Lies The Census Tells | Dan Bouk | TMR

Emma hosts Dan Bouk, associate professor of history at Colgate University, to discuss his recent book Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them. Professor Dan Bouk gets right into the central importance of the US Census in the delegation of power across the various branches and levels of federalism, with its inception in the first article of the US Constitution. Bouk then walks through the state of the Census bureau over the first century of the American experiment, with this mass mobilization driven by US Marshals organizing law enforcement to get people out for the count, with the infrastructure of the bureau slowly growing through the early 1900s – becoming an institution made up of hundreds of thousands of workers. Emma and Dan then explore how this massive bloat of the bureau brought forwards greater scholarly work (even within the bureau) on the failures of the census methodology, with a segregated office of Black census workers first revealing the mass undercount of various marginalized communities – including Black and brown folks, immigrants, those in poverty and without housing, and more. Next, Professor Bouk walks through the various factors that push this miscount in the census, and how these factors developed over the 20th Century, with certain aspects (like having representatives that actually want to count you, living in a house, etc) continuing to present an issue, while new ones (being part of a racial group being put in internment camps, having an atypical family structure) arose alongside developing social issues.

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