Circumventing State Distrust: Frontline Professionals and 2020 US Census Counting

Background/Purpose: US Decennial Census counts help determine the distribution of federal funding for a wide range of government programs and the distribution of political power through congressional apportionment and redistricting. In the lead up to the 2020 Census, the Trump administration’s use of the census to target immigrants deepened mistrust and left many worried about the possibility of a severe undercount. Accordingly, Chicago was home to a large mobilization outside of the Census Bureau that brought together social workers, organizers, elected officials, and bureaucrats in an attempt to reach groups they expected were most vulnerable to undercounting. The coalition at the center of this mobilization and parallel state, county, and city government efforts sought to recruit trusted voices by funding service providers and neighborhood organizations to get out the count. This paper takes a closer ethnographic look at these diverse frontline professionals, broadly termed “enumerators,” who were not hired by the Census Bureau and yet were integral to census counting. How were these “enumerators” positioned as intermediary figures between the distrusted state and a wary public?

Methods: This paper draws on a larger ethnographic study centered on frontline professionals in Chicago, external to the Census Bureau, trying to prevent an undercount in 2020. Study methods included participant observation and semi-structured interviews from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the lead up to and throughout 2020 census counting (July 2019 to December 2020). Participant observation was anchored in the coalition at the center of the Illinois mobilization—the multi-professional space where stakeholders came together around census counting. Common sites for participant observation included meetings, trainings, webinars, and outreach events. Ethnographic data, including fieldnotes and transcripts of meetings and interviews, were analyzed with an inductive approach by the author.

Results: This paper argues that “enumerators” were simultaneously positioned as state and non-state actors, tasked with building and leveraging trust on behalf of census counting while responding to the Trump administration’s strategic attempts to mobilize mistrust. Working to reach groups often undercounted by the census, “enumerators” were ambiguously compelled by the relevance of the census for the distribution of political power and federal resources and wary of its promises. The paper traces “enumerators’” uncertainty about this double-edged quality of their work that was on one hand about moving towards a more complete, and equitable, count and on the other about reinforcing an idea of democratic governance that may not exist.

Conclusions/Implications: This study shows how, in a moment of crisis, frontline professionals confronted the contradictions of the US state—its promised potential and its perennial inequity—in day-to-day work. Its ethnographic insights contribute to longstanding debate in social work about the ethical implications of working in the intermediary space between state power and public. In so doing, it expands literature on street level bureaucrats into emergent sites of macro practice where an array of allied professionals are working to both do and contest the work of the state.