Race matters

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2002 by Coleman, Trevor W

Should racial information be a private

matter or a matter of government concern?

A new California initative will test voters' desire to

keep public the most potent weapon

in the civil rights arsenal.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

It doesn't in Ward Connerly's world. That appears to be the logic behind the controversial University of California regent's latest campaign to rid the nation of color-consciousness.

"The Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI) is a very deliberate, very moderate, attempt to turn America - beginning with California - away from its obsession with race in the governmental sector, to the pursuit of colorblind policies - period," Connerly says.

According to critics, however, the RPI ballot proposal Connerly is asking voters to endorse in 2004 would turn a blind eye to the profound and chronic problems of race and ethnic discrimination in the state. According to them, the RPI would prevent California from documenting in any way the race or ethnic characteristics of residents and, by logical extension, racially disparate outcomes and treatment of non-Whites. And if there is no documentation or record-keeping of discriminatory patterns, for example, discrimination will be hard to prove, much less address. Like that tree falling in the woods, no one would hear hard-won civil rights when they crash to the ground.

"It's like burning books," says Kimberly West-Faulcon, Western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Connerly is "banning information, and we need to start calling this the `Information Ban Initiative,' because that is exactly what it is."

NAACP chairman Julian Bond is more blunt; he says, "As long as race counts, we have to count race."

Connerly, a Sacramento businessman, says collecting racial information is an invasion of privacy. It's divisive, he insists, because it perpetuates racism by keeping people focused on color when they ought to be colorblind. He argues that if the U.S. government ends its practice of racial classification of Americans society will no longer be "obsessed.' with it and there will be less racial tension and division: "The average person already feels the government is too intrusive and is offended by having to state who they are in `little square boxes."'

Connerly's words and actions present a certain irony that is not lost on Cornell University sociologist James E. Turner. While Connerly is debating color-blindness with people of color, Turner says, he "is paying no attention to the Whites fleeing public schools and neighborhoods or the hyper-segregation of America."

A Logical Extension

The Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI), an effort of Connerly's American Civil Rights Coalition (ACRC), expressly forbids the state of California and all of its agencies (schools, universities, employment offices, hospitals, health clinics and other state-funded institutions) to collect data relevant to the race and ethnic characteristics of its citizens. Connerly was the architect of California's Proposition 209, which banned the state from using affirmative action in 1996 and practically led to the re-segregation of its top-tier universities. Connerly says RPI is the logical extension of Prop 209. "Gathering race data does not help people and does not prove discrimination," he says.

Now Connerly and his supporters are pressing on. The campaign has raised $2.1 million from large infusions of cash from the ACRC and conservative backers including Joseph Coors scion of the Coors Brewing family, who donated $100,000, direct mail wizard Richard A. Viguerie ($1,000) and the NRA's Charlton Heston ($500). Connerly himself chipped in $1,000. With the help of about 9,000 volunteers, RPI proponents turned in approximately 982,000 valid signatures (well over the required 670,816) in July to get the initiative on the March 2004 primary election ballot. If approved by voters, RPI will amend California's state constitution to prohibit classifying "any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment" with limited exceptions.

According to the RPI, the state could continue to collect data for the Department of Fair Employment and Housing as well as for certain kinds of medical research and law enforcement. But it could not collect data by race involving academic achievement in the public schools or medical concerns that may affect one racial group more than another.

West-Faulcon, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, calls the initiative a thinly veiled attempt to eviscerate critical information civil rights organizations and other social advocacy groups need to measure social progress and the general health of our nation. "It is a manipulative strategy to push the country back into the darker era in our nation's history when we didn't bother to collect and report the basic information we need to protect civil rights, or health and economic opportunities of minorities and people of color," West-Faulcon says.