Someday in early April, two-thousand-and-ten, I walked into my school’s mailroom. No busier than one would expect a place where chocolate chip cookies are regularly received, the room was unusual in that students were walking away from their mailboxes with huge US Census Report forms held underneath their arms.
When I thought of the census, I didn’t just think of the one paragraph of information inserted into standard, AP US History textbooks, somewhere in the chapter about our Constitution. In 1790, the nation underwent its first census, devised by the founders as a way not to determine who should be taxed or who could be drafted into fighting the country’s wars, (as earlier censuses in other countries had done), but to help elected officials understand whom they are representing in the clearest way possible—an x-ray to other nation’s simple check-up. Although it represents one of the more conspicuous intrusions into the private lives of American citizens, the census is approved by Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution.
When I thought of the census, I thought of standing around my kitchen table at age ten, watching over my Mom’s elbow as she checked boxes, reading the questions aloud so that my Dad, washing dishes, could help answer questions that were particularly vague or wide-ranging. I think of the tens of millions of families, with different demographics, different careers, different concerns, different interpretations of the American Dream, huddled around their own dining tables, deciphering a form that, if nothing else, unites the three-hundred-and-nine-million, one-hundred-and-eighty-one-thousand, nine-hundred-and-some-hundred of us—if the Census is to be trusted—as Americans.
Two years ago, I voted for the first time on November 4th, a giddy democratic virgin. At nineteen, I knew little about half of the candidates from my area, so I did my own private research. I looked up important issues in my area and where candidates stood on the issue. Like a first year speaking up in a 300-level course, I was nervous that my failure to read up on the issues would lead to embarrassment and failure within the state of Illinois. But even the overwhelmed freshman knows, someone, that they had passed the pre-requisites, and I knew that simply by being an American citizen I had the right to vote, and whether I flunked the course or excelled, I had a responsibility to do my research and put my best answers forward in class and on the final exam.
So I was excited when I saw the mass produced government document curled up in my mailbox, snuggled in a large white envelope, like a college admission letter signifying just by size alone the acceptance into an institution greater than one’s self. But unlike a college admission letter, addressed solely to one person, with one simple logo on the top right corner, the census envelope was covered in barcodes, meaningless numbers, and governmental requests. And instead of finding itself in the possession of a selected few, it was being opened by the entire United States.
I walked to the nearest study area, put down my backpack, pulled out a pen, and started answering questions—but there were only seven of them. The Individual Census Report would leave me unsatisfied a few minutes later. Question number one: What is your name? Seemed like a good ice-breaker. Names define individuals, and here I was filling out an individual census report so I could be recognized by my government. A legitimate inquiry. The next question alerted me to the possibility that, however short, one double-sided piece of paper could be a gratuitous loss of federal resources.
Question number two: What is your sex? Isn’t necessarily a difficult question to answer, but the United States demands that you only mark “ONE” box, which they instruct you to do with the unnecessarily harsh stylistic use of capitalized letters. I had two important questions. First, a tad uppity, but why was the female option listed second? Why does male precede? even though it is hundreds of pages after female in most dictionaries. There are more women in America than there are men. There are also more women in universities and nursing homes, two places where the Individual Census Report is used (cite census). And, although this wasn’t the “actual” Census Report, my guess is that women will be filling out the majority of the Census Reports that get distributed to families this year. This is not a result of falsely upheld stereotypical differences between the sexes. Even psychologists believe mothers tend to understand the state of their families better and with more realism than their male life partners. Even from a scientific standpoint, women come first. The first member of the species Homo sapiens was female. And female is the default sex of mankind. If anything goes wrong concerning sex determination in vivo, the result is almost always female. It takes two sex chromosomes to make a man. It only takes one to make a woman.
But sometimes errors in sex determination don’t lead to male or female, but rather, intersex individuals. This led me to my second question. I’m assuming that hermaphrodites can’t answer question two. They could leave it blank, but that violates the clause printed on the envelope: “Response Required By Law.” Or they could mark both boxes. But that is not recognized by the census report as a viable option. My problem isn’t so much about the political correctness here. My problem is with the shallowness our answers are forced to be. If the purpose is to count literally everyone, why is it so easy to gloss over individuals? The power seems almost tyrannical, that which was given to whatever governmental group decided with the dryness of bureaucratic phrasings, who exists and who does not.
Question number three: What is your age and what is your date of birth? Was much more straightforward. Upon completion, I found myself at the quasi-racist questions four and five. I say quasi because my naïve optimism of human nature begs me to believe the writers were well-intentioned.
Question number four: Are you of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? Seemed to be set up simply to invite criticism, especially when compared with the next question of What is your race? To be fair, they state that “For this census, Hispanic origins are not races.” I agree with the census architects here. Races are hard to define. And no one would think that simply living on an island like Puerto Rico or Cuba for a brief evolutionary time period—the original habitants of both islands were almost completely wiped out from forced slavery and disease when Spaniards took over the island in the 16th century—would allow for enough genetic drift to create a new race. But then why does the census care what country you’re from? And how far removed do you have to be from your immigrant ancestors to say you originated from a certain country? And what constitutes Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin anyway? One of the follow up boxes asks census-takers to fill in their place of origin, but only if they are Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish, listing examples such as “Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, … and so on.” These are all countries where Conquistadors invaded, and they’re all from the Carribbean and South America. But what about a country like Brazil? Brazil’s dominant language is Portuguese, not Spanish. But it is surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries.
Portugal also colonized African countries like Angola and Mozambique. But there isn’t an option for that. In fact, question five declares a blatant disregard for your race if you are black or white. What is your race? The first option is White. The second option is Black, African Am[erican], Negro. (As with question two, I have to question why options aren’t just alphabetized to avoid uppity assumptions of presumed racial and sexual preferences). I question the necessity of the second and third synonyms for black. I don’t want to criticize people’s legitimate feelings, but from an equality standpoint, if the first option only offers White then the second option should only offer Black. But some people are “politically correct”, and I guess we should respect what they want to be labeled—something that isn’t offensive and is as neutral as possible (even though Black really is less descriptive and less assuming than African-American, which implies you are African and American, which probably isn’t true because few black Americans have dual citizenship with African countries). It’s also comical that after deferring to the pride of the “politically correct”, the census decides to give black people the option of being Negro, which does indeed mean black in Spanish, but is still only slightly less offensive than another infamous epithet that starts with the letter N and has also faded from common use.
Maybe my outrage is primarily personal. I am both black and white. But I think that’s a relatively undetailed account of my ancestor’s history. My white mother is actually German, a result of the arrival of Anabaptists to America escaping religious persecution sometime in the seventeenth century. My black father is Nigerian, and can trace his ancestry to his grandfather who had at least six wives and changed his last name to mean Big Man in Yoruban, the language associated with the largest cultural group in all of Africa, the majority in the country of Nigeria, which happens to be the eighth largest country in the world. The act of marking two boxes seems like a disservice to my far more complicated history.
I could’ve been American Indian or an Alaskan Native, which would have allowed me to “Print [the] name of [your] enrolled or principle tribe.” Never mind that tribe is an offensive trope. Asian countries also have a lot of options—Asian Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, and the Other Asian—that would have required you to print your race in a box that overlaps with the Other Pacific Islander option, thereby invalidating you (along with out intersex friends we lost after question two) if you happen to be Other Asian and Other Pacific Islander, which considering the Asian continent is in the Pacific, shouldn’t be that difficult to do. There are also the Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, and Samoan options. The island of Samoa only has 179,000 inhabitants, about 10 times smaller than Nigeria with 155 million. But whatever.
I suppose my biggest complaint with question number five is that it asks you for your race but then asks you to list your nationality (even though you’re American). I don’t believe that anyone has successfully defined what a “race” is. I do know that scientists have found the greatest amount of human genetic diversity in Africa. And yet, that’s not an option. The birthplace of humankind doesn’t get a box within America’s census, harkening ever subtly to the continued lack of respect over the humanity of Africans which has persisted for nearly four-hundred years. I suppose if I was really picky, I could have checked question five’s attempt at a saving grace, a box to the left of “Some other race.” I could have said I was Yoruban. But I couldn’t have said that I was both Yoruban and German, because they only give you one box.
Questions six and seven are as benign as questions four and five are offensive. Question Six, Do you live or stay in this facility MOST OF THE TIME? Question seven asks for clarification if, indeed, you don’t live in “this facility MOST OF THE TIME.”
I still think a census is vital for our democracy. It’s just not the one I had the responsibility of filling out. As it was designed, I think the census can still help consitutents make known the intricacies of their lives to elected officials, allowing more precise governance and an awareness by politicians of the people they are supposed to be representing. But for this to happen, the census actually has to ask questions. My outrage isn’t that I had to fill out a census that wasted about three minutes of my life, but that these seven questions somehow seemed “important” to my government. Yes, ethnicity might be important. It might be helpful to know you have an influx of foreign constituents settling into your area, alerting you to the growing need of hiring bilingual teachers. But I doubt race is as important. Especially when it is obfuscated, when blacks and whites lose all their culture as they are reduced to the simplest answers, when arbitrary weight is placed on what Spanish-speaking country you came from, and when race, culture, and ethnicity—distinct areas of classification—are bastardized into a series of empty questions.
The Census only takes place every ten years. It costs over a billion dollars to facilitate the Census. The website associated with the 2010 Census says that the Census is important in determining how federal funding is spent on infrastructures and services within various areas. If we want a government that works for us, that provides us with the things we need, it’s going to have to ask us more detailed questions than “What is your race?” It’s going to have to risk processing answers that reflect the actual diversity of America. To know what people really need, you have to figure out who they are as people. Knowing petty details about them doesn’t count. And thus, maybe I’m just angry that this thing I filled out is called a census. A census that pays little attention to what it is counting is hardly a census at all.
1. United States Census 2010 < http://2010.census.gov/2010census/index.php>
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