The Census and Me

As I am presenting tomorrow, I will save my thematic analysis for then. For now, I will expound upon my own experience working for the US Census. Benedict Anderson's hugely successful Imagined Communities works through how nation-states envision their identity through inclusionary/exclusionary practices. The census was used as a tool for inventorying human capital for the use of taxation and military conscription. This quote speaks to the "imagined" in the title:

Hirschman's facsimiles of the identity categories of successive censuses from the late nineteenth century up to the recent present show an extraordinarily rapid, superficially arbitrary, series of changes, in which categories are continuously agglomerated, disaggregated, recombined, intermixed, and reordered (but the politically powerful identity categories always lead the list)(164).

The way in which governments construct measurements to order society in particular ways can be well-intentioned as in the below two cases. Two primary changes within the 2010 US census were the addition of the relationship status unmarried partner(worded differently on form) and the question "Is person #1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? For the purposes of this census, Hispanic is not a race." Further taxonomies included selected countries of origin and an additional write-in option. The first question could be viewed as a catalyst for granting equal legal rights to unmarried couples (regardless of sexual orientation). The second question was at least designed for the provisioning of language resources to those municipalities with a certain percentage of Spanish speaking residents. The ways in which this data is used may in fact be for other purposes, but that is the rationality given by some actors regarding these questions.

Most folks, when confronted with the next question of race, would insert one of the above categories, though some specified countries of origin or other answer instead. According to the Census webpage, the first time a write-in "some other race" only came into being in 2000. These few changes as evidenced in the US census speak to how categories change to suit needs and desires of both the people and the government.

My experience with the census was mixed. I did feel like I was a part of something larger, and important. Minnesota was poised to lose a House of Representatives seat, so I was keen to count every house on my list. I don't believe I can go into too much detail about protocol, but we had to visit each residence a number of times and do some detective work if the person was not home. I found out firsthand just how diligent the US is in counting every person that lives within it's borders. Efforts are also made to count the homeless, but of course this number can never be accurate.

The categories on the short US Census: age, sex, home ownership status, relationships with other residents, Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin, and race can be seen as making legible certain characteristics about a population which may or may not resonate with how a person identifies themselves. For example, I could feel more affinity to someone who shares a similar worldview to me (which could not be gleaned from a few simple questions on a census form) than someone of my same age, race, and sex. There was a long-form census which some of the unlucky residents of my grid had already completed (folks needed to fill out both the short and the long forms as they were tabulated differently), which included other superficial identity markers such as education level, income, religion, etc.

The point of this story is that the act of tabulating the people in a given territory requires boundary-making with regards to what information is important for the rulers of a society to know and what is not. (Have you registered with the military if you are a male and over 18 exists on the census remains a function of the contemporary census.) The census, map, museums, and others ossify constantly fluctuating identity affiliations and become an instrument of the institutionalization of a snapshot in time (albeit a blurry, incomplete one). Is a solution to ask publics what categories they would rather see on the census? Efforts to simplify the social into neat and tidy lines will always fail to deliver in my point of view. The question then becomes how to incorporate ever complex notions of identity into state policies in a fashion that will not discount/create hierarchies?