This animated map depicting the “slave trade” has been around for a number of years. About 4% of those Atlantic slave trade ships landed in what is now the United States. Some enslaved people who disembarked at Caribbean ports would later be resold in North America. New York Times journalist Jamelle Bouie helped create it when he was still at Slate. Here is what he wrote yesterday about it:
Years ago, I worked with colleagues at Slate magazine on an infographic that showed the scale and duration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, using data from the SlaveVoyages website. Plotted on a map of the Atlantic Ocean, it represented each ship as a single dot, moving from its departure point on the African coast to its arrival point in the Americas. As time goes on — as the 16th century becomes the 17th century becomes the 18th century becomes the 19th century — the dots grow overwhelming.
Bouie writes that after he helped create the popular animation, he wondered if reducing thousands of enslaved people to moving dots had abstracted the misery the map represented. He wrote:
What I did not appreciate at the time was how we, the creators, would lose control of our creation. People encountered the infographic in ways we could not anticipate and that lay outside of our imagination. It was repurposed for schools and museums, used for personal projects and in exhibitions. Inevitably, some of these people would contact us. They would want to know more: about the ships, about the journeys, about the people. And we couldn’t answer them.
When I think back to the creation of that infographic, I wonder whether we had shown the care demanded of the data. Whether we had, in creating this abstraction, re-enacted — however inadvertently — some of the objectification of the slave trade.
The article discusses ways historians can restore the humanity and legacy of the people represented by the data.
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