"As white as anybody": Race and the Politics of Counting as Black

Abstract

With Census 2000 questionnaires in mail during March of 2000, word from black format radio to its listener base was unequivocal: avoid undercount. Fill out and return your census forms.1 The Undercount, of course, is term for widely known fact that US census routinely misses some number of nation's citizenry in its attempt to count nation's population. More to point, although 1980 and 1990 censuses each missed less than two percent of those not counted tended to be poor, minority urban dwellers. In 1980 blacks made up 11.7 percent of United States population, but accounted for fifty-three percent of those missed by census.2 And despite concerted efforts to redress problem, US Census monitoring board reported that the 1990 undercount was larger than previous census. In 1980 1.2 percent of population was missed; in 1990 those missed accounted for 1.8 percent of or 4.7 million people in all. In addition, 1990 results also continued an alarming trend: those left uncounted were disproportionately from minority, low-income or urban communities.3 When coupled with esti mates that as many as six million people, most of them white, were counted twice, official nation was presumably whiter and wealthier than real nation.4 Yet even as radio hosts urged black listeners to make sure they were counted, they also professed only partial faith in efficacy of this strategy. Pointing to what they insisted were disparities between official and actual crowd estimates for such events as Million Man March and a more recent rally in Tallahassee, Florida in support of affirmative action, radio commentators complained that all official counting of minority populations amounted to undercounting.5 The sense that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get individuals and nation as a whole to count as black is both a recent and