Using the 2030 census to hide the facts

This is what I wrote about the proposal to change the 2030 census to limit the information it gathers ways that will harm the pursuit of justice. Because even if you know it's broken, you can't fix it if you can't RTFM.

The links were not included in the submission; they are for use of people reading here.

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I write in opposition to “Decennial Census of the Population of Americans; Proposed Residence Criteria and Proposed Regulations for Demographic Questions” (USBC-2026-0628).

Contrary to the claims, these proposed changes are not an attempt to “prioritize the Census Bureau’s Constitutional mandate” but rather one intended to advance ideologically-driven racism and xenophobia by denying federal and state agencies and the people as a whole the demographic information needed to address and oppose them.

To be more specific: The regulations propose to change the long-standard understanding of “usual residence” as the place one normally lives to one based on often-inaccurate tax data (which can reflect PO boxes, accountants’ addresses, or other non-residential addresses), something against which the Treasury Department unsuccessfully pushed back.

Moreover, the regulations would hold that “allegiance” to the US should form a basis of the definition of “usual residence” - a definition that is deliberately intended to exclude all but citizens and green card holders from the count despite the Constitution’s requirement to count “the whole number of persons” with no limitations to “citizens.”

The net effect of this change, the net intended effect, is exclude all aliens, whether documented or otherwise, legal or otherwise, from the count for the unallowable purpose of distorting the apportionment of representation in Congress - that is, it proposes to change the rules for the purpose of partisan, ideological gain based on xenophobia.

The proposals also assert the count “should be colorblind and not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics.” In other words, the bureau is proposing to prohibit questions about race, ethnicity, and other characteristics such as sexual orientation on the short-form census form and other questionnaires used to enumerate the population. Instead of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” this is not even “we don’t ask because we don’t want to know,” it’s “we don’t ask because we actively want not to know, we want to remain ignorant.”

Together these changes are nothing short of epistemicide: the murder of knowledge.

Because - and I’m quoting another person here - “You cannot enforce civil rights protections for communities you have erased from the data. You cannot address health disparities you have made statistically invisible. You cannot redistribute resources to people the government has decided do not need to be counted.”

And ultimately, that is the point of all this: making racial, social, political, and economic justice impossible by making injustice invisible, as invisible as the Bureau tried to make these very proposals by ordering all staff to refrain from any public events related to the 2030 census until after the end of the public comment period.

These proposed regulatory changes should be opposed and struck down as contrary to long-standing practice, the clear language of the Constitution, and our founding principles, as expressed in the Preamble to the Constitution, to “establish Justice” and “promote the general Welfare.”