“In those days Caesar Augustus declared that everyone throughout the empire should be enrolled in the tax lists. This occurred when Quirinius governed… Everyone went to their own cities to be enrolled.” Luke 2:1-3

1.5 million, that’s the magic number. In case you missed it this week, the New York Times reported that 1.5 million people were not counted in the 2010 U.S. Census. Of course, those who were “missed” were predominately African-American and Latino-Hispanic. Imagine the entire population of Philadelphia, Phoenix, or San Antonio and you begin to get the picture. While the government may be satisfied with this under-representation, citizens should not be so accepting especially given that the total population was overestimated by 36,000.

What is at stake is that African-American and Latino-Hispanic communities will receive less in government funding while other populations will receive more than they should. In many public education systems minority populations already often receive less per student due to regressive tax structures. Further, in many urban areas such as Chicago, segregation is the order of the day (Chicago 90%).

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously commented that he had seen more racial hatred in Chicago than he had in the South. Lest anyone believe that we have become a post-racial society, think again.

The one place where we have accurate counts of African-Americans and Latino-Hispanics is in the nation’s penal system where both governments and private corporations profit from the pain of others and the mass incarceration of black and brown people.

As U.S. citizens continue to become less concerned about the common good or the general welfare of their neighbor we will need to decide whether people count and why we are not counting them.