Situating Reparations Advocacy: Mapping HR40

United States

By Jason Brown
federal politics, reparations, policy analysis

This map features the comparative geographies of over 30 years of voting on HR40, the federal bill to study reparations for African Americans.

HR40 - The Reparations Study Bill

The House of Representatives Bill HR40, named after the promise of “forty acres and mule” to emancipated black citizens, calls for the establishment of a commission to study the necessity and delivery of reparations for African Americans due to the harms done them and their ancestors since slavery.

John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan first introduced the bill in 1989, and it has been introduced annually since, growing and shrinking in co-sponsorship. Since Rep. Conyers’ retirement in 2017, the torch has been carried by Sheila Jackson Lee, of Texas. The bill had failed to pass out of the judicial committee until the spring of 2021, after gaining unprecedented co-sponsorship.

This map features the affected geographies of over 30 years of voting on HR40. Viewers can explore when and if their state and district has supported reparations. However, because reparations is a complex campaign, inviting conversation (and disagreements) on race, rights, and history, readers are invited, too, to compare these reparationist geographies to other political phenomena, such as densities of black populations, Senate support of parallel bill S40, and Trump-leaning districts from the 2020 election.

While voting records are public, and district data is public, there has been no compilation of voting history and represented districts. This map gathers all of that data into one place to illustrate the geography of reparations support (as HR40 sponsorship) since 1989.

Process:

Data gathering and much data “cleaning” tasks were done to get this information into geographic form. Two major lines of data had to first be found and determined: the support history of HR40, available on congress.gov, and the geometries of congressional house districts as they changed between the 101st and 117th (present) Congresses. While the information on the Congress website was easy to acquire, it had to be massively reformatted and collated to create a historical timeline of voting. More complexly, congressional districts change both regularly every 4 congresses (after a Census), but also irregularly if a state decides to redistrict. Once the voting data and geometries were gathered and sized down (to make the overall dataset feasible for online use), then they were joined into one spreadsheet. This sheet is a rich resource of its own, and will be shareable after further review and validation.

Upon sharing the initial findings, it was brought to my attention that the nature of congressional “business” was not entirely clear to readers of the map. Thus, this map must have multiple levels of entry. For most, it will not be immediately clear what Bill “cosponsorship” means, or why there are so many different shapes for districts. The map, if left de-contextualized from civic knowledges, would be largely illegible or simply insignificant. Because of this secondary need, additional references to the nature of Congress, the role of redistricting, and the history of HR40 have been included.

Lastly, the map would not have been possible without preliminary research and geographic location data done by other researchers. Data for historical congressional districts (101st-114th) came from Jeffrey B. Lewis, Brandon DeVine, Lincoln Pitcher, and Kenneth C. Martis who shared it publicly as part of their research at UCLA. In the tradition of open-data access for expanded research, my spreadsheet data and shapefiles will be made public as well.

Intended Use of these Tools:

This map is catered to at least two kinds of users: the curious observer looking for personally relevant House district information, and the intent researcher of policy support and HR40 development. First, the filters and layers available intentionally allow users who may not be familiar with cartography to play with some different data comparisons. By giving the user free reign to zoom, pan, and select data, the map becomes their own. They can see how their selection choices, which illustrate local and national level decisions, change the landscape. Secondly, for the more intent researcher or organizer, this tool reveals larger patterns which they can copy to track political losses and gains, in respect to reparations and their other campaigns. Additionally, with the voting and geometry data made freely available, they can use it for their own purposes and inquiries.

Space for Development (Addition, Subtraction, Critique, Collaboration):

Since this map contains both broad and narrow scale data, there is much room for pedagogical development of “how” to use this map. This map and its data could easily be brought into civics or social study classrooms to investigate HR40 as a case study of placed politics or anti-racist organizing. There is much room to add other data layers to the map, and I hope that researchers, organizers, and/or teachers will be able to critique and inform other data perspectives that will bring nuance to the map. The level of scale and abstraction on this map gives space for it to function as a backdrop for other questions around race, economy, partisan politics, and State-Region-Federal campaigns.

Please see the project website for full notes and details on sources.