One of the toughest things about running a blog is finding new content to post. Every now and then things just fall into my lap. Through a friend I just got wind of the “I am Caribbean 2010″ campaign.

CaribbeanFever.Com and FeverEyes.Com are proud US Census 2010 partners. We strongly encourage Caribbean persons across the USA to complete the Census 2010 form in March this year and answer question 9 with their ancestry and/or country of origin. Spread the word by telling your Caribbean friends and/or family about completing the US census given it’s importance. In addition it is only ten questions long.

The idea is to get ancestral recognition, checking Black, African American or Negro (I hate that they added that in), on the census form does not indicate if you are directly from Africa or your heritage is from the Caribbean or America. And not to be short sighted about this, the same goes for Indians, Asians etc, who have migrated to the US via the Caribbean. During the last census 1.8 million people wrote West Indian as their ancestry, so the numbers are there and obviously smaller than the actual numbers, if there was a place to check it off. Compare those numbers to Pacific Islanders who only made up roughly 874,000 people surveyed about 0.3 percent of the US population and they were able to have their own category.

Accurate counts in the once-a-decade survey ensure recognition from the federal government and the fair allocation of resources to state and local governments, advocates say.

While most Caribbeans are expected to at least check the box for “black,” lumping them together with all African-Americans means corporations and politicians won’t see the political, economic and social issues specific to their immigrant communities, Persaud said. They also won’t see the size of those communities or get a sense of the diversity of experiences among Afro-Caribbean groups.

– LA Times

I don’t know who denied us the last time we tried to do this – and decided to lobby for “Negro” but now is our chance to make a bigger impression. We got to get rid of Negro as well

Tags: 2010 Census, Caribbean, Census, News, Politics, The Los Angeles Times

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 5:00 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.