Tom McLaughlin

Tom McLaughlin lives in Lovell, Maine. 

Does racial discrimination still exist in the 2017 United States? If so, how does it show? One manifestation, perhaps the biggest, is in the U.S. government. As it prepares to fulfill its constitutional responsibility under Article I, Section 2 to count how many people live here, let’s ponder what the Census has become.

Its original purpose was to figure out how many seats in the U.S. House of Representatives each state gets as our population grows and shifts, but America’s obsession with race has expanded the function of this basic count. Right now, there’s a political struggle to add even more racial categories to the 2020 census. Why? Well, the Census Bureau itself touts that the data it collects determines how and where $400 billion of federal money is spent, much of it according to race.

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