http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) A burgeoning movement in California that would bar government from asking about race or ethnicity is stirring fears that national civil rights gains could be undone.
The measure, known as the Racial Privacy Initiative, would ban local and state governments from using racial or ethnic classifications in education, employment, or contracting, but notes that the ban is not limited to those areas.
Proponents say government inquiries about race, ethnicity and national origin are as intrusive as questions about religion and sexual orientation. And they say the change would actually help put an end to discrimination.
"We have become so conditioned about the subject of race that we almost believe there are separate species divided by this thing called race," said Ward Connerly, the measure's chief proponent and one of the nation's leading crusaders against race-based programs.
Connerly, a University of California regent who is multiracial, says categorizing people by race and ethnicity divides society and exacerbates discrimination. His dream, he says, is to move the United States away from an obsession with race, and toward being a colorblind society.
Critics counter that ceasing to record race and ethnicity would not end discrimination, but instead only make it impossible to document it. Without racial and ethnic data, they say, they could not identify problems such as high school dropout and infant mortality rates that disproportionately affect minority populations.
"This is huge," said Erica Teasley Linnick, counsel for the Western Regional office of the NAACP. "And it has huge national implications."
The measure, which has sparked a bitter debate in California - long a springboard for movements that become national - is expected to appear on the ballot in March 2004. But if an effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis results in a special election this fall, the measure would be up for a vote then.
Connerly, author of an autobiography called "Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences," notes that despite his mix of African, Irish, and Native American ancestry, some have insisted on seeing him as solely "black."
"What is black? There are Mexicans who have darker skin than I do," he said. "Having government ask about race gives credence to this one-drop rule, which goes back to the days of Jim Crow. All my life I've objected to the intrusion of government. It's primitive, it's imprecise and cruel. It's telling people who they are. It leads to prejudice."
He says inquiries about race should be viewed as no less invasive and irrelevant than questions about gender, age, and disability.
"We've made race so relevant," he said. "We have awarded race a protected realm in our lives."
The measure is being closely watched by both liberal and conservative groups nationwide.
They note that Connerly has a track record of successfully pushing through other initiatives aimed at fighting race-based policies. He was the chief proponent of Proposition 209, the ballot initiative approved by voters in 1996 that banned race and gender considerations in public education, hiring, and contracting. He led a similar successful movement in Washington in 1998. On Tuesday, Connerly is traveling to Michigan to urge voters to consider a ballot initiative that would strike down affirmative action in higher education.
Opponents of the Racial Privacy Initiative say Connerly and his supporters simply want to continue their attack on affirmative action by taking away the only tools - statistics compiled from reports that show race and ethnicity - that can document patterns of inequality and discrimination.
"If you take race out of data that is collected, we cannot judge disparity or determine which populations are suffering because they're not getting access to good health care or education," said Roland Anglin, executive director of the New Jersey Public Policy Research Institute, a black think tank at Rutgers University.
"The idea of a color-blind society is also absurd," Anglin said. "If I, a dark-skinned African-American male, walked down the streets of (upscale) Millburn, N.J., no one is going to say, `Oh, there's a human being.' That's the reality, whether you collect race data or ban it. They'll say, `There's a black man,' and if they're ungenerous they'll say something worse, and we need to deal with that in public policy."
The measure allows exemptions for some medical research, such as trials, and descriptions of prisoners and criminal suspects. It also allows exceptions for race and ethnicity classification if federal funding of a program requires it.
But opponents say such exemptions do little to alleviate what could be a greater harm caused by the measure. They say the initiative would make it difficult to identify high school dropout rates among various racial and ethnic groups, academic achievement gaps, and racial profiling by law enforcement authorities, among other things.
Polls of California residents show that more than half of those surveyed support the measure. State Republicans approved the initiative at their convention.
And so the opposition is gearing up for a fight. A large coalition that includes educators, health professionals, and civil rights groups in California have joined forces to spread the word that the initiative would hamper their ability to address inequities and needs in minority communities. In May, Connerly's fellow regents at the University of California voted 15-3 to oppose the initiative.
Sean Thomas Breitfeld, a policy analyst for National Council of La Raza, the country's largest Latino civil rights group, said: "Ignoring race and ethnicity by not collecting information about it does not make disparities and discrimination go away. It just makes us ignorant about what barriers there are and makes us unable to address those barriers."
Opponents of RPI, as it is known, say they are especially concerned that the measure singles out education, employment and public contracts.
"Those happen to be the key areas where discrimination and disparities exist, and those are the areas that concern groups like ours the most," Breitfeld said.
Shawn Steel, the immediate past chairman of the California Republican Party, says he is confident the measure will pass and that the race data ban will spread nationally.
"At one time we had obvious racism against African-Americans in the South, and those battles were won," Steel said. "Now we have a new politically correct racism that honors separateness and ignores mainstream culture."
Connerly says he is simply pushing forward the ideas espoused by Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, who exhorted their countrymen to judge people by their character, not by the color of their skin.
He maintains that his initiative would improve life for minorities.
"Sometimes you can put so much pressure on people that you track that you can make them uptight, you make them feel you're always watching," Connerly said. "We shouldn't talk about the black child as the black student, just a student. If children from certain groups are struggling, we need to say to the parents, `Read to your children, take responsibility.' That's the solution, not race data. It sounds tough, but it's tough love."
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