About Our Racial Equity Research

What Does Racial Equity Mean?

Equity exists when race, indigenous status, gender, class, sexuality, age, religion, ability, national origin, and language no longer determine one's socioeconomic outcomes, and when everyone has what they need to thrive.

We center race in our equity work to address the harm caused by historical and contemporary disenfranchisement based on institutionalized racism in US governments. Race is the most important determinant of social and economic outcomes in the US today, with a greater range of impacts on individual and community conditions.

While centering on race, we also address racism in intersection with sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, and so on, as we understand that by centering the most impacted group, everyone thrives.

  • Dashboard data was originally collected by the Census Bureau and other federal and state governmental agencies and processed by City data analysts and Tableau developers.
  • Community stories are from Seattle Channel and Department of Neighborhoods collections.
  • Root causes mapping and other analytical content are created by City and University of Washington researchers based on in-depth research on these topics.

  • Mixed Method Research: Our racial equity research weaves quantitative data (e.g. numbers) together with qualitative data (e.g. storytelling) as we hope to map the important connections between community stories, lived experience, and population level data. Using this anti-racist data practice, we hope the data interpretations we present here can support City RSJ activists and community organizers to use data and data projects to fuel our collective efforts for racial justice.
  • Results-Based Accountability: As racial equity is outcome-oriented, we want to use population-level data as a measurement of changes. For example, are there disparities between racial groups and inequalities across neighborhoods? At the same time, we want to aim our short- and mid-term strategies and actions towards long-term changes and ensure we move in the right direction to transformational changes, instead of transactional ones. Root cause analysis can help us with that.

Uplifting community stories and organizations assists City employees in aligning our racial justice efforts with local community organizing, and strengthening relationships with communities most impacted by structural racism.

The tactics include:

  1. Support community-led racial justice campaigns.
  2. Redirect funding to communities most impacted by structural racism.
  3. Conduct racially equitable community engagement.

To learn more, you can download the Department of Neighborhoods' guidance on racially equitable community engagement strategies (Word document).