Civil Rights, Social Equity, and Census 2020

Abstract

This article examines Census 2020 relative to civil rights and social equity. Mandated by the U.S. Constitution, the Census is directly related to civil rights as Census totals are used to determine voting representation, and results impact billions of dollars of federal, state, and local funding across multiple areas including education, health care, and housing. Census undercounts impact marginalized communities, and this is a heightened concern for Census 2020 along two core social equity dimensions: (1) race and ethnicity, and (2) immigration and citizenship. The implementation of Census 2020 is the responsibility of public administrators and poses challenges in the areas of social equity, leadership, and administrative infrastructure. Practitioner Points • Census 2020 matters. Data from the U.S. Census is fundamental to apportioning political power as well as more than $800 billion each year for governmental services. • In each state, population totals will determine the House of Representative seats. Every state will use population totals to redraw legislative districts, allocate resources, and provide public services. • Racial categories and undercounts have been fundamental concerns since the first U.S. Census in 1790. These undercounts pose ongoing challenges to political participation, representation, and resources. • The citizenship question controversy of Census 2020 will likely lead to lower completion levels for noncitizens. • Implementation of Census 2020 is the responsibility of public administrators, and there are important challenges relative to civil rights and social equity. The U.S. Census: Historical Context S ince its constitutional inception in 1787, there have been significant political and social consequences of the U.S. Census. While the word "census" provokes thoughts of a straightforward and objective numerical population count, Census implications are broad, complex, nuanced, and critical. Notably, "the appearance of political noninvolvement is crucially important to the legitimacy of census bureaus and censuses" (Nobles 2000, 5). From a political perspective, "… The United States became the first nation in the history of the world to take a population census and use it to allocate seats in a national assembly according to the population" (Anderson 2010, 154). Following the 1910 Census, Congress fixed the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives at 435, where it remains today. As Billard (2000) explained, this immediately cultivated winners and losers relative to political power. "It was now a zerosum game, and since politicians typically are loath to give up power, the stage was set for potential battles in the future" (767). These political battles are not randomly distributed; rather they follow historical patterns relative to racial inequities. Race, Civil Rights, and the U.S. Census Race has been a fundamental part of the U.S. Census since its inception. These inequities were so important that they were specified in the U.S. Constitution, with slaves counting as mere...

Confronting Racism in All Forms of Pain Research: Reframing Study Designs

“…These subjective design choices resulted in "objective" data that helped entrench systemic racism in US society. To this day, aspects of the current Census' design result in "objective" data that adversely impact racialized groups (e.g., prison gerrymandering 125 , debate over adding a citizenship question 7 ).…”

“…Racism-related stress is multidimensional and differs from other forms of stress. It includes: [1] racism-related life events (i.e., salient racist acts that an individual has experienced), [2] racism microaggressions (i.e., insidious racist acts that occur on a more frequent basis), [3] vicarious racism (i.e., the observation of racist events impacting members of one's racialized group; e.g., a Black child observing police brutality against a Black adult), [4] collective experiences of racism (i.e., knowledge of racist events that happened to members of one's racialized group; e.g., Japanese internment camps in the US), [5] intergenerational trauma (i.e., emotional and behavioral responses to a traumatic event among the descendants of an individual who experienced the event), [6] social role demands and the need to adapt to White or dominant group society, and [7] structural/institutional racism's impact on living conditions, access to resources, and opportunities 66 . Finally, unlike other forms of stress, the impact of racism-related stress occurs across the lifespan.…”

Creating a sustainable action-oriented engagement infrastructure—a UMN-MIDB perspective

“…According to the Society for Neuroscience, 23% of students enrolling in neuroscience Ph.D. programs and 14% of Ph.D. awardees in 2016/2017 were students from underrepresented backgrounds and 15% of postdoctoral trainees and 8% of program faculty identified with underrepresented backgrounds (Society for Neuroscience, 2017 ). Given that the 2020 US Census reported that 42.1% of the US population identifies as coming from an underrepresented backgrounds (Berry-James et al, 2020 ), these statistics indicate that there is an unmet need for innovative programs that foster recruitment and retention of URMs and/or disabled students in the neuroscience workforce, in order to better reflect the broader population that neuroscience research seeks to benefit.…”

Symposium Introduction: The Pursuit of Civil Rights and Public Sector Values in the 21st Century: Examining Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Vision in the Trump Era

“…He finds that bureaucrats’ welfare policy discourse marginalized vulnerable populations, particularly African American women. To round out the symposium, Berry‐James, Gooden, and Johnson III (2020) examine the implementation of Census 2020; as Census undercounts disproportionately impact marginalized communities, there is heightened concern for Census 2020 regarding two core social equity dimensions: (1) race and ethnicity and (2) immigration and citizenship.…”