exploration in the National Equity Atlas. This is where you can disaggregate the data such as race/ethnicity, race and nativity, race and gender, ancestry, and poverty level. It is also where you can get indicator-specific breakdowns of the data, such as business ownership by race and by industry or commute time by race and transportation mode.

Take these steps to use the Chart Breakdown and Filters feature:

Here is how it looks for our Working poor indicator for the city of Albuquerque:

• MASTER IT: Explore the different breakdowns and filters for this indicator. Which groups are most likely to be working full-time but still in poverty or economically insecure (living below 200 percent of poverty) in your community?

3. Compare: See How Your Community Stacks Up

A fourth essential feature — also in the Indicator and Geography Selection Toolbar — is the Compare function. Comparison is a very important method for analyzing equity metrics, allowing you to see how your community (or a group in your community) is doing in relation to other communities (or the same group in a different community). This can help you understand the extent of disparities, assess what are the drivers of inequities, identify strategies to remove barriers, and set goals for progress on eliminating inequities.

Here is how to use the Compare function:

Note that the Compare function is not available for indicator breakdowns that contain multiple categories over multiple years (like the Race/ethnicity indicator you just looked at) because the display would not be legible.

• MASTER IT: Compare working poverty trends in your city and your state.

4. Map Filters and Full Extent: Visualizing Patterns

Mapping data by geography puts spatial inequities — which are also racial inequities, due to housing segregation and discrimination — into stark relief. The National Equity Atlas team has worked hard to create a custom mapping system that enables clear visualization of patterns across communities and correlations between race, place, and income.

Follow these steps to Map Filters and Full Extent features:

5. Downloads and Social Media Buttons: Share and Use Data Visualizations

The National Equity Atlas is a tool for community action, and we wanted to make it easy for you to use the data to highlight issues of inequity, build support for campaigns, and make your case for solutions with policymakers and others in positions of power. We also believe in open data and know that you want to be able to explore the raw data yourself. That’s why we built more sharing and download functionality into the National Equity Atlas.

Follow these steps to access our Download and Sharing features:

• MASTER IT: Download an Excel file to examine the data behind a chart or map. Post a National Equity Atlas chart or map on your Facebook or Twitter page.

6. Racial Equity Index

The new Racial Equity Index — available for all geographies in the Atlas — allows you to track how well your community is doing on a set of nine equity indicators compared with other communities (and over time). The index summarizes an inclusion score (which measures racial disparities on nine indicators) and a prosperity score (which measures overall performance levels on those same indicators), and can be further broken down into its components to help you identify the most important challenges and areas of progress to develop targeted equity strategies. You can also examine the prosperity score for each of six major racial/ethnic groups. Here is how to access the index:

The National Equity Atlas team is excited to announce the launch of the Racial Equity Index, our newest data resource designed to provide a single comparative metric for racial equity in US cities, regions, and states.

Six years ago, we created the National Equity Atlas as a tool to measure, track, and make the case for inclusive growth. With 30 indicators measuring demographic change, multiple dimensions of economic and social equity, and the economic benefits of racial economic inclusion, the Atlas presents deeply disaggregated data, and hundreds of customizable displays, for 301 geographies.

Now, for the first time, it also includes an integrated and holistic measure to compare the state of equity across different places, developed in response to your call for a more comprehensive, summary picture of how communities were doing on our equity metrics. The Racial Equity Index is designed to support advocates, policymakers, and other leaders to quickly understand the issue areas where outcomes are most inequitable, and the populations who are most impacted. This innovative tool can help communities identify priority areas for advancing racial equity, track progress over time, and set specific goals for closing racial gaps.

The Racial Equity Index is a summary score that provides a snapshot of how well a given place is performing on racial equity compared to its peers — comparing cities to cities, regions to regions, and states to states. Because equity means both closing racial gaps and ensuring that everyone is doing well, the Racial Equity Index is based on two components: an inclusion score that indicates the extent of racial gaps in outcomes for a series of nine equity indicators, and a prosperity score that indicates how well the population is doing overall on those same indicators.

How It Works

First, each geography is assessed based on a set of nine unique equity indicators from the National Equity Atlas, as shown in the table below. For every geography, each indicator is translated into an inclusion value, ranging from 1 to 100, where 100 indicates the most racially inclusive outcomes observed for the geographic type (city, region, or state). The composite inclusion value for all nine indicators becomes the inclusion score for that place. (For more information on the construction of the index, see the methodology.)

Next, each indicator is converted into a prosperity value, also ranging from 1 and 100, where 100 indicates the most positive overall outcome for that geographic type. The composite prosperity value for all nine indicators is calculated for the whole population in that geography, and the result is the prosperity score for that place.

Finally, the prosperity score and the inclusion score are averaged to derive the Racial Equity Index, reflecting overall population outcomes as well as racial/ethnic inclusion.

We selected these indicators to capture a range of both people-focused and place-based equity metrics that are available for all geographies in the National Equity Atlas, to include a range of interrelated systems where structural racism is manifest, and to allow for tracking change over time (both retrospectively and in the future). This set of indicators does not encompass all dimensions of racial equity; notably, we are not able to integrate any measures related to the criminal-legal system or wealth due to limited data availability.

What It Shows

The Racial Equity Index is designed to compare equity outcomes — using a composite score for both inclusion and prosperity — for one type of geography at a time to see how a place is doing relative to its peers. Scores are calculated independently for each point in time reported in the Index, so changes over time should be understood as relative changes (that is, a change in ranking compared to the performance of peer geographies) rather than as absolute changes in indicator values.

In addition to reporting the overall inclusion score and prosperity score for each place, the Racial Equity Index overview breaks down outcomes in each geography by the three indicator categories shown in the table above: Economic Vitality, Readiness, and Connectedness.

Along with the raw indicator data included on the National Equity Atlas, this comparative analysis helps to identify the issue areas in greatest need of improvement for a given place. For instance, the Minneapolis metro has one of the highest prosperity scores among the 150 largest metropolitan regions (#6 out of 150), but one of the lowest inclusion scores (#149 out of 150). This indicates that while overall population outcomes are better in Minneapolis than in most other regions, racial gaps are more pronounced. A couple of examples can help illustrate this dynamic.

In the Minneapolis region, the overall rate of poverty/economic insecurity (the share of people with household incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level) is 23 percent — one of the lowest in the nation. But this figure obscures tremendous racial inequities: just 16 percent of White residents in the Minneapolis metro are economically insecure, compared to 57 percent of Black residents and 50 percent of Native American residents. This is reflected in the region’s Racial Equity Index scores for poverty: a prosperity score of 92 (because the overall rate is better than in most other places), but an inclusion score of 1 (indicating that racial inequities for this indicator were worse than any other region). The Racial Equity Index reveals that in the Minneapolis metro, building an equitable economy will depend on solutions that reduce poverty, support economic security, and build pathways to the middle class targeted to the Black, Indigenous, and Latinx populations experiencing the greatest inequities. The differences between the region's prosperity and inclusion scores for each indicator are illustrated in the charts below.The Minneapolis region scores well for prosperity across all indicators, especially unemployment and poverty/economic insecurity, but is in the bottom half of regions for eight out of ten indicators.

Note that the Racial Equity Index should not be used to compare different geographic types; for example, you can use the index to compare the performance of the largest cities in Texas, but you cannot use it to compare Houston’s performance to the state overall.

Prosperity Scores by Race/Ethnicity

The index also powers another unique metric for understanding equity within and across different places: prosperity scores by race/ethnicity. These scores offer a snapshot of prosperity score gaps between racial/ethnic groups, revealing which groups are doing well and which are not, providing deeper context for understanding the overall scores for a given place.

Prosperity scores by race/ethnicity are derived for each geography for the six major racial/ethnic groups, and for all people of color combined. Because these scores are derived from the overall prosperity scores in each place, they can be used to make comparisons across racial/ethnic groups within a given place as well as between places (again, comparing cities only to cities, regions only to regions, and states only to states).

For example, among the 100 largest cities, the prosperity score for the Black population is highest in Plano, Texas (with a score of 67), signaling that Black residents of Plano are faring better on the underlying indicators than their counterparts in other cities. Yet Plano’s Black population still experiences significant racial gaps in most index indicators, especially educational attainment and median wages, as shown in the chart below.

The largest equity gaps facing Plano’s Black community are for the indicators of educational attainment, median wage, and poverty/economic insecurity. This snapshot can help advocates contextualize the more detailed data in the National Equity Atlas when comparing equity outcomes within their city and across neighboring or peer cities. Black workers in Plano have a median wage of $23 per hour — higher than the national average of $18 for all Black workers in the United States, but significantly trailing the city’s overall median wage of $29 per hour.

To learn more, see our analysis for some of the key findings for cities and metros, or visit the Racial Equity Index summary page to explore the data for your city, region, or state.

After months of rebuilding the National Equity Atlas, our team is thrilled to share this updated data resource with you!

We are dedicated to maintaining the most comprehensive and user-friendly source of equity indicators deeply disaggregated by race/ethnicity, nativity, gender, ancestry, and income for communities across the nation. And we are committed to providing not just metrics but the story behind the data and trends, and the policy solutions that can work to close racial and economic inequities and move communities toward inclusive prosperity.

Here are the new features and updates you will find in the Atlas:

1. The Racial Equity Index: This new index — available for cities, metropolitan regions, states, and the US — allows you to track how well your community is doing on equity compared with other communities (and over time), and identify the most important challenges and areas of progress to develop targeted equity strategies.
    
2. Updated and more robust data: All 30 indicators have been updated with the latest available data (generally 2017). We’ve also added new breakdowns to several indicators, including comparative rankings, disaggregation by race, gender, nativity, and ancestry, and historical data whenever possible.
    
3. State-of-the-art data, visualization, and mapping infrastructure: The technological underpinnings of the Atlas have been upgraded based on the Bay Area Equity Atlas (named a Top Urban Planning Website of 2019 by Planetizen) to instantaneously put equity data at your fingertips to use in policy research, development, advocacy, and community organizing.
    
4. Two new indicators: We added two brand-new indicators: life expectancy and the economic benefits of eliminating rent burdens. The life expectancy indicator replaces several health indicators (asthma, overweight and obese, diabetes) for which updated data was not available.
    
5. More contextual information and updated strategies and examples: We’ve added an introductory page explaining our indicator framework and expanded our indicator pages to provide more information about why these metrics matter for communities and what are the drivers of inequities. We’ve also updated all of our strategies and examples.
    
6. Data and PowerPoint downloads: For the first time, you can easily download all of the data behind the Atlas indicators in spreadsheet format to do your own analyses and create your own visualizations. You can also download PowerPoint slides to add local equity indicators to your presentations.

We hope that you find these new features to be helpful in your equity efforts! We would love to hear your feedback via this short survey and you can always reach us at info@nationalequityatlas.org.

Since 2014, the National Equity Atlas has served as the nation’s most detailed report card on racial equity. At a time when racial justice is (finally) at the center of our national policy debate, we are thrilled to share this completely updated and strengthened data and policy tool with you!

The National Equity Atlas is a one-stop-shop for data and policy ideas to advance racial equity and shared prosperity. Our focus is providing equity metrics that are deeply disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, nativity, ancestry, and income for the largest 100 cities, 150 regions, all 50 states, and the United States as a whole.

We built this site to democratize data and make the facts accessible and actionable to everyone — including the grassroots organizations that possess invaluable firsthand knowledge of inequities yet often lack the resources to gather, analyze, and display the quantitative data so crucial to policy campaigns to address them. At the click of a button, you can see how your community is doing in comparison to other communities according to our Racial Equity Index and 30 relevant, useful, field-tested indicators of racial and economic equity.

Our updated Atlas builds upon our previous data infrastructure but provides a new holistic Racial Equity Index, new indicators, more detailed data for existing indicators, and additional ways to explore, share, and use the data.

Ready to dig in? Here are six essential features to help you explore the indicators in the National Equity Atlas.

1. Racial Equity Index: Start Here

The new Racial Equity Index — available for all geographies in the Atlas — allows you to track how well your community is doing on a set of nine equity indicators compared with other communities (and over time). The index summarizes an inclusion score (which measures racial disparities on nine indicators) and a prosperity score (which measures overall performance levels on those same indicators), and can be further broken down into its components to help you identify the most important challenges and areas of progress to develop targeted equity strategies. You can also examine the prosperity score for each of six major racial/ethnic groups. Here is how to access the index:

2. Indicator and Geography Selection Toolbar: Your Home Base

Next, explore the individual indicators in the Atlas. Once you are on the page for any indicator, the first interactive element you will find is the Indicator and Geography Selection Toolbar. This toolbar allows you to choose which of our 30 indicators you want to explore for any of the 272 geographies in the National Equity Atlas. To do so, follow these five steps:

• MASTER IT: Change the geography and pull up the trend data for a community. What groups are growing and which are shrinking?

3. Chart Breakdowns and Filters: Explore the Data

The Chart Breakdown and Filters feature is the true engine for data exploration in the National Equity Atlas. This is where you can disaggregate the data such as race/ethnicity, race and nativity, race and gender, ancestry, and poverty level. It is also where you can get indicator-specific breakdowns of the data, such as business ownership by race and by industry or commute time by race and transportation mode.

Take these steps to use the Chart Breakdown and Filters feature:

Here is how it looks for our Working poor indicator for the city of Albuquerque:

• MASTER IT: Explore the different breakdowns and filters for this indicator. Which groups are most likely to be working full-time but still in poverty or economically insecure (living below 200 percent of poverty) in your community?

4. Compare: See How Your Community Stacks Up

A fourth essential feature — also in the Indicator and Geography Selection Toolbar — is the Compare function. Comparison is a very important method for analyzing equity metrics, allowing you to see how your community (or a group in your community) is doing in relation to other communities (or the same group in a different community). This can help you understand the extent of disparities, assess what are the drivers of inequities, identify strategies to remove barriers, and set goals for progress on eliminating inequities.

Here is how to use the Compare function:

Note that the Compare function is not available for indicator breakdowns that contain multiple categories over multiple years (like the Race/ethnicity indicator you just looked at) because the display would not be legible.

• MASTER IT: Compare working poverty trends in your city and your state.

5. Map Filters and Full Extent: Visualizing Patterns

Mapping data by geography puts spatial inequities — which are also racial inequities, due to housing segregation and discrimination — into stark relief. The National Equity Atlas team has worked hard to create a custom mapping system that enables clear visualization of patterns across communities and correlations between race, place, and income.

Follow these steps to Map Filters and Full Extent features:

6. Downloads and Social Media Buttons: Share and Use Data Visualizations

The National Equity Atlas is a tool for community action, and we wanted to make it easy for you to use the data to highlight issues of inequity, build support for campaigns, and make your case for solutions with policymakers and others in positions of power. We also believe in open data and know that you want to be able to explore the raw data yourself. That’s why we built more sharing and download functionality into the National Equity Atlas.

Follow these steps to access our Download and Sharing features:

• MASTER IT: Download an Excel file to examine the data behind a chart or map. Post a National Equity Atlas chart or map on your Facebook or Twitter page.

Thank you for exploring the National Equity Atlas! We hope you are excited enough about these features to let your colleagues know about this new tool. We encourage you to join the discussion on social media using the hashtag #equitydata.