I know that here and now, if there were any group to be targeted for any purpose whatsoever, there would be ways to find those in the group. The fact is, there are other ways to locate people these days besides a census, many more ways.
I suspect that back in the day authorities knew where ethnic groups were ghettoized or where they preferred to live, among others who spoke the same language and had the same cultural expectations. My own ancestors lived in these ethnic ghettos as immigrants.
Our multiculturalism and mixing no longer guarantees that a given name or a surname identifies the person on a census as one ethnicity or another. Therefore I wonder about the validity of "identity politics." Are we not creatures of personality and character and soul and not just what we appear on the surface to be? Our own self-identity is what matters to us now. Besides thinking or feeling yourself to be a certain race or ethnicity though the facts (such as a DNA test or genealogy research) may indicate that you are a mix, that self identity also includes our gender and sexual orientation. The fact is that census takers used observation to determine that someone was male or female, W, M, or C, back in the day. (And I've seen the person considered C or M in the South to be considered W in the North on census.)
I had a client who immediately assumed because some names of his ancestors were German that they were Jewish. He was wrong. I asked my friend who is upset about the Japanese internment, well what if they used the census to identify and locate Jews for round up? She gulped.
What is the purpose of a census? It's statistical. It is used to determine what's what - what's needed - and to ask for money from the government (as well as common citizens through taxation or donations) for various purposes and to make policy.
Certainly no census has ever been done for the purposes of future genealogy buffs.
An example that many Americans can understand is homeless counts, which are usually under counts since many homeless people do not cooperate or cannot be found to be counted. Agencies and the government look to this count to ask for and get funding appropriate to their location. They don't get enough money to deal with all the people who come through their doors asking for help because maybe a third of those who are actually homeless were counted.
We can't know if we will be for or against any particular change that might be based on census, but we certainly would like to know how many citizens there are so we can also know how many are voting. We'd like to know how many children live in a district to plan for their education. And I think we'd like to know how many people are living in the U.S. who want to be citizens.
Several years ago I met a school teacher who showed up to teach in the fall and had an almost empty classroom. Due to housing costs many students had left that school and their parents seemed to not have re-enrolled them elsewhere as there had been no requests to have grades or other documents transferred to another district. (It was assumed that these families had become homeless and not enrolled their children in any school.)
And there is a precedent as any genealogist who uses the past U.S. Census knows of asking these questions: Are you an alien? In process of citizenship? What year did you become a citizen? (And we genealogists depend on these documents to find out where people came from so we can cross the ocean with our research.)
I once wondered if my own ancestors hid out, afraid to answer the door because of the conditions they lived in prior to America, but I did find them - their surname horribly misspelled - on one of those pages that is faded and damaged.
There is also a historical precedent for blocking or not allowing the citizenship process to go forwards which prevented those of a certain ethnicity - including mine - to be considered a potential threat to the security of the United States because of World War I. Thus some immigrants who wanted citizenship years earlier had to wait until after that war.
As for reparations, I cannot even imagine how we would decide who deserves "reparations" for slavery prior to the Emancipation decades ago other than using DNA tests and coming up with some mathematical formula for how many dollars for what percentage of slave-identified genetics. And what of so many of us who never owned slaves and come from families that never owned slaves? Why would we pay, assume we are "guilty" of enslaving for our skin color, and owe others based on their racial identity because of our racial identity? That's not fair. I'm not responsible for what anyone in my family history (and mine came here after the abolishment of slavery) did in the past. I'm not responsible for the actions of people I never met and wasn't raised by. I'm only responsible as an adult for my own actions in this life.
As they say, you can't choose your family, you can only choose your friends. I don't want to punish others for their ancestry any more than I want to punish some upstanding citizen who happens to have a criminal in the family. What about those people who have slave heritage but generations later have moved beyond it or those who have African heritage but were never slaves?
Should those of Catholic heritage ask for reparations from WASPS because they were horribly exploited by the Robber Barons as immigrants (pre-union) who worked six days a week, back to back "shifts" of 14-16 hours, for example?
When does prejudice end?
It ends with our personal behavior in this life.
One person mentioned to me the reparations for Jews who's families were killed in the Holocaust or had property seized. While I don't know exactly how that worked in Germany - or Israel - there are some differences.
The first is that living people were able to PROVE what they lost, mostly because it was fairly recent history, so names, photographs, addresses, titles to property and so on could be used. Secondly, Jewish-Americans have told me that they did not ALL get the money. Rather one person in their family proved what they had lost, did the applications and got whatever was offered. So they would say to me, "I didn't apply because so and so already got the money." And it was generally not much. Generally it was a token - a token apology of sorts.
It's not that I don't have a heart. I'd rather see the money spent on education and other programs to help those who need help here and now, no matter what their heritage.
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This post was edited for clarity on September 3, 2019
