She sat with California Black Media writer Charlene Muhammad to talk more about the state’s $187.3 million investment to get an accurate count of all Californians. Katague also shared details about what her office has been doing so far to achieve it, and she give some insights on why it has been so hard for census workers to get the African-American count right in the past. Here's an excerpt from the interview.
CALIFORNIA BLACK MEDIA (CBM): What has your office done to reach out to Blacks in California – particularly to the the Black population here in Los Angeles?
DITAS KATAGUE (DK): As you know, statewide, the money and the investment that both the governor and the legislature have made across the state have been unprecedented. That’s because California is the hardest-to-count state in the country. In fact, the City of L.A. is the hardest-to-count city and Los Angeles County is the hardest-to-count county in the hardest-to-count state.
So, even though our efforts are unprecedented, these are the reasons that we need to do that level of outreach.
The U.S. Census is actually a federal operation, and so here at the state level, we don’t control any of the actual counting. We don’t design the form, but what we can control is reaching out, educating our Californians to make sure that they know how important it is to respond.
And to that end, we’ve divided the state. We’ve used data to really inform our partners on the ground about where they should be reaching out and to whom. I’m up in Sacramento. Nobody wants to listen to me about why they should be filling out the form. It’s really about getting the word out through trusted community partners on the ground, and really connecting with folks to say why is it so important and what an accurate count means for them on the ground.
CBM: L.A. - the hardest to count in the country! I didn’t know that. What makes L.A. and the state the hardest-to-count places?
DK: Well, for Los Angeles County, one of the things is that it’s so very diverse. In L.A. Unified School District, they speak over 200 languages. That is what makes our state so beautiful and so diverse, but it also makes it very hard to count.
Now, when we talk about hard to count from the state level, we looked at the state and we took these 14 variables and we came up with a hard-to-count index based on them.
(Those variables are: Percent of households without broadband subscriptions; percent of households that are non-family; percent of households that are renter occupied; percent of housing units that are vacant; percent of households that are crowded with more than 1.5 persons per room; percent of population that is foreign-born; percent of adults (25 or older) who are not high school graduates; percent of population with income below 150 percent of the poverty level; percent of households receiving public assistance; percent of persons (ages 16 or older) unemployed; percent of limited-English households; percent of persons who moved from outside a county in the past year; percent of population under 5; and percent of total housing units with three or more units in a multi-unit structure.)
What does that mean? Well, that is really because the enumeration is address-based, so it’s where you are. In order to be invited, you have to have an address, right? Think about the difficulty of counting people that are living in multi-unit apartments, or if they’re living with non-family members. So, say there is an apartment, and there are four of us living there, and we’re not related. Sometimes, one person will get the mail and the invitation to respond, and they’ll respond for themselves but forget the other three roommates. So, it sort of compounds itself in terms of the difficulty to be counted. And, of course, we have a lot of people who rent. We have a lot of people here in Los Angeles that have limited English, or that are new to the country. We have a lot of folks who are scared, or just kind of don’t care, and so it’s not just one thing that makes folks hard to count. It’s a number of things if you kind of layer them on top of each other.
CBM: Why is the Census important for the Black community?
DK: It’s important for all our communities, of course, but particularly for the Black community. I mean they have to know we exist for us to resist, right? And if they don’t know we’re here, then we’ll be ignored. I say that both for the Black community and also for the Native American community. My Native American folks up in Northern California, the way they look at it is to save their water, and that’s what really resonates with them, because if they don’t know you’re there, they’ll take the water. That’s how they feel, so you have to think about that within your community. If people don’t understand how strong and how powerful our communities are, they don’t understand what kind of voice we could have and will have. So, it’s really about being seen. It’s about standing up. It’s about no longer being invisible for all of our communities ".
https://www.sacculturalhub.com/item/13950-california-census-chief-don-t-be-invisible-counting-everyone-comes-down-to-money-and-power?fbclid=IwAR393gJPpjJHjcqXBzOn6LefDY6jhqv9mqFlY4g4ajJBY_exw87SfylQczI
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