The context under which one may need to understand the cotton weight data is that Benjamin Bates donated a large sum of money to Owen Cheney, founder of the college, to support the institution. He gave so much money that they named the school after him. Bates made all of this money off of selling textiles. The cotton weight data shows how much money Benjamin Bates made off of selling textiles that were made from cotton picked by enslaved people. The school was always accepting students of color and coined themselves as “founded by abolitionists”. Yet the money that built the school and whose the man who donated it was wealthy off of the backs of enslaved people in the southern United States. The process of collecting this data would be to look at the location of purchase and whether or not the product was from enslavers cotton farms. If the majority of the money comes from such farms, the school is somewhat ignorantly claiming to be anti-racist from the start of the school. The data could encourage the administration to think critically about their somewhat false advertisement.
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