State Plates
The Washington Income Plate
In Washington, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Washington in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Washington's own distribution figures — 490,000 Black residents, 4 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For Washington, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. Median household income is the most widely used single measure of a population's economic position, and for Black households in the United States the Census Bureau's annual income report places the figure at $56,490. The plate sets the national midpoint beside Washington's households and invites the two-sided reading.
The income figures take their local meaning in Washington, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. Household income counts the combined money income of everyone aged 15 and over living in the home — wages, salaries, self-employment income, Social Security, pensions, interest, and cash benefits — before taxes. Rank is not the benchmark's business — location is, and Washington is located by it here.
For Washington, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. The national median household income in the same report is $77,719. Against that benchmark, the Black median of $56,490 is about 73 cents on the dollar. On one side the national midpoint, on the other the households of Washington — that is the comparison this plate invites.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Washington; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Washington, the plate makes no state income estimate of its own — it sets the state's population, counted exactly, beside the national income record, measured exactly, which is the honest first step of any income geography.
The Population Behind the Plate
For Washington, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. Washington holds about 490,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in sixteen of its people, with Black alone at about 295,000, or 3.8 percent. Where this general material turns into a specific place is the table below: Washington's own rows.
For Washington, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. Tacoma, the state's third city, is its most heavily Black large city — roughly a ninth of its 220,000 residents — built by the port, the railroads, and above all the military: Joint Base Lewis-McChord, one of the largest installations in the nation, sprawls across the Pierce County plain south of the city, and its service families sustain Black communities through Tacoma's Hilltop and Eastside, Lakewood (a base-adjacent city with one of the state's highest Black shares for its size), Parkland, and Spanaway. The rows tabled below are Washington's, and they are what make the general material local.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Washington's among them. Read against the population counted on the distribution plate, the national median describes the economic center of gravity of the community that Washington's 490,000 Black residents belong to. Holding the structure still while the numbers move is the gazetteer's work — the only way an atlas stays honest across editions, for Washington as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Washington, the income geography of Black America changes at the speed of households — of graduations, hires, diagnoses, incorporations, and moves — and the federal surveys that measure it publish on their own calendars. What does not change between releases is the structure this plate records: a counted population in Washington, a measured national pattern, and the standing invitation to read the two together, state by state, until the whole country has been read that way. That is the work of this section of the atlas, and the Washington Income plate is one page of it.
Filed in this series as The Washington Income Plate, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 4%; Black share, alone or in combination: 6.4%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 490,000. In Washington, the atlas asks no more of the material than the material can state.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 4% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 6.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 490,000 |
| United States benchmark — Black median household income, Census Bureau annual report | $56,490 |
| United States benchmark — Black median household income per $1 of the national median | 73 Cents |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Income in the United States (Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement); American Community Survey. Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.