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The census is here,
and you might think, "Who gives a shit?"
The revolution is here, too.
But as I learned in my last installment,
the census has a lot to do with how your community is treated.
Participating in the census
allows your community its fair share
of over $800 billion in support for education,
health, school lunches, highways.
If you don't respond,
your community's gonna get cheated.
SLOAN: But something doesn't add up.
If an accurate count is as important
as Bob says it is, you'd think the states
would want to make sure they get their count right.
But half the states don't spend any money on the census.
Zero dollars.
That's the same amount of money I've spent on Wi-Fi
since I moved next to a Starbucks.
To find out why,
I called someone doing census outreach in Georgia.
(chiming)
-Jeanine! -Dulcé!
I need your help, friend.
So, some states don't want to be counted accurately?
Explain to me what's going on here.
So, unfortunately, not all states
have invested in the census.
You have some states, like California,
that have invested over $180 million,
which is about four dollars per person.
But then, on the other hand, you have the state of Texas,
which is investing zero dollars
in making sure they get a complete count.
So, you're saying that there are places
that are not trying to get the census right? Why?
When the census is done, those numbers are used
in a process called "redistricting,"
which is a fancy word for redrawing voting districts
all the way down to the school board level.
If you're able to keep a certain type of person
out of the census,
then you also keep them out of the redistricting process,
which redraws the map and distributes political power.
Now, when you say "certain people"...
do you mean us?
You know who I'm talking about.
-(sighs) -Anytime a map
is unfairly drawn, the only way we have to fight it
is on the basis of racial gerrymandering.
And if you don't count all the races,
if you don't have the complete demographic picture,
then we don't have anything to stand on
to fight unfair maps.
SLOAN: A suppressed census
leads to many of the problems we are seeing today--
like disparities in health care,
education and representation.
Okay, this all sounds like it makes sense,
but it also sounds like a conspiracy theory
for a very good movie.
Am I being paranoid? I'm not being paranoid, right?
You're not being paranoid, Dulcé.
And we have evidence to back it up.
If you remember, the Trump administration
tried to add a citizenship question to the census
that the Supreme Court shut down.
They were working with the Guru of Gerrymandering,
Thomas Hofeller.
When he died, his daughter found his hard drive,
and on those hard drives, there was a study out of Texas,
where he found that if you added a citizenship question
to the census, it would benefit the Republican Party
and white voters.
No conspiracy. Data.
Straight facts.
You got to work so hard to be so shady.
Th-There's one more thing that...
-Man! -If you don't complete the census,
and you don't answer the door,
the Census Bureau uses a process called "imputation."
If you are a black woman
living in a place that is majority white
and you don't respond to the census,
then they say, "Hey, this person might be a white guy."
You're telling me, if I don't turn in the census paperwork
and don't fill it out online
and then don't answer the door when they come to my house,
because you know that I'm not answering a door,
I could be a white man in the eyes of the U.S. government?
McLEAN: Could be.
SLOAN: Uh-uh, uh-uh.
The only time I want to be assumed to be white
is when the cops show up.
In the same way when we talk about voter suppression,
the same thing is true for census oppression.
So, wait. So I have to worry about police oppression,
voter suppression,
and census suppression, too?
There's too many "essions."
That's what they want, Dulcé.
They want you to be overwhelmed
so that you just throw your hands in the air
and say "forget it."
But we can't do that.
We have to fight back.
To fight voter suppression, we got to fight census suppression,
and that's why my sister Stacey Abrams
started two organizations that do just that.
So when you say "sister," you mean, like, sister
or, like, sister sister?
We got the same mom and daddy.
-Your sister's Stacey Abrams? -Yeah.
Oh, then you know first-hand how important it is
to count people in the state of Georgia.
It was shady how they did her.
They're doing all of this to discourage us,
but what we have to do is show them that we see them.
We see that you are leaving certain communities out
and stripping away their political power,
and we can't let them win.
Because they wouldn't be doing all of this stuff
if it wasn't important for us to take it.
Yup.
SLOAN: So please, y'all,
take the census,
just so that all those shady manipulators know:
We (bleep) see you.