U.S. Census Office, Growth of the Elements of the Population (1898)

This graphic was included in the 1898 Statistical Atlas of the United States Based upon the Results of the Eleventh Census. It is similar to a color coded horizontal bar chart, but it has no values on the horizontal axis. It is intended to illustrate the growth of different "elements" of the population over the course of the nineteenth century. The population is divided into three categories: “Colored,” which, according to the 1890 Census, included "persons of African descent, Chinese, Japanese, and civilized Indians"; “Native Stock,” which included individuals born in the United States to two parents who had been born in the United States; and “Foreign Stock,” which included foreign-born persons and persons born in the United States with either one or two foreign-born parents (Schor, 2017). These categorizations are grounded in the hypodescent principle, the belief that a person's identity is most closely tied to their native-born, white parentage. They reflect elements of scientific racism that emerged in the late nineteenth century, rooted in white supremacist and Social Darwinist ideas (Schor, 2017). These assumptions are evident in the racialized categorization of the population, and in the emphasis on individuals' foreign parentage. This display illustrates that, while data collection is a crucial tool for understanding social and economic change, bias can shape data collection, interpretation, and visual representation. As a result, visualizations like these can reinforce misleading or distorted understandings of population trends rather than objectively represent them.