With everything else going on, it’s easy to forget about the 2020 census. But the national survey only occurs every 10 years, and it has an important impact on communities, from determining redistricting of congressional seats, to distribution of federal funding. To help get the word out about completing the census, especially to younger groups typically underrepresented by the survey, community arts organization BOOM Concepts has launched Count It Up, a campaign of gifs and memes to encourage participation.
The campaign, which gets its name from lyrics to rapper J. Cole’s 2018 song “ATM,” aims to “set a new standard of census awareness and participation with a younger set of underrepresented participants that are currently serving as head of household or potentially co-head of household,” according to a press release. The graphics in the campaign are created by two artists, Jenson Leonard, a local poet and meme-maker, and Shey Rivera Rios, an interdisciplinary artist who previously had a residency at BOOM.
The first image released, created by Leonard, features a play on the album cover for James Brown’s Please, Please, Please. Instead of begging someone not to leave him, Brown now looks like he’s begging for viewers to fill out the census.
“Like I obviously can’t make you do something you don’t wanna do,” it reads, in place of track titles, “but I gotta stress how important, in this dumpster fire of a year, the census is in determining how and where that $400 billion in federal funding is spent.”
The press release describes the language on the image as using “an avalanche of contemporary AAVE specific vocabulary and key phrases highly used across popular internet culture influencers and vultures.”
BOOM Concepts and the artists created the images for this campaign with the purpose of getting them shared on social media and printed out like flyers. Funding for the project came from the 2020 Census Philanthropic Fund.
DS Kinsel, co-founder of BOOM, says that traditional marketing for the census doesn’t reach or represent many of the undercounted communities it should be aiming for.
“I think the census and the institution of government in general has had a bad relationship with minorities so when there is a formal interaction, such as the census, there is a lot of distrust from individuals,” says Kinsel. “There have also historically been a lack of culturally specific and authentic voice in campaigns across intent and target, so people rarely see or hear themselves in the PSAs and advertisements for the census and that doesn’t encourage participation.”
Responses for the 2020 census are expected to be completed by Sept. 30. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, several of the areas with the lowest response rates are currently in communities with a larger Black population, like Homewood, Knoxville, and several neighborhoods on the North Side. The overall census response rate in Pittsburgh is currently at 59.9%. Census workers are currently going door-to-door in lower response neighborhoods to collect information, as well as setting up at events like farmers markets and food distribution centers.
The rest of the Count It Up campaign will feature a gif by Leonard, as well as pieces from Rios that will focus on targeting Spanish-speakers.
This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2020.
