Census Form Quotes

7. Some Theories that Arose at the Time 1. The world is merely a dream dreamt by god who is waking after a long sleep. When he is properly awake the world will disappear completely. When the world disappears we will disappear with it and be happy. 2. The world has become sensitive to light. In the same way that prolonged use of, say, penicillin can suddenly result in a dangerous allergy, prolonged exposure of the world to the sun has made it sensitive to light. The advocates of this theory could be seen bustling through the city crowds in their long, hooded black robes. 3. The fact that the world is disappearing has been caused by the sloppy work of the Cartographers and the census takers. Those who filled out their census forms incorrectly would lose those items they had neglected to describe. People overlooked in the census by impatient officials would also disappear. A strong pressure group demanded that a new census be taken quickly before matters got worse. - From the story "Do You Love Me?

The pieces of who I am, beginning, though, not ending, with my name have complicated the way that I see the simplistic act of checking “White” on census forms or questionnaires. Without ignoring the privileged position that comes with being White in our current society, Whiteness never fully embraced me and for that reason, as well as the historical context, the act of checking that box is uncomfortable and further, marginalizing.

The United States now has too few farmers to merit counting on the national census form. As a culture, we don’t cook at home. We don’t have a larder. We’re tuned in, plugged in, addicted to electronic gadgetry to the exclusion of a whippoorwill’s midsummer song or a herd of cows lying down contentedly on the leeward side of a slope, indicating a thunderstorm in the offing. Most modern Americans can’t conceive of a time without supermarkets, without refrigeration, stainless steel, plastic, bar codes, potato chips.

Feeblemindedness,” in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify—the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a “mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months”—but imbecile and moron were more porous categories. On paper, the terms referred to less severe forms of cognitive disability, but in practice, the words were revolving semantic doors that swung inward all too easily to admit a diverse group of men and women, some with no mental illness at all—prostitutes, orphans, depressives, vagrants, petty criminals, schizophrenics, dyslexics, feminists, rebellious adolescents—anyone, in short, whose behavior, desires, choices, or appearance fell outside the accepted norm. Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons or idiots.

New statistical and racial identities forged out of raw census data showed that African Americans, as 12 percent of the population, made up 30 percent of the nation’s prison population. Although specially designed race-conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of everyday racial surveillance had been institutionalized by the 1890s as a way to suppress black freedom, white social scientists presented the new crime data as objective, color-blind, and incontrovertible.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

The shopkeeper is very efficient, has an efficient home delivery system and knows the tastes and price considerations of his customers. But he is labelled ‘unorganized’ by our experts and national income data and his contribution thereby diminished. The footfalls in his shop cannot be measured using Western models [since there is no place to keep anybody’s foot inside his shop!] and so he is derided and abused. It is like clubbing housewives along with prostitutes in our Census data to show them that they are involved in ‘unproductive’ activities. These are economic constructs imposed by the west on the rest and it is a form of terminological terrorism which is mouthed ad-nauseam by our economists and policy planners without understanding their implications.

To celebrate the Russian/Ukrainian partnership, in 1954 the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty was marked throughout the Soviet Union in an unusually grandiose manner. In addition to numerous festivities, myriad publications, and countless speeches, the Central Committee of the all-union party even issued thirteen "thesis", which argued the irreversibility of the "everlasting union" of the Ukrainians and the Russians: "The experience of history has shown that the way of fraternal union and alliance chosen by the Russians and Ukrainians was the only true way. The union of two great Slavic peoples multiplied their strength in the common struggle against all external foes, against serf owners and the bourgeoisie, again tsarism and capitalist slavery. The unshakeable friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples has grown and strengthened in this struggle." To emphasize the point that the union with Moscow brought the Ukrainians great benefits, the Pereiaslav anniversary was crowned by the Russian republic's ceding of Crimea to Ukraine "as a token of friendship of the Russian people." But the "gift" of the Crimea was far less altruistic than it seemed. First, because the peninsula was the historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars whom Stalin had expelled during the Second World War, the Russians did not have the moral right to give it away nor did the Ukrainians have the right to accept it. Second, because of its proximity and economic dependence on Ukraine, the Crimea's links with Ukraine were naturally greater than with Russia. Finally, the annexation of the Crimea saddled Ukraine with economic and political problems. The deportation of the Tatars in 1944 had created economic chaos in the region and it was Kiev's budget that had to make up loses. More important was the fact that, according to the 1959 census, about 860,000 Russians and only 260,000 Ukrainians lived in the Crimea. Although Kiev attempted to bring more Ukrainians into the region after 1954, the Russians, many of whom were especially adamant in rejecting any form of Ukrainization, remained the overwhelming majority. As a result, the Crimean "gift" increased considerably the number of Russians in the Ukrainian republic. In this regard, it certainly was an appropriate way of marking the Pereiaslav Treaty.

a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. “The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,” Rometty adds, “there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are not programmed, they learn.”27 But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a breast cancer specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of the team that worked with Watson. “Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and medicine will evolve with it,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28 This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug Engelbart called “bootstrapping” and “coevolution.”29 It raises an interesting prospect: perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let us assume, for example, that a machine someday exhibits all of the mental capabilities of a human: giving the outward appearance of recognizing patterns, perceiving emotions, appreciating beauty, creating art, having desires, forming moral values, and pursuing goals. Such a machine might be able to pass a Turing Test. It might even pass what we could call the Ada Test, which is that it could appear to “originate” its own thoughts that go beyond what we humans program it to do. There would, however, be still another hurdle before we could say that artificial intelligence has triumphed over augmented intelligence. We can call it the Licklider Test. It would go beyond asking whether a machine could replicate all the components of human intelligence to ask whether the machine accomplishes these tasks better when whirring away completely on its own or when working in conjunction with humans. In other words, is it possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful than an artificial intelligence machine working alone?

Ukraine’s Russians are fairly recent arrivals. They came in waves that mirrored the empire’s belated industrial revolution: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first industrial boom; in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Five-Year Plans; and again after the war. By 1989, according to the last Soviet census, they made up 11 million of Ukraine’s 52 million population. In the Donbass coal basin, equidistant from Kiev and Moscow, they form a majority.

Are you going to count me on the census form?” “Sure. Ghost squatter, quantity of one. Sex male, race Caucasian, age dead. That’ll really help with the demographics.

I had to study the questions and really think about how to answer them. Such are the challenges of being multiethnic or multiracial and filling out the census form—it really gives us pause and makes us think about who we want to define ourselves as.

Douglass's story reminds us that names are things we use, as well as things that others use to grasp and hold on to a sense of us. Names don't spring forth fully formed from the platonic ideal of our identities. Names are social technologies, built and negotiated through extensive social systems.

Reclaiming my identity has been a painful birthing process. Something beautiful has been born, but not without blood and tears. The Latino identity is complex...even the very words we use to describe our community cause controversy. How we are counted in official forms like the census have created unintended consequences, or maybe it's by design that we are treated as America's bastard child, as perpetual foreigners no matter how many generations ago we became American.

We Palestinians identify closely with blacks and their struggle. Like they once did, we are now fighting for recognition in the face of a structure built to defeat us and silence our narrative. I actually almost checked "African-American" on the census form last year. We Arabs are, indeed, very similar to black people. We get profiled. We get blamed for stuff we don't do. And white people cross the street when they see us coming. Also, like black people, we have Sunday dinners and large families. Our families are so large that an Arab is sometimes older than his uncle. You know you're an Arab if you've ever taken your uncle to Chuck E. Cheese. Finally, our cuisines share a lot in common. Go to an Arab barbecue and you'll see it...There are watermelons everywhere!

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In this sense, it is not much different from early American settlement activity, which came to see itself existing only in opposition to the native population, first undertaking policies to wipe them all out, then creating a society in which they were essentially non-persons, or even worse, a "nuisance." In fact, on the 2010 Census form, the term "Native American" is not even used. It instead uses "American Indian," a term that is inaccurate, and most importantly, does not connote that these people in fact had a preexisting tie to the land we all live on today. This kind of talk might disturb and confuse most Americans, and, frankly, ruin the myths we have been taught. In fact, I would love to go to the next major Republican gathering and ask all the Native Americans to identify themselves. I think Sarah Palin might raise her hand.

We usually define members of religions by using a kind of checklist. For instance, one could say that if someone believes in the Trinity and incarnation, she is a member of the religion Christianity, but if she doesn’t, she isn’t a proper member of that religion. One could say, conversely, that if someone does not believe in the Trinity and incarnation, then he is a member of the religion Judaism, but if he does believe in those things, he isn’t. One could also say that if someone keeps the Sabbath on Saturday, eats only kosher food, and circumcises her sons, she is a member of the Jewish religion, but if she doesn’t, she is not a member of the Jewish religion. Or, conversely again, if some group believes that everyone should keep the Sabbath, eat only kosher food, and circumcise sons, they are not Christians, but if they believe that these practices have been superseded, then they are Christians. This is, as I have said, our usual way of looking at such matters. However, this manner of categorizing people’s religions runs into difficulties. First, someone has to be making the checklists. Who decides what specific beliefs disqualify a person from being a Jew? Throughout history these decisions have been made by certain groups of people or individuals and are then imposed on other people (who may, however, refuse—unless the deciders have an army). It’s a little bit like those “race” checklists on the census forms. Some of us simply refuse to check a box that defines us as Caucasian or Hispanic or African American because we don’t identify that way, and only laws, and courts, or an army could force us to if they chose to. Of course, it will be asserted that the decisions about Jews and Christians (not Americans) were made by God and revealed in this Scripture or that, by this prophet or that, but this is a matter of faith, not of scholarship. Neither faith nor theology should play a role in the attempt to describe what was, as opposed to what ought to have been (according to this religious authority or another).

We’ve said that the universe is the sum total of all matter and energy, but what exactly is this? Until a few decades ago, astronomers assumed that the matter of the universe was primarily found in stars and galaxies, while the energy of the universe took the form of light. It now seems that this “visible” matter and energy are just the tip of the iceberg in a universe that remains far more mysterious. Just as planets orbit the Sun, stars orbit the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The more massive the galaxy, the stronger its gravity and the faster stars should be orbiting. By carefully studying stellar orbits, astronomers have been able to put together a map of the distribution of matter in the Milky Way. The surprising result is that while most of the matter that we can see consists of stars and gas clouds in the galaxy’s relatively flat disk, most of the mass lies unseen in a much larger, spherical halo that surrounds the disk (Figure 3.5). We don’t know the nature of this unseen mass in the halo, so we call it dark matter to indicate that we have not detected any light coming from it, even though we have detected its gravitational effects. Studies of other galaxies suggest that they also are made mostly of dark matter. In fact, most of the mass in the universe seems to be made of this mysterious dark matter, which means that its gravity must have played a key role in assembling galaxies. Evidence of the existence of dark matter has been building for several decades. More recently, scientists have gathered evidence of an even greater mystery: The universe seems to contain a mysterious form of energy—nicknamed dark energy by analogy to dark matter—that is pushing galaxies apart even while their gravity tries to draw them together. As is the case with dark matter, scientists have good reason to think that dark energy exists but lack any real understanding of its nature. In recent years, scientists have been able to conduct a sort of census of the matter and energy in the universe. The results show that dark energy and dark matter are by far the main ingredients of the universe. The ordinary matter—atoms and molecules—that makes up stars and planets and life apparently represents no more than a few percent of all the matter and energy in the universe.

The far-ranging latitude granted by the Gene Protection Act made it legal for the GPA to use people’s voter registration information, phone records, CCTV surveillance tracking, publications, travel history, census forms, Social Security documents, tax returns, and every keystroke they made, all in the scope of what had been coined Predictive Criminality Modeling.

The far-ranging latitude granted by the Gene Protection Act made it legal for the GPA to use people’s voter registration information, phone records, CCTV surveillance tracking, publications, travel history, census forms, Social Security documents, tax returns, and every keystroke they made, all in the scope of what had been coined Predictive Criminality Modeling. And all without a warrant or just cause.

Once, and not long ago, even the greatest of European monarchies could not carry out a census or create a unified internal market. Now, the state has a virtual monopoly of the main instruments of physical control. Even a hundred years ago, the police and armed forces of government unshaken by war or uncorrupted by sedition gave them a security; technology has only increased their near-certainty. New repressive techniques and weapons, though, are now only a small part of the story. State intervention in the economy through its power as consumer, investor or planner, and the improvement of mass communications in a form that leaves access to them highly centralized, all matter immensely. Hitler and Roosevelt made great use of radio (though for very different ends); and attempts to regulate economic life are as old as government itself.

Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?" by Yggdrasil The sine-qua-non of inner party power is a multi-cultural elite alienated from its tribal and racial kinsmen. It is the native elites - the indigenous leaders who might resist the inner party's drive for power that are always the target. ... For the reform version of communism developed by the Frankfurt School that now dominates the ‘liberal democracies" and the NWO, the masses of the nations are important as consumers ... What remains relevant to the inner party are the inner party's potential competitors, the native national elites with community ties to their brethren. In the Soviet Union, the inner party elites (using Lenin and Stalin as their cover) resorted to murder and forced resettlement to remove the native national elites, a fast, direct and brutal form of decapitation. In the "liberal democracies" the inner party uses a slower and less visibly brutal method of decapitation. Thus, in the liberal democracies of today we have "affirmative action" - a set of laws that places tremendous pressure on private businesses to displace native elites at the top with minorities who will be less plausible targets of discrimination lawsuits. These laws exist everywhere in the European world, and with the exception of the U.S. were enacted long before any significant minority constituencies (other than the inner party itself) existed to lobby for their passage. The entire program of displacement and decapitation within the liberal democracies was carefully drawn up and explained in "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno, et. al.(1947). It is a prescription for identifying any person who displays any bond of obligation to his own kind and the will to resist those who threaten the interests of his kind. Such "authoritarian personalities" are to be denied university admission and consigned to low status occupations, which is precisely what the laws of affirmative action and social rules of political correctness accomplish. Indeed, as I read the tables from the 1939 Soviet census published in Sanning's work [The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning] I recalled my own research showing that the inner party, representing 2.4% of the U.S. population comprises 28% of the student body at Harvard, while the descendants of European Christendom comprising 70% of the population supply only 18% of the students. The American Majority has been effectively displaced at Harvard. Relative to their share of the Population, they have 2.4 times fewer students than do the inner party's Afro-American coalition partners. ... The United States Department of Labor has maintained a tracking study of 12,000 young people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 known as the National Longitudinal study of Youth ("NLSY"). The CD Roms with all the data can be purchased from Ohio State University. These data show that at each given level of IQ (all participants were tested) the income and educational attainment of the descendants of European Christendom is much lower than for Blacks, Hispanics and Inner party members of the same IQ. In what will surely be a surprise to most middle and upper middle-income Euro-Americans, the effects are most pronounced at the highest IQ levels. In other words, it is the majority elite that suffers the widest disparity in income and education when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and Inner Party members within the same IQ range. When the effects are broken down by sex, we find that among males the disparity is most pronounced in the highest IQ ranges and disappears entirely by the time you descend to the 50% mark. The widest disparity exists among the top 2% of the population (those with IQs above 130).

Census data formed the basis of the lists used during all future roundups for deportation.

When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call ‘census voting,’ where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes, and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel.

Race is an evolving social idea that was created to legitimize racial inequality and protect white advantage. The term “white” first appeared in colonial law in the late 1600s. By 1790, people were asked to claim their race on the census, and by 1825, the perceived degrees of blood determined who would be classified as Indian. From the late 1800s through the early twentieth century, as waves of immigrants entered the United States, the concept of a white race was solidified.8 When slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865, whiteness remained profoundly important as legalized racist exclusion and violence against African Americans continued in new forms. To have citizenship—and the rights citizenship imbued—you had to be legally classified as white. People with nonwhite racial classifications began to petition the courts to be reclassified. Now the courts were in the position to decide who was white and who was not. For example, Armenians won their case to be reclassified as white with the help of a scientific witness who claimed they were scientifically “Caucasian.” In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Japanese could not be legally white, because they were scientifically classified as “Mongoloid.” A year later, the court stated that Asian Indians were not legally white, even though they were also scientifically classified as “Caucasian.” To justify these contradictory rulings, the court stated that being white was based on the common understanding of the white man. In other words, people already seen as white got to decide who was white.