Even with the 2010/2020 Census showing MORE minorities?
One is able to find numerous situation where the Census numbers just aren’t right….
And undercounting people of color hurts funding for their local and state governments and leads to the loss of political power….
An accurate census is crucial for the distribution of hundreds of billions of federal dollars, and it determines how many congressional seats each state gets. But a review by The Associated Press found that in many places, the share of the Hispanic and Black populations in the latest census figures fell below recent estimates and an annual Census Bureau survey, suggesting that some areas were overlooked.
For the share of the Black population, the trend was most visible in southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, including Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. For the Hispanic population, it was most noticeable in New Mexico and Arizona.
In Somerton, about 200 miles southwest of Phoenix near the Mexico border, community leaders were incredulous.
“This is not true. This is not real numbers, you know. They don’t know our community. They did not do what needed to be done to count our people, and it’s just ridiculous. It can’t be,” said Emma Torres, executive director of Campesinos Sin Fronteras, an organization that advocates for farmworkers. The group was heavily involved in promoting the census.
Most Somerton residents use post office boxes. A majority are Spanish-speaking farmworkers, and many lack reliable internet access.
Community leaders say they are used to an undercount, but the notion that they lost residents is unfathomable….
More complaints about minority undercounts with the Census….
Once again, the Census Bureau reported, Detroit has gotten smaller.
For most Detroiters’ entire lives, census day has brought only bad news, a painful once-a-decade accounting of an exodus that has shrunk their city’s population by more than half since 1950 and left entire blocks abandoned.
Mayor Mike Duggan pledged to stop that decline when he swept into office eight years ago, telling voters they could measure his success based on whether residents returned. But when the latest numbers were released this month, they showed the population had fallen more than 10 percent since 2010, to about 639,000 residents.
In the ledger of the federal government, Mr. Duggan had failed to meet his goal, people were still leaving and Detroit now had fewer residents than Oklahoma City. In the mayor’s own view, he was succeeding, the city was coming back and the Census Bureau had just counted wrong….
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