Sabotaging the Census Is a Gift to White Power

[Nevilledog]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/sabotaging-the-census-gift-to-white-power-1042529/


Donald Trump has tested previously held concepts of Oval Office power much like a Jurassic Park raptor testing an electric fence for weaknesses. The aspiring authoritarian has been busy lately, even by his standards: sound-and-fury executive orders that boast of solving the Covid-19 aid stalemate on Capitol Hill, but do nothing but complicate matters with legal questions; jackboot tactics against civil rights demonstrations, showing that he and Attorney General Bill Barr are little more than Bull Connor with a military budget. And the execrable interference with the Postal Service is not only a pathetic attempt to suppress votes and delegitimize the forthcoming election — it isn’t even the worst damage Trump is doing to American democracy right now.

I speak not of Trump’s deference to Vladimir Putin, but to white power, the true master whom he serves with more faithfulness than any spouse. His administration moving up the deadline for counting every human being in the country by four weeks to September 30th, all while Covid-19 is still spreading unchecked, doesn’t even qualify for an imitation of foolish optimism. It is that ludicrous. It is deliberate sabotage of the method by which the nation apportions its electoral districts and federal monetary resources for the next decade, and no one anywhere can pretend that neither race nor class have anything to do with it.

As of Monday, just more than 63 percent of U.S. households have responded to the census. That is more than three percent below the 2010 rate, and as it stands, the lowest in the nation’s history. Sixty million households remain uncounted, according to The New York Times report last week, up from 47 million in 2010. Surely the coronavirus has been a factor. There are fewer people to knock on doors, and fewer people willing to answer them. The shortened deadline only threatens to worsen the problem, which typically disproportionately affects those hardest to find: the homeless, poor people, and those in black, Hispanic and Latina, and indigenous communities.

“The Trump administration has had a target on the census for the past several years, and an agenda to basically try to erase communities of color, immigrant communities from counting politically because they view it as a threat to the Republican Party,” says Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Obama.

*snip*

[dchill]

1. Ya think?

[2naSalit]

2. Not a gift as much as a campaign promise.