Racial Categories and the 2020 Census Conference (Seattle, 6/5-6/6/2019)
Posted: 5/21/2019 (Conference)
This year’s annual conference is entitled “Racial Categories and the 2020 Census.” We will highlight scholarly and community engaged work on the topic, and explore how definitions of race change to accommodate or contest power.
The U.S. government, through the decennial Census Bureau, has a goal “to count everyone once, only once, and in the right place.” Census data is used by state agencies, policy makers, scholars, and businesses to know, understand, and make policy decisions about our communities, to account for political representation, and to allocate public resources.
The Census does not simply reflect the racial identities in existence, rather, its racial categorization has powerful impacts on how ‘race’ is politically and socially defined, and how marginalized people are made visible to and by state institutions. In many ways, the history of the Census traces the history of the construction of racial identities.
The US 2020 Census presents unique challenges to consider. In response to decades of activism and lobbying, the Obama administration approved the addition of a ‘Middle Eastern, North African’ category to the 2020 Census; this addition has now been rejected by the current administration. Under the Trump administration, the debate on the constitutionality of adding a question about citizenship has heightened fears of an undercounting, especially for communities that remain ‘hard to count,’ such those experiencing homelessness, children, immigrant and refugee populations, and the LGBTQ+ community. Additionally, the 2020 Census will be the first digitized Census, bringing up new concerns around data security and further troubling the accuracy of the count. With a lower budget, fewer Census field offices, and new algorithms for differential privacy protections, activists, politicians, policy makers, and scholars are increasingly concerned about the dependability of the data collected by the 2020 Census.
Join us for an informative conference that explores the historical, political, and social aspects of the US Census. The Keynote lecture will feature G. Cristina Mora, Kim Williams, and Nazita Lajevardi on the historical and political impacts of the Census. The following day we will have a series of panels of scholars, activists, policy makers, and journalists that will speak to these and other specific challenges of the 2020 Census. The goal of this conference is to not only learn about the Census, but to collaboratively find ways to speak back to the Census.
Location: UW Center for Communication, Difference, and Equiy (CCDE)