This episode is an interview with Rev. Craig B. Mousin founder and former Executive Director of the Midwest Immigrant Rights Center and an Adjunct Faculty member at DePaul University’s College of Law and The Grace School of Applied Diplomacy. He discusses how the Census, by counting all those residing in the United States every ten years, if done well, helps the nation repair past breaches to our body politic. In the wake of a pandemic, civic unrest and the long road to healing our nation from the consequences of slavery and racism, the Census offers an opportunity for all of “We the People” to be counted and leading to a fairer representation. The government will stop counting residents in this Census on September 30, 2020, thus necessitating that we all use our resources to ensure a fair count. You can go to www.census.gov for information on how to encourage greater participation. If you would like to participate in a phone bank sponsored by the Urban League of Chicago on Wednesday, September 9, 2020 to encourage participation in the City of Chicago, you can volunteer by emailing kbutler@chiul.org (Kareem Butler, Director of Learning and Evaluation, Chicago Urban League). The quotation from Professor Akhill Reed Amar can be found in American’s Constitution, A Biography,” (Random House, N.Y., 2005), 87. For a description of rotten districts / rotten boroughs see P.84.
Please share this podcast and links with members of your community or faith organizations, family members and friends. Encourage them to assist all members of their communities to file their Census form to generate a fair count of all. Thank you for your consideration of this request.
“”The census is most definitely important. Our whole representative democracy is based on it,” says Gordon De Jong, professor of sociology and demography and senior scientist in Penn State’s Population Research Institute. “The census ensures that each community gets the right number of representatives in government.” Because representation is based on population, an up-to-date tally is essential.” From “Probing Question: Why is the census important?” by Solmaz Barazesh at
https://news.psu.edu/story/141197/2009/07/27/research/probing-question-why-census-important#:~:text=U.S.%20Census%20Bureau.%20Every%20ten%20years%2C%20the%20U.S.,they%20mandated%20it%20as%20part%20of%20the%20Constitution.