(Under) Counting Blackness Across The Globe: The Civil Rights Crisis of Census Racial Erasure

• In Event: Race and Identity Making Past and Present

Description for Program

A nation’s census count of its population every ten years is viewed by many residents as an intrusive and mundane domestic administrative task with little relevance to the quality of their lives. Yet census taking is critical to power sharing in the pursuit of an effective multiracial democracy and the fair allocation of resources. In the 234 years since its inception in the U.S., the accuracy of census taking has steadily improved, while the undercount of Black residents has remained a problem. Commentators suggest that the struggle to fully count people of African ancestry is simply a logistical matter. Black people are presumed to be inherently hard to count because of their distrust of U.S. government officials. However, the failure to fully count Blackness extends beyond U.S. boundaries and the specificity of its racial history. Examining the problem of the Black census undercount from a transnational comparative perspective reveals what is rarely named in the analysis of census taking–- governmental anti-Blackness. The lack of governmental will in Latin America, Europe and elsewhere to address the longstanding differential undercount problem has resulted in a civil rights crisis for Black people across the African Diaspora. The paper "(Under) Counting Blackness Across The Globe," will assess the Black differential undercount as a global phenomenon, and recommend that the best response to the problem is an international human rights approach. With an international right to be counted, Afro-descendants will be empowered to collectively call out the anti-Blackness of census undercounts on the international stage. Uniting Black people across the African Diaspora in their common struggle to be counted is the best path for addressing the hidden civil rights crisis of statistical erasure.

Author

• Tanya Hernandez