Du Bois's 1900 Paris plates made the present legible at the scale he could draw it. This series makes the future legible at the current rate of change — and asks whether that rate is acceptable.
The forecast is not a prediction. It is an extrapolation from 36 years of federal data, drawn in the visual grammar Du Bois set in 1900. The answer, almost always, is never, or centuries from now.
At current rates, the median Black household catches the median white household in the year — never. All three forecast models agree: parity does not arrive within 500 years. The Black/White wealth ratio went from 0.263 (1989Q3) to 0.220 (2025Q4). The series moves away from parity, not toward it.
A plate briefly shipped at this slot on 2026-04-14 under the title Reparations ETA. The framing abstracted the HBCU / Ivy endowment gap as a proxy for reparations — a reductive frame that misstates what reparations actually demand (stolen labor, land, generational wealth, Jim Crow, redlining, incarceration). An institutional endowment comparison is not a reparations accounting.
Three paces — reform, current, backlash — projected forward against the question: in what year does racial parity in incarceration arrive? Layered with 50 per-state plates, each a small mirror of the national curve.
Train TimesFM on truncated historical windows of Black economic progress before interruption. Forecast forward to 2024 as if the interruption hadn't happened. The gap between the gold counterfactual line and the vermillion actual line is the cost — quantified in dollars. Three sub-plates, each tied to a SAM in the Constellation.
Each plate uses the color discipline Du Bois set in 1900 — vermillion, gold, ink, cream — and the same insistence that the data be drawn plainly. The methodology page on every plate publishes the data sources, the forecast models, and the assumptions in full. No figure that cannot be cited will appear.
The toolchain is open-source, set by Anthony Starks for the #DuBoisChallenge community: dubois-data-portraits, decksh, deck. The forecast engine is TimesFM 2.5 (Google Research, zero-shot foundation model with quantile output) — supplemented with statsmodels ARIMA, OLS regression, and geometric extrapolation as cross-checks on every claim.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste & Britt Rusert's W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018) is the lineage being claimed. This series is its forward-looking companion.
Forecasts ships open. MIT-licensed. Forkable. Contributable.