Weldon Cooper Center: "be very cautious using any 2020 Census race data."

"Add in the impact of the Census Bureau's privacy algorithm," says Lombard, "and I would not try comparing and be very cautious using any 2020 race data."

Well, we've got new 2020 Census numbers for Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and our total populations have gone up since the 2010 Census, but for anyone hoping to understand how the racial composition of our area has changed (like The DTM had hoped) in the last decade by comparing 2020 race and ethnicity numbers and percentages with their 2010 numbers, The Weldon Cooper Center has some bad news.

"The changes in Albemarle and Charlottesville's racial composition are too slight to know if change actually occurred," says Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with the Weldon Cooper Center, "whether people changed their responses, if the Census categorized them differently or if the Bureau's privacy algorithm is just distorting the numbers."

Though the Weldon Cooper Center put both the 2010 and 2020 data in their population charts, Lombard said he would not recommend reading too much into the change in race numbers between the two censuses.

"If there was a large change, such as the share…