Nine Percent Of Amherst Residents Identify As African American According To Census

Report On The Meeting Of The African Heritage Reparations Assembly, April 4, 2022

Present
Michele Miller (Chair), Alexis Reed, Amilcar Shabazz, Heather Hala Lord, Irv Rhodes, and Yvonne Mendez

Staff: Jennifer Moyston (Staff Liaison) and Paul Bockelman (Town Manager)

The African Heritage Reparations Assembly (AHRA) heard a presentation by Kerry Spitzer and Susan Strate of the Donahue Institute on the preliminary data on the census of Black African Americans in Amherst. The report incorporated data from the 2020 national census and the American Community Survey. 

According to the census, 23,000 of Amherst’s 39,263 residents are students, and 16,000 live in dorms. The information compiled combines residents who described themselves as being of Black or African American heritage alone (2,382). Nine percent, or 3,450 residents identified themselves Black or Black in combination with another race, and 900 of them live on campus.  Although it is possible to discern the number of Black residents in each census block, the census differential privacy policy introduces noise into the data to prevent being able to link data to individuals if very few people of color reside in a certain census block. Therefore, Spitzer advised looking at patterns, not particular data.

Because  there are so many students who live off-campus in Amherst, the town appears to have a higher level of poverty than it actually does. Race was self-identified on the census, and the categories were changed from the 2010 to the 2020 version. More respondents checked more than one race in 2020, so there was a decrease of eight percent in those identifying as White non-Hispanic between 2010 and 2020 in Amherst. Strate said that this is a trend statewide and that the Donahue Institute is still doing research on the significance of the different categories.

Hala Lord asked if the African American population was undercounted in the census, and  Strate responded that it would be hard to determine if it was more undercounted than other groups were. She suggested using local sources, such as school enrollments and data from the colleges and university, to augment the census data.

The AHRA will next meet on April 15 at 3:15 p.m. The committee will discuss how it will employ the census data in its work on determining reparations for Amherst’s African heritage community.