The census-taker was furious. Locals, he told the San Diego Union, “are apathetic, indifferent and in many cases belligerent. And for what? Simply they could not, in their own obtuse minds, fathom what the census was being taken for.” This was in 1890, the 11th national census. The U.S. Constitution mandates that the nation’s inhabitants be counted once each decade, which sounds like a straight-forward task. As the irate census-taker discovered, it’s not and never has been. From 1791, when disputed census figures prompted President Washington’s first veto, to 2019, when the Trump administration urged a citizenship question, the census has courted controversy. While the census steers federal funds to a broad spectrum of public services, debates rage over what this exercise includes — census-takers once asked residents to count their home’s toilets — and what’s ignored. The 2020 census, for instance, will have 20 categories for race or ethnicity, including “white,” “black or African-American,” “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish,” “American Indian or Alaska Native” and 11 Asian groupings. Yet there’s no specific accounting for people of Middle Eastern or North African descent; the form suggests that “white” includes “Lebanese, Epyptian, etc.”