Race matters

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.

Kevin Nguyen, the former executive director of the RPI and spokesman for ACRC, who now serves as a consultant, says "old line" civil rights organizations like the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Urban League are obsessed with "divisive" racial classifications. "Race is an inherently private matter, much like religion. Those traits can be a source of pride and should command respect," he says. "But it shouldn't be any of the government's business, and it certainly shouldn't be a point of inquiry on a government form or application. Nguyen, a Vietnamese American, calls the initiative a positive step in race relations that eliminates a racial data collection that is an "arbitrary and artificial system."

The Case for More Data

According to the 2000 Census, California's 34 million residents are a diverse group, predominantly White (46.7 percent) and increasingly Hispanic (32.4 percent). Blacks account for 6.7 percent of the population. RPI opponents concede that as the country becomes increasingly multiethnic the idea of a colorblind society has a visceral appeal with the children of baby boomers who may feel burdened by race, new immigrants who don't want to be saddled with a racial designation and biracial young people who identify with more than one group. According to the 2000 Census, 6.8 million people in the United States, or 2.4 percent of the population, identified themselves as two or more races; 4.7 percent of Californians reported two or more races.

Given the increasingly multiethnic makeup of California, UCLA education Professor Jeannie Oakes says that even opponents of the RPI must acknowledge that America's racial classification system is flawed because it places people of mixed heritage under labels they may not agree with. However, she says, it is a powerful tool for exposing discrimination and inequality and that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

For example, Oakes is particularly interested in which students get to take high school advanced placement courses, which can be a ticket to selective colleges and universities. "In my work, I want to understand whether African American or Latino students have equal access to those courses, whether they are participating at rates comparable to Whites and Asians and whether they are achieving success in the advanced placement exams or whether they are gaining admission to public California universities," Oakes says. "And I use state databases to help answer those questions. It would be virtually impossible to understand those patterns if the state did not collect that data, which is so key to equal educational opportunity."'

Eva Paterson, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is part of the effort in California to defeat RPI, says collection of data about the quality of life of various ethnic groups is intended to help, not divide people. "In the health area, like in sickle cell anemia, if we can't get that information, then we can't come up with remedies for it." She continues, "We also learned that the suicide rate for young Filipino girls is higher than for any other group. If we can't get information about that, then we cannot tailor make remedies to keep these young girls alive."

Dr. Carmen Rita Nevarez, medical director and vice president of external relations at the Public Health Institute in Berkeley, Calif., says Connerly's logic and initiative totally ignores the reality of the disparate treatment of minorities and will be disastrous for people of color in California: "Documenting disparities is not an insignificant issue here, because it is how we are able to determine whether or not all groups are getting the care that they need, getting the prevention they need, making sure they can receive services in languages they understand and making sure that in keeping each individual group healthy, that we keep everyone healthy."

Navarez says the initiative is deceptively written and to illustrate her point notes the distinctions between medical research and public health concerns. "Medical care research is substantially different than public health care research; the research which tells us which percentage or which rate of people are prone to any particular condition. You cannot get those numbers without public health research, and you get those numbers from the kinds of governmental forms that are filled out on a daily basis - that RPI will prohibit."

Navarez gives as an example the fact that White women get breast cancer more often than Black women, but Black women die more often from breast cancer. That disparity was determined with public health data. Under RPI, the State of California cancer registry, the California birth defects registry and many hundreds more institutions would not be able to collect or use such information because they are public institutions.

Margaret Simms, vice president for research at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C., says there are other reasons for collecting identification data by race and gender. "You also collect information for effectiveness. [To discern] how you can improve what you are doing," she says. "If African American or Hispanic children learn differently than White children and you don't know what these differences are, you cannot develop the best program for increasing their performance."

However, Connerly says that is the point of his initiative. He says the race of a child is irrelevant to how well he or she learns. By associating poor performance with race, it perpetuates stereotypes about Black and Hispanic children underachieving. "With the Racial Privacy Initiative, you wouldn't be able to tell if children in school districts with low scores were Black, Hispanic or White," he says. "The focus would be on improving their grades, not on their race."

How Far From Colorblind?

Meanwhile, Connerly and others scoff at studies and surveys that show the country is far from colorblind and therefore still needs data to address the problems of race. One report, a 2000 national survey by the Washington, D.C.-based National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ, formerly The National Conference of Christians and Jews) showed that racial discrimination against African Americans remains so intense that Blacks feel no other racial or ethnic group is discriminated against more than they. More important, the rest of the nation agrees, according to the report.

The NCCJ report, "Taking America's Pulse II," also found that when Americans were asked about groups that had suffered either a great deal or some discrimination in American society, 83 percent of all those questioned said Blacks were discrimination victims. Hispanics were second with 76 percent of those questioned feeling the group faced at least some discrimination. Women and American Indians were next with 67 percent of those questioned believing they faced at least some discrimination. The report further concluded that "whether it was at the corner grocery store, at work or in a local eatery, Black Americans said they experienced discrimination more in the last 30 days than any other racial or ethnic group."

About 13 percent of Whites said they were discriminated against in the past month, compared with 42 percent of Blacks, according to the NCCJ. Meanwhile, 31 percent of Asians reported being discriminated against in the last month and 16 percent of Hispanics reported the same.

The U.S. government recently conceded that racism in America continues to be a profoundly stubborn problem. In the last year of the Clinton administration, the federal government issued its first-ever analysis of U.S. compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. It listed, among primary examples of the persistence of racism throughout society, deep opposition to affirmative action programs to help combat racism in the workplace and other institutions.

"The true extent of contemporary racism remains clouded by ignorance as well as differences of perception," the government report said. "While most Whites do not believe there is much discrimination today in American society, most minorities see the opposite in their life experiences."

Connerly dismisses the surveys and reports. "If we embrace the rationale that data is reliable and that we need the data in order to monitor human behavior in the public sphere, then you have just signaled your permanent opposition to a colorblind government," he says. "If we keep collecting racial data on the basis of what is politically expedient or what social science says, then you might as well open the doors and do it for everything."

Prominent conservatives, such as academics Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Shelby Steele, all African Americans, support the RPI. But Thomas Wood, who heads the California Association of Scholars and co-wrote Proposition 209, strongly disagrees with it, as does John H. McWhorter, author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. "We need to collect data based on racial categories because so much of the news is good," McWhorter, a U.C. Berkeley linguist, told Black Issues in Higher Education earlier this year. "Black poverty continues to shrink, the number of Black people getting college degrees continues to increase, the number of Black people off welfare and working continues to grow."

In the same article, Wood, who is White, argued the need to collect racial data in order to determine if public agencies in states that have banned affirmative action are complying with the law. "It would, I think, adversely impact the enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, including 209. 1 think you need data to do that. I think this is going to put the focus of the debate in the wrong place. The problem is not the data or asking people about the data. It's what's done with the data."

In addition, a wide variety of organizations have come out against the RPI, including the California Teachers' Association, the California Public Health Association, the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Asian Pacific Islander American Health Forum and other organizations concerned with environmental health and justice. At a press conference this spring organized by the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union, several people spoke out against the initiative.

"Californians need to vote 'No' on Connerly's initiative because how likely your children are to have asthma is directly connected to your race, and because if you are Latino, Asian American or African American you are much more likely to get pollution-related cancer," Denise Hoffner-Brodsky, an environmental justice attorney at the Sierra Club, said at the gathering.

"Race is the biggest determining factor when it comes to environmental health. We will not solve this problem by obscuring the facts, as Connerly suggests. We will solve this problem by arming ourselves with information."

The NAACP came out firmly against the RPI at its annual convention in July. Bond, chair of the group's board, says, "We haven't had any people clamoring or calling or complaining to us that requests for racial and ethnic information on public forms was an invasion of their privacy or reducing them to little square boxes."

Bond continues: "This is a manufactured complaint whose real intent is twofold - it is designed to draw to the polls voters who are opposed to civil rights and to eviscerate civil rights enforcement." He calls racial data "the most potent weapon in the civil rights arsenal."

Nguyen calls criticism by civil rights proponents "self-serving" because they represent a constituency that benefits from government services "doled out" based on demographics. "The NAACP bought into the immoral compromise of using race to get beyond race; subscribing to the end justifying the means," he says.

"And we think the cost too great. On a practical basis, it is in their vested interest to maintain the centuries-old system until they get their fair share of the pie. But that is an inherently dangerous way to go about public policy, because it subjects an individual's right to those services to the social and demographic whim of the present day. In other words, one's rights can be greater or lesser depending upon how well-represented one group happens to be at the moment," Nguyen says. "When was the last time we were asked about our religion and sexual orientation on a government form even as we go about dealing with religious and anti-gay bigotry without classifying people?"

Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRC), says Nguyen's argument is a transparent attempt to avoid dealing with societal racism. "It's more of their racial denial and playing of their game of just yelling `colorblind."'

Connerly compares civil rights leaders' views to those of hard-line segregationists who also feared change. "Maybe we get so invested in a position we just can't give it up," he says. "These civil rights organizations today still cling to the same old paradigm they supported in the 1970s."

Connerly continues, "As a matter of moral principle, I subscribe to the view that the government should not identify me on the basis of my religion, who my ancestors are, my sexual orientation, my political affiliation or my skin color. The government should not be using those traits to identify me."

But West-Falcon of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund says what really makes Connerly's campaign so tragic is that his personal insecurities may very well set back for generations progress toward creating a level playing field for all Californians.

"[The RPI] is something we cannot accept just so people like Ward Connerly don't have to think or talk about race anymore," she says. "If the ban takes place, it will be a never-ending nightmare for people of color."

Trevor W. Coleman is an editorial writer and columnist at the Detroit Free Press.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Nov/Dec 2002
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