On January 4, the U.S. Census Bureau began promoting the 2010 census by debuting the 2010 Portrait of America tour bus in Times Square, which will go across the country to familiarize people with the format of the census form and why people are being urged to fill it out when it comes in the mail in March.
The U.S. Census Bureau is investing millions to publicize the census, with targeted advertisement specifically within the African-American and Black community with newspaper, radio and television ads.
And on January 4, the U.S. Census Bureau took it a step further by sending U.S. Census representatives to the Harlem community for an informational meeting with community leaders and local politicians. The meeting addressed the importance of the Black and Brown communities to fill out the 10-question form, which determines the apportioning of seats in the House of Representatives, allocation of $400 billion in federal funding, drawing local district lines and a host of other statistical data.
The 2010 census is being considered important even more so for people of color because the minorities of yesterday are the majorities of today, which was something that Assemblyman Keith Wright highlighted as an important factor in making sure the Black and Brown communities are accurately counted at the meeting.
“This is our future,” said Rep. Charles Rangel, who has been working with the Department of Commerce and was at the meeting. “It also determines how $400 billion will be distributed every single year. We have to have an accurate count of the people, especially in these economic times.”
NAACP President of the New York State Conference Hazel Dukes said that there are going to be events on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to raise awareness on the census in churches and community centers.
“Instead of just talking about King, we have to talk about what King left for us to do. We’ve got to be counted. This is how we get to be in power. We can get money into our community for housing, for heath, for unemployment, for training and for retraining our people. That empowers our community. So if we don’t have the count, we don’t get money,” she said.
Dukes, Councilman Robert Jackson, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce Gary Locke, Director of the U.S. Census Bureau Dr. Robert Groves, and others in and around the Harlem community were in attendance in an effort to educate the public on the process of the census to raise the response rate from the community that has been low in the past.
“We know a lot of people don’t answer surveys,” said Locke, so the U.S. Census representatives were pulling out all the stops this time to raise awareness, along with raising awareness on the job opportunities that local residents can applying for within the census.
But more importantly, what was also highlighted on the agenda at the meeting were ways to break down barriers that have been known to contribute to the low response rate in Black and Brown communities–barriers that often deter people from sending back the forms when they are mailed or refusing to allow field workers into their homes when they come.
Some of these barriers are confidentiality concerns, fear within the immigrant community on immigration status concerns and a lack of not counting the prison population in the areas where lived before they were incarcerated, rather than the policy of counting the inmates in the rural areas upstate where they are in jail or prison, which has been a concern of many in the community.
“We count college students in dormitories. It’s a similar sort of issue,” said Groves on the issue of counting the prison population where they live when the issue was raised at the meeting.
To end the federal policy, Congress would have to change the law, but on the state and city level, Jackson, Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat and State Sen. Eric Schneiderman and others are working on getting the state Legislator to pass a bill to have the prison and jail population counted where they lived and not in the county where they are jailed.
In an e-mail message, Schneiderman said, “For census purposes, the practice of counting people where they are incarcerated undermines the fundamental ‘one person, one vote’ principle–it’s undemocratic and reflects a broken system. This legislation is as simple as it is fair: It requires that legislative districts at every level of government contain equal numbers of residents in order to ensure equal representation for all. I applaud Council Member Jackson for bringing this critical issue to the attention of the City Council and generating the momentum we need to move this bill forward in the Legislature.”
Jackson told the Amsterdam News “inmates in these upstate prisons don’t use any services whatsoever in those towns and municipalities. They don’t use the roads, they don’t use the county rec center [and] they don’t go to food stamps or any thing else like that.”
The only possible things they may use are the hospital if they are badly injured, he said.
Proposed bills S1633 and A5946 would allow the state to count these men and women, Jackson explained. However, it would not affect the federal census because Congress would have to change that law. This proposed bill is for the state Legislature.
It would require accurate demographic and geographic information and report it to the state board of elections. “As far as we are concerned, the prisoners or inmates are counted as residents in the county in which they reside,” Jackson said, if the bill gets passed.
Speaking on the prison issue, Dukes told the AmNews that because the prison population is counted in the counties where they are jailed, the money from funding stays in those counties.
“When they are released back to Brooklyn, to Queens to Manhattan, the services that they need–heath services, training–there are not enough there for them, and so we think it’s unfair for them to be counted there.” She continued to say, “We are not talking about lifers. We are talking about people under the crazy Rockefeller drug laws that were sentenced for five years or 10 years.
When they come back home, the census has been counted, she said, and the services are not there as a result.
Jackson said 75 percent of all inmates in upstate prisons basically are from New York City and from 15 assembly districts.
“So we need those individuals to be counted as living in New York [City],” he said.
“I am hopeful that when the Senate is back in session, reforming the practice of prison gerrymandering will be a top priority. There is a well of support for this legislation in the Senate. Currently the bill has at least 15 sponsors. I’m optimistic that we can get this done,” Schneiderman said.