The Guardian, February 27, 2020: How the US census misses people of color – and why it’s so harmful
The mammoth task of conducting the 2020 US census is already under way, but last time 9% of Black people in the U.S. were simply missed, a rate that was higher than any other racial or ethnic group.
The Census Bureau also double-counted 4% of Black residents and were able to make educated guesses about another 3%, so they were left with a net undercount of 2%.
There are many reasons why people are missed by the Census Bureau. Residents can be hard to contact (for example, if they live in inaccessible places), hard to interview (if they have limited English proficiency), hard to locate (if they are homeless or have been displaced by a natural disaster) and finally, hard to persuade (people who are angry or distrustful of government can fall into this group). Many of these obstacles are likely to be higher for non-White residents of the U.S. and so people of color are systematically undercounted.
Black residents will yet again be missed from the national count in 2020 – somewhere between 1.1 million and 1.7 million of them according to the Urban Institute. Unless there is a significant change in either the public funding for the census, or the public’s willingness to fill out these forms, it is likely that millions of dollars in federal funding will be misallocated as a result.
