The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

Pat Joseph underscored that the Census is the civil rights fight of our lifetime. We don’t have freedom of privacy. Journalists are potentially being restricted in acting in the American Way that we know—to be informers. When he sees people being exiled or imprisoned for revealing heinous things the government has done, and the climb towards totalitarianism with our current president, he sees the Census as a way of fighting these things. While that may sound grandiose, it really is. If you’re not counted, you don’t really exist in the eyes of the government. It’s a relatively easy way to demonstrate that you are here and that you matter.

Pat Joseph emphasized that getting community groups involved was key to marketing the Census in a way that never could have happened at the city level. They represented a lot of those historically underrepresented community groups and reached out to them in a more personal way. The winning forum was multiple languages, leveraging grants team, and casting—actively

looking for representatives from the communities that really needed to be counted. And (surprise!) they found them. The Census team leveraged all the connections they’d made in communities, and the diversity in their office, which led to their communications team casting people who represented a wide range of New Yorkers for a refreshing change

Olivia noted that she wouldn’t necessarily associate Pat Joseph—as a young man of color—with the Census, bc the Census conjures images of an old white man with a pencil for her. She asked him how he and his team worked to “rebrand” the Census.

Pat noted that part of it is that the Census office is the most diverse he’s ever worked in, which led to the generation of lots of fresh ideas, since people had so many lived experiences and diverse understandings of the world. They also had tons of opportunities for cross-pollination with different parts of the organization to produce the most impactful products. He’s also talked about the offices huge emphasis on language, given how many languages are spoken in nY. They produced things in 13-20 languages and leveraged grants to 150 orgs to further communicate with their communities.

Pat Joseph approaches things from a humanist standpoint, noting that he doesn’t think he’s any different than someone who emigrated here, like his parents did, particularly given that most people in the U.S. originally came from somewhere else if you go back far enough. He underscores that the benefit of counting immigrants—and fully including them in all ways—is to society at large. The higher the count of people in one’s state, the more dollars the state receives. So pragmatically, why would you want to exclude anyone? But politically, he recognizes that there is intentional exclusion of certain groups for political reasons, both from the Census and from voting. Political representation gets allocated alongside money, so the issue is inherently political and, unfortunately, politicized.

Pat Joseph notes that he didn’t have a lot at stake in the 2016 election btw Trump and Clinton, because he felt that both candidates were going to do things that he would find absolutely appalling when they came to power. Neither one of them was interested in ending the industrial war complex, or peace in the Middle East, or legalizing marijuana, or making college free, or providing universal healthcare to all Americans, or ending police brutality. These issues were not going to be touched by either candidate so as a voter, he felt he’d only be voting for the lesser of two evils. Conversely, he feels the Census gives people much more direct power in the sense that the numbers do the talking. If one’s community shows up, the data’s there, it’s public, and can’t be interfered with, the government can’t deny funds without being taken to task by advocates.

Pat Joseph describes how he and his team treated getting people to fill out the Census like a multi-faceted social justice campaign. One of his colleagues referred to the Census as “the great civil rights battle of our time.” Because when you think about the communities that aren’t counted, it’s pretty predictably black and brown. Who are the people who don’t fill out the Census? It’s immigrants, it’s people who don’t have trust in the government, it’s people who think their communities will suffer regardless of whether or not they’re counted.

Pat Joseph notes that when people think of the census, they think about being counted—of someone knocking on the door and asking how many people are in your home. Some people, erroneously, think of it as being about citizenship, which it’s not—ALL people are meant to be counted. But it also serves a much larger purpose. The Census determines our representation in Congress, through the apportionment clause of The Constitution. It also represents the federal funding that goes to states. States are actually in competition during the Census. The more people you get counted, the more money you get—percentage wise. You want to ensure that you get money equivalent to the people you need to support through services. The Census also provides vitally important data about the ethnic backgrounds of people, the languages they speak, where they are concentrated, etc. This is a critical piece of determining the needs of different communities and channeling resources accordingly.

Much though Pat loved his work for the Manhattan Borough President, he saw there was quite a lot of harm being done around him. His big learn was there was that it isn’t just a classroom or school based issue causing inequities; there are quite a lot of problematic behaviors and policy making in the political arena causing inequity in schools. He didn’t feel elected officials were necessarily doing what he thought should be done to address those evils. So he decided to head back to pursue his PhD, but took a pit stop doing something else connected to the funding side of education: working on the 2020 Census through the Mayor’s Office

Pat Joseph comes at things from an educational perspective. He taught HS special ed for 4 years and experienced educational inequity first hand, teaching in predominantly white schools on the Upper West Side and in schools serving predominantly students of color in the South Bronx —resource disparities, treatment of students, presence of police. He saw education policy as a route to correct some of the evils he experienced as a teacher (which he hadn’t been aware of as a student growing up in the Bronx). Things panned out for him when he got a job working for the Manhattan Borough President coming out of grad school as a senior advisor of education policy issues.