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Black Leaders Push for Fair 2020 Census Count

WASHINGTON INFORMER — Leaders of numerous African American organizations recently convened in the District to deal with the upcoming 2020 census that could affect available resources and the political representation of Blacks in the century’s third decade.

Published

6 years ago

June 23, 2019

James Wright

By James Wright

Leaders of numerous African American organizations recently convened in the District to deal with the upcoming 2020 census that could affect available resources and the political representation of Blacks in the century’s third decade.

Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) and the convener of the Black Women’s Roundtable, had the leaders and representatives of key African American and civil rights organizations meet on June 18 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill to talk about the 2020 Census and its importance to Blacks.

“The 2020 Decennial Census will be the most critical census count of our lifetime,” Campbell said. “In 2010, African Americans and Black immigrants were under-counted by more than 800,000, leaving our communities with a shortage of government resources. We cannot let this happen again.

“Further, the 2020 presidential election is also taking place next year,” she said. “For that reason, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and our Unity Diaspora partners are strategizing, organizing and mobilizing to make sure our people be fully counted and vote to build power for the next generation. Our future depends on it.”

Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution requires the federal government to conduct a count of all within the borders of the United States every 10 years, with the year ending in a “0”. The data collected from the census count will be used to decide how many representatives will serve individual states in the U.S. House of Representatives. Plus, non-states such as the District and U.S. territories and possessions base their legislative bodies on those numbers.

Business and nonprofit organizations use census data to determine whether to expand or decrease operations and services. In addition, billions of federal dollars are allocated based on census data.

Leaders and representatives of organizations such as National Urban League, the National Action Network, the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women participated in the summit, themed “Be Counted to Build Power for the Next Generation.”

Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said prisoner gerrymandering, the practice of counting offenders where they are serving time instead of their hometown, and a dubious citizenship question are tools being used by those who don’t want people of color to be counted properly.

“There are two million incarcerated Americans and many of them are African American,” Clay said. “We want them to be counted as residents of their home, not the institution they are serving time in.”

Clay has a bill, Correct the Census Count Act of 2019, that would remedy that situation.
On the citizenship question that could appear on census forms that the U.S. Commerce Department leaders requested the Supreme Court to rule on based on validity, Clay called it “idiotic.”

“The purpose of the citizenship question is to disenfranchise and intimidate non-White Americans by having people answer this question,” he said.

Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said Black communities need to be prepared for the census “in light of so many Black children were missing in the 2010 census.”

“We will hold nationwide town hall meetings in the fall and the spring to inform people about the importance of the census,” he said.

South Carolina Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter (D-Orangeburg), president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, stressed that state officials draw congressional and in-state legislative districts based on census data.

“We want to make sure all communities are represented,” she said. “In the process of doing that, we will need to have hard conversations about the makeup of our districts.”

Cobb-Hunter also railed against “packing,” the practice of putting Blacks in one district that produces neighboring predominantly White —and, in many cases, conservative Republican — districts. She said putting some Blacks in a neighboring White district could produce a White Democrat who would be more sensitive to African American concerns.

Cobb-Hunter said many states such as South Carolina and Mississippi have large numbers of Blacks in state legislatures who have little power because they are outnumbered by White Republicans.

Tamika Mallory, co-chair of the Women’s March, said Black leaders need to talk in plain language to African Americans about filling out census forms.

“Sometimes we as Black leaders become elitist and use big words to explain things,” Mallory said. “Black people need someone they can relate to explaining why the census is important.”

This article originally appeared in the Washington Informer.

James Wright

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Activism

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

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December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

6 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.