The U.S. Census: A Tradition of Black Undercounts Since 1787

There's a long history of blacks being undercounted in U.S. Census-related activities. Remember the shameful “three-fifths of a person” section of the U.S. Constitution, and how it was used to hold down the number of Congressional representatives in the southern states? While it pre-dated the first, formal, national census, it certainly was the first black Census issue, and things have gotten only marginally better, over the years.

In December, several black leaders met with U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department is ultimately responsible for conducting the Census. As part of that meeting, they warned African Americans, as they seem to do every ten years, about how important it is “to be counted,” that approximately 3 million blacks were actually undercounted in the 2000 Census and that whites, on the other hand, were overcounted, by one percent.

Then, as they always do, they strongly recommended that the whole “undercount thing” could be quickly rectified, if the Census Bureau simply increased that part of its advertising budget that focuses on black communities. That’s what Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP and National Urban League all said in their meeting, and afterwards, in comments to the assembled media.

The more I listened, the more I thought that I had heard all of that before. It sounded exactly like what they said prior to the 2000 Census, prior to the 1990 Census and just before the 1980 Census.

I wasn’t impressed.

I just don’t think the meeting, the press conference or the well-worn cry for more advertising dollars, carried enough impact to “bust a grape” on this critically important issue. In fact, I think the Census Bureau is paying scant attention to "our official black spokespeople" on this issue, and has apparently decided to throw in some blatant disrespect along with its normal disregard and ambivalence on Census matters related to African Americans.

How else do you explain the Census Bureau’s recent announcement that it would return-- in 2010-- to including the word “Negro” as an option for people of African descent who want to describe themselves on their questionnaires?

Somewhere in Washington, D.C., men and women wearing expensive suits, in very well-furnished offices, are probably “cracking up” laughing and “high-fiving” each other, right now. I don’t even think they, themselves, expected to get away with that one. But, so far, they have.

Negro?

Where did that come from--Harry Reid?

The truth is that the U.S. Census, according to the Constitution, was conceived to produce an “actual enumeration” of the nation’s population every ten years and to establish a basis for determining the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives from each state. For me, however, the numbers just never seem to "add up."

One of the most confusing aspects of the entire Census process is how illegal immigrants--people who are not even U.S. citizens-- are routinely included in the Census count and how their numbers contribute substantially to the exploding numbers of Congressional members in certain states. Is it a coincidence that the three states in the country with the greatest number of illegal immigrants--California, Texas and New York -- are also the same three states with the greatest number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives?

No.

In addition, do you ever wonder why the southern states, wherein black slaves significantly out-numbered white families, now have so few black residents, according to the Census counts? For example, South Carolina, whose population was about 75 percent black, immediately following the Civil War, is listed , according to the Census, at 28.5 percent black. North Carolina is officially 21.6 percent black; Georgia, 30 percent; Alabama, 26.4 percent; Mississippi, 37.2 percent, and so on, and so on…

If the numbers in those former slave states were anywhere close to being accurate, there would have been no logical reason for the white majority in those states to try to intimidate black voters at southern polling places, over so many years. There would have been no need to threaten lynchings or to invent the Ku Klux Klan.

In a related vein, in the 1930 Census, the “counters” were advised that a person who had both white and “Negro” blood was to be listed on the Census form as a "Negro," no matter how small the percentage of black blood. On the other hand, and inconsistently, Census “counters” in 1940 were instructed that Mexican Americans should be listed on the Census forms as “white,” regardless of their percentage of Mexican blood. That may be the primary reason why an actor born in Chihuahua, Mexico, as Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca was able to rise so easily to mainstream Hollywood stardom, when he arrived in the United States. Simply by changing his name to Anthony Quinn, Mr. Oaxaca was accepted by the movie industry, and by most movie-goers, as a "white" actor.

By 1980, the Census Bureau, which never has had an incentive to produce an accurate count of the black population, or to contribute to black political and economic empowerment through its numbers, admitted that low-income, minority groups were definitely being undercounted, by about 3.2 million persons. By the year 2000, the Census Bureau announced it planned to use statistical sampling to more accurately count historically underserved black and minority communities.

Curiously, that announcement was met with a lawsuit by Congressional Republicans, which led to the Supreme Court prohibiting the use of statistical sampling in the production of Census counts.
For the 2010 exercise, the Census Bureau has already warned us that the people most likely to be undercounted are those who are economically disadvantaged, unattached/single, and those living in high density ethnic enclaves, i.e., the “hood.”
Here we go, again.

As hard as it is for me to admit, given my own marketing and communications background, what’s keeping the Census Bureau from, finally, producing fair and accurate counts of blacks in this country has very little to do with its communications budget.

There are two, major complicating factors: Dating back to 1790, there are entrenched special interests in Washington, DC who, for blatantly political reasons, are absolutely opposed to having an honest tally of black Americans; and secondly, the Census Bureau's plan to hire 1.2 million people to go door-to-door to conduct its research is an outmoded concept.

That approach may be good for stimulating temporary job growth, but a computer-assisted review of birth certificates, death certificates, legal immigration records, and other database information should be sufficient to provide the true count needed for determining political representation and government funding levels. Other optional questions can be addressed a lot more cost-effectively through low-margin-of-error sampling techniques.

Somehow, I believe the Census Bureau, the Commerce Department, the U.S. Congress and the President of the United States all know this. They apparently just don’t feel the need to tell us precisely how many African Americans there really are in this country.

Reminds me of William “Boss” Tweed. He was the guy who famously led Tammany Hall, New York City’s all-powerful, Democratic Party political machine in the mid-to-late1800’s. Once he was featured in a political cartoon, responding to a question about whether people in New York City would turn out to vote in an upcoming election.

Tweed was depicted as saying: “As long as I count the ballots, what are you going to do about it?”

That’s pretty much where black folks find themselves with regard to the consistently inaccurate Census data that have limited their full political and economic participation in this country, since the days of George Washington.

Trust me, it’s not the advertising, or the people who go door-to-door, or whether people in black communities fill out their questionnaires. The problem is the lingering, racial biases and political agendas of the people who are actually doing the counting.

Someone in high office needs to change that, once and for all, sooner than later.


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