Vernellia R. Randall, A Colorblind Census in a Racist Society: We Cannot Eliminate Racial Disparities by Refusing to Count Them, Racism.org (September 14, 2026).

The Census Bureau is accepting public comments through October 13, 2026, on a proposal that would exclude millions of immigrant residents from the population used for congressional apportionment and remove race and ethnicity questions from the decennial census questionnaire. This proposal would weaken political representation, resource allocation, civil-rights enforcement, public-health research, redistricting, and our ability to document racial inequality. Public opposition must become part of the administrative record before the government portrays the deliberate suppression of essential racial data as a neutral administrative change.   Submit a public comment through Regulations.gov

The Trump administration has proposed removing the portions of the 2030 United States Census questionnaire that collect information about race and ethnicity. The proposal has not become final policy, but its implications are enormous. Race-related questions—although the categories have changed considerably and often reflected the racism of their time—have appeared in every decennial census since 1790.

This is not a technical dispute over a government questionnaire. It is a struggle over whether the government will continue collecting the population data needed to expose racial inequality—or deliberately make that inequality harder to prove.

To eliminate a racial disparity, we must first establish that it exists. We need to know who is affected, where the disparity occurs, how severe it is, and whether it is improving or worsening. We also need reliable information to determine whether the actions taken to correct the disparity are working.

If the government removes race and ethnicity from the census, racism will not disappear. The government will merely make its consequences harder to prove and easier to deny.