Comments on: The Census and I

By: GenDad

GenDad — Sun, 16 May 2010 04:16:45 +0000

Imagine being a substitute teacher in CA’s heavily hispanic Riverside county. The census and now the AZ law creates fascinating dialog. When I can, I step outside the day’s lesson plans to engage my own life-long learning and world view teasers. With the brow/white conflict always under the surface, I ask, “Hey what three races do we have here today” unless I spot a rare Asian. Inevitably it’s white, American Indian, Black, and, of course “Hispanic” or “Mexican”. When I try to assure that most of us here are officially “White,” the discussion gets loud. I try to bring in the blend and the uniformity that is “American.” I make some progress. Sometimes.

By: Bajo

Bajo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:04:54 +0000

I am Latino (Mexican-American) and my wife is Anglo (very mixed). So that makes both of us white, according to the Census Bureau’s q5 instructions. My birth certificate lists my race as white.

But our dilemma was on q4 for our children – there was no option for a 50/50 mix. Q5 allows for more than one option to be checked, but q4 doesn’t.

By: Grace

Grace — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:41:52 +0000

The Census is Constitutionally only for counting how many people there are in order to determine appropriate Congressional representation, and that’s all. They have no business asking anything else. It is not legal for them to claim they are using the census to determine where tax dollars go, and that is a fraud anyway. ZERO of our tax dollars go for services or infrastructure for taxpayers. It ALL goes to paying foreign bankers on our national debt.

By: Mara

Mara — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:20:55 +0000

Recently, I found the 2010 Census form hanging on my door. As I began filling it out, I came across a dilemma. The U.S. government wants to know if my children are adopted or not and it wants to know what our races are. Being adopted myself, I had to put “Other” and “Don’t Know Adopted” for my race and “Other” and “Don’t Know” for my kids’ races.

Can you imagine not knowing your ethnicity, your race? Now imagine walking into a vital records office and asking the clerk for your original birth certificate only to be told “No, you can’t have it, it’s sealed.”

How about being presented with a “family history form” to fill out at every single doctor’s office visit and having to put “N/A Adopted” where life saving information should be?

Imagine being asked what your nationality is and having to respond with “I don’t know”.

It is time that the archaic practice of sealing and altering birth certificates of adopted persons stops.

Adoption is a 5 billion dollar, unregulated industry that profits from the sale and redistribution of children. It turns children into chattel who are re-labeled and sold as “blank slates”.

Genealogy, a modern-day fascination, cannot be enjoyed by adopted persons with sealed identities. Family trees are exclusive to the non-adopted persons in our society.

If adoption is truly to return to what is best for a child, then the rights of children to their biological identities should NEVER be violated. Every single judge that finalizes an adoption and orders a child’s birth certificate to be sealed should be ashamed of him/herself.

I challenge all readers: Ask the adopted persons that you know if their original birth certificates are sealed.

By: George Barna

George Barna — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 23:39:44 +0000

That’s a great point, Linda. I remember receiving the questionnaire several days before April 1 and wondering whether I was breaking the law by sending it in prior to April 1! I’d agree, it seems that estimating who would be living in your residence several days from when you are instructed to immediately return the survey probably introduces a bit more error into the process. That, in itself, defeats the purpose of doing a census, rather than a survey – i.e. to eliminate such causes of measurement error.

By: Linda

Linda — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:29:04 +0000

Did it bother you that they asked questions about people who lived at your house on April 1st, but wanted you to send in the survey as soon as it arrived–several days before the first? Of course, we could all guess probably pretty accurately, but it seems to me that guessing on a survey is not a wise thing to encourage if accuracy is the goal.

By: Tim Curtin

Tim Curtin — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 01:55:13 +0000

I wasn’t “stumped” by the racial and ethnic questions. No-I was annoyed. Article 1, Section 2 (as amended by Section 2 of the 14th Amendment) ” The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”. Anything in there about keeping racial/ethnic stats? And it never said anything about keeping stats on home ownership. So, I just don’t answer anything in it that doesn’t directly relate to a pure population count. Name, age, sex, and familial relationship-that’s it.

enumerate vb 1 : to determine the number of : count 2 : list

By: Loraine Isenberger

Loraine Isenberger — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:45:46 +0000

I too was confused with the mixing of culture and race. As a school teacher in the early 1970′s, I was confronted with a similar dilemma. We were to fill out a form for the government to indicate the culture backgrounds of our students. Sounds innocent, but we were only to use the last name as our clue. Now, knew that I had American Indians in our classes, as well as hispanic students, but their names did not reflect their ethnic background. What, however has this to do with the classroom, or in the case of the Census, determining the count of our people?