Race and the Power of Popular Census Reading in the Nineteenth Century

This essay examines the challenge that census data represented to the Black press as both critical information and intrusive surveillance of minoritized people. Studying the United States Census in the nineteenth century as a history of popular reading reveals that census reading—either in the form of reading the census directly or reading about the census in the periodical press—provided its own form of nationalism, but it could be one based on a feeling of personal connection to its crowds or on fantasies of surveillance and voyeurism of its outliers. This split provided very different experiences of census data for white and Black readers. The essay tracks this split in three approaches: the widely circulated and controversial publication of the 1850 Census, newspapers written by predominantly white journalists aimed at predominantly white audiences, and the Black press. All offer reading strategies for the census focused on how readers imaginatively place themselves within its numbers. However, while official census publications and majority-white newspapers emphasize the census as an opportunity for “data tourism,” or an imaginative experience of seeing marginalized lives through the eyes of government workers, Black periodical writings created their own form of census reading focused on registering citizenship, nongovernmental authority, and collective survival

Census · Citizenship · Geography · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Population · Reading (process · Sociology · White (mutation · Census and Population Estimation · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law