[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img] I missed the mail carrier this morning, but I came downstairs just in time to run into United States Census takers – a year early.
I have always loved the idea of the census. I love filling out forms. Send me a survey of any kind, and I’ll complete it – seriously considering my responses at the kitchen table. I am a voluntary participant in quite a few studies. And I’m always 100 percent compliant. Just this week I completed a five-page, several-hundred-question survey about my new car, while my husband watched, shaking his head.
I loved the census in particular because I am amazed by the idea that a snapshot of humanity can be so quickly and thoroughly quantified. Almanacs were my favorite reference books when I was a child for just this reason. The idea that an overview of human history, and geography, and demographics could be contained in one thick book was fascinating. When our family purchased almanacs, every 10 years or so, we would wait for the version that included the new decennial census results. And I was eerily content with the idea that our government could count each individual person.
Then I got married, and my husband ruined the census for me.
My Husband’s Focus
In the year 2000, we’d been married three years, and I was waiting with eager anticipation for the census form. I imagined that with computers and Scantron technology, it would include pages that parsed out American behavior from how much we earn, to how many children we have, to the kind of houses in which we live. For my husband, the census always has been about race. He views it as an historical, constitutional excuse to keep divided our country by reinforcing and quantifying those divisions. He said he’d never liked the census because it was solely about counting us versus them, segregating us, separating us.
I dismissed his opinions and waited with bated breath until the form came, especially eager because I had missed the last one. Unfortunately, during the 1990 census I was in college.
I don’t much remember the 1980 census (my first), except that I watched with an eight-year-old’s excitement as my mother completed the form. Then I listened to my grandmother tell stories about how census takers came by her family’s house and farm when she was 10 (in 1930) and asked my great-grandmother when everyone was born and how many children she had – which by then would have been quite a few. When we got a new Information Please almanac the next year, I read all about New York City, knowing that I had been counted among the millions living there.
Then the 2000 census form arrived in all of its five-paged, multi-hued glory. I cleared off the dining room tables, sharpened my pencils and got ready to work. It was quick work.
The Race to Count Races
In addition to my name, address, telephone number, and whether I had a mortgage, the other questions for which I had patiently waited were very simple and focused on just one thing – race. Okay, they also asked how old I was. But after that, it was all about race. First I had to clear up the important issue of whether I was Hispanic, and (in a separate question that I was specially instructed on the form to answer as well) I needed to report my race. I flipped through the remaining pages, thinking all the other important questions were just around the corner—income, education, occupation, work commute, number of automobiles, etc. But I was wrong. The questionnaire only went on to ask about the race of the other people in my household.
That was it. I contemplated how disclosing just my gender, age, status as a renter or mortgagee, and (lest we forget) my race was going to fulfill the promise on the top of the form: “Complete the Census and help your community get what it needs – today and in the future!” Did my community (Shaker Heights, Ohio, at the time) really need to know how many blacks or Hispanics were in the city to get what it needed? How would that information help address the problems of that community of that time – surviving as an inner-ring suburb of a city on the verge of economic collapse?
Yes, I know. There was an alternative long form in 2000 that asked the questions I thought America really needed the answers to. It was randomly sent to a statistically representative number of households and purported to produce a complete picture with less work. In 2010, the Census Bureau is doing away with the long form altogether. Households will receive the short form: age, gender, and race only, please. My screams of protest (okay, not exactly screams, but the muted protests of someone home alone all day) so far have fallen on deaf ears, starting with today’s census taker.
What We Really Need
If I filled it out, “California gets what it needs!” Or so the newly minted census employee exclaimed. What California needs are legislators with the courage to raise property taxes and business taxes. Warren Buffet knows it and I know it. California needs to address its crumbling infrastructure. California needs to address long-term air and water pollution. I don’t know if California needs to know how many Guamanians or Chamorros there are in the state. And how will the census, which admittedly undercounts the homeless and illegal immigrants, really address California’s problems when it has so many of them both?
The census employee, who had the misfortune to run into me this morning, did not have any answers to my questions.
I don’t know who does have the answers. But there is good reason to be dubious about the motives of those collecting such information while making saccharine promises.
Using the Census for Purposes
The Census Bureau collected the racial information that facilitated the forcible relocation and internment of Japanese Americans, by identifying concentrations of these Americans often down to the very block, and then disclosing this information to the War Department. And of course, the census was used for nearly a century to help assure the political domination of Slave States by bolstering their representation in Congress—as well as their share of the Electoral College—by counting three-fifths of “all other persons” (read slaves) not so happily situated in their jurisdiction. Maybe my husband was on to something.
Oh, sure, I would like the proper reapportionment of the House of Representatives. Especially living in the most populous state in the nation, which (according to the Census Bureau) receives only 78 cents in federal spending for every dollar of taxes paid to the U.S. Treasury. But I don’t appreciate that necessary count coming with a heap of historical baggage, like the vestiges of slavery, internment and disenfranchisement, not to mention the specter of similar misuses today and in the future.
Curiously, many in the not so monolithic black community actually advanced the argument when urging completion of the census that we should stand up and be counted. It’s said that we won’t get our fair share unless we’re enumerated. But judging by the results of American policies, it can be assumed our “fair share” is disproportionately more prison, more children in foster care or in underfunded public schools. With the Census, these are the results I can count on.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. She's a reformed lawyer, and full time novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course.This will mark the debut of our newest, and perhaps most charismatic, weekly essayist. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com.
