L.A. police to record racial data</span>

"Irrelevance of Race"

The irrelevance of race
Ward Connerly
Sunday, July 8, 2001
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

Intended to discover patterns of de facto discrimination, racial data are collected by the state in what critics consider a now-needless exception to the ideal of a color-blind society. With a Racial Privacy Initiative proposed for the California ballot next year, Insight asked its chief sponsor, Ward Connerly, to argue its merits and Eva Paterson, a San Francisco civil rights lawyer, to explain her opposition.

What's your race? Is it the color of your skin? The country of your birth? Your religion? Where your grandparents came from? Or a mixture? In the United States -- and in California in particular -- the issue of race is ever more elusive and confusing as we evolve into a more polyglot society.

In California, the number of multiracial births -- or should we say "multicolored"? – has grown by 40 percent since 1982. According to the state Department of Finance, one in nine births is to a multiracial couple.

Some 40,000 individuals in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley checked more than one race box on the Census 2000 form. A poll conducted by Zogby International found 80 percent of respondents would support a measure banning the race box altogether.

This is what my Racial Privacy Initiative, which I am proposing for the ballot a year from November, is all about. It is time to stop the government from classifying individuals -- or demanding that individuals classify themselves -- on the basis of skin color, facial features, hair texture, national ancestry or ethnic background. Not only is it socially abhorrent and politically divisive, it has become irrelevant.

If the measure is passed, Californians applying for a job with the state will no longer be asked to disclose their race; school districts won't ask you for the race of your children when you register them; the state won't ask parents trying to adopt a child to state their race, nor will the state specify the race of a child being placed for adoption.

But the initiative also allows the collection of racial data for medical research into race-linked diseases like Tay-Sachs or sickle cell anemia. It won't prevent law enforcement officers from describing the racial characteristics of "particular persons in otherwise lawful ways" for legitimate investigation, undercover and prison management purposes.

The initiative specifically exempts the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing, the chief enforcer of California's civil rights laws, from the ban on collecting racial data. And it won't apply to federal programs -- or to state programs that draw on federal money -- which might involve racial classifications.

The initiative -- which would not be implemented until 2005, would give government ample time to gear up for the change.

It would also allow the Legislature to establish classifications for racial information in areas other than public employment, public education and public contracting if the governor and both the state Senate and the Assembly (by a two-thirds vote) find a compelling government interest in such classifications.

Some have labeled the initiative "divisive." I suspect what they really mean is that race is too sensitive to discuss. But our failure to confront the issue -- especially when our society is changing so dramatically -- is putting us in an ever more tortuous bind.

For example, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requires banks to identify the race of every applicant for a home loan. If the applicant refuses to identify his or her race, the bank itself is required to racially classify the person.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve Bank's Regulation B prohibits banks from asking credit card applicants about their race.

Given this tangled web, what is a bank to do when a father moves his family into a new area and applies simultaneously for a home loan and a MasterCard? And in the 21st century, what message are we supposed to be sending -- that racial classification is appropriate, as the mortgage disclosure act implies, or inappropriate, as Regulation B implies?

Getting California's government out of the racial classification business would be a first step to getting American society out of this morass.

As race-obsessed as our society has been, the idea that our government should be genuinely "color-blind" is hardly novel. In the 19th Century, abolitionist Wendell Phillips said, "If the (civil) war settled anything, it settled this: that neither Law nor Constitution here can recognize race in any way, or in any circumstance."

In Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan proclaimed, "There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

In 1949, Thurgood Marshall, arguing on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Sipuel vs. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, said, "Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society."

And in 1963, President John F. Kennedy, preparing the nation for the the Civil Rights Act, proclaimed, "Race has no place in American life or law."

The Racial Privacy Initiative seeks to make those words real.

Ward Connerly, the chief campaigner for Proposition 209 to eliminate state-sponsored race-based affirmative action programs in California, is a Sacramento businessman, and author of Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences''

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page C - 8
The world isn't color-blind yet
Eva Paterson
Sunday, July 8, 2001
C2001 San Francisco Chronicle

Ward Connerly, where are you when I need you? This thought ran through my brain two weeks ago at the Food Court in the Emeryville Public Market. As I ate Indian food, I watched the passing parade. I wanted to share the sight with my buddy Ward Connerly. Yes, we are buddies despite our differences over the role that race plays and should play in our society.

I saw Latinos and African Americans. South Asians walked by. Young blond white people. Young blond black people. Interracial families. Interracial friendships.

This mass of humanity interacted with an ease and lack of self-consciousness that would have been unthinkable several decades ago.

At that moment, I thought, "Ward, you and I would probably both marvel and revel in this truly color-blind moment. This is the world both you and I want to create and live in."

As I sat there watching a black couple buying Italian food at a stand run by Asian Americans, I thought more deeply about race in the 21^st century. I reflected on how Ward Connerly and I profoundly disagree about how to achieve a color-blind society.

Connerly has sponsored two efforts which, in the opinion of many, have moved society backward vis-a-vis race relations. Rather than producing a laundry list of statistics, let me tell you about an institution near and dear to my heart. At Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California in Berkeley, approximately 900 students are enrolled. Only 16 are African American, and 17 are Latino.

My friends tell me that in the first five years of Connerly's anti-affirmative action efforts as a member of the UC Board of Regents, not one full-time woman law professor was hired at Boalt. At faculty meetings, mention of the racial or gender composition of the faculty was prohibited.

It is too late in the day to have a discussion as to whether or not racial discrimination still exists. The vibrant debate over racial profiling clearly illustrates that the color of your skin affects how you are treated in daily life. Statistics on infant mortality, life expectancy, income and the like demonstrate to a moral certainty that race matters.

Now Connerly has a new idea to try out on the California electorate. He wants to prohibit the public from having information on race.

His latest ballot initiative boggles the mind. When one wants to determine if one is overweight, one gets on a scale to get concrete information. If one wants to live within a financial budget, one gets information on income and expenses. One cannot make decisions without information.

If a society that acknowledges racial discrimination wants to know in a concrete way if such discrimination is alive and well, members of that society need information -- facts and figures. When a coalition of civil rights organizations sued the San Francisco Fire Department almost two decades ago, concerned citizens were appalled to see there were no Asian American firefighters -- and no women. The information on racial and gender realities spurred corrective action.

Without such information, we are like a blindfolded driver. Let me be more personal. I make my living trying to desegregate society. I pride myself on being an employer with a diverse workforce.

About a year ago, concerned about lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, I was urging the government to force these companies to keep statistics on the racial and ethnic composition of their workforces. In the course of these efforts, I realized I had not compiled these statistics for my own workplace.

I was embarrassed. But the information helped later when we were hiring. We all like to think of ourselves as enlightened, as being free from prejudice. We are not there yet as a society.

My dad recently succumbed to lung cancer. As I watched him go to various doctors and hospitals, I was reminded of the studies that document how whites tend to get better treatment than people of color.

When I asked how long my dad had to live, one doctor told me, "Well, maybe six to eight months, but everyone has got to go sometime."

I wanted to strike him. I wondered if he would have said the same thing to a white person. Maybe yes. Maybe no. But the New England Journal of Medicine's report on treatment disparities made me shudder for my father.

My parents' encounters with the medical establishment also reminded me that certain diseases are more prevalent among people of color. Diabetes affects Latinos and blacks in disproportionate numbers.

Connerly's initiative would prevent the routine collection of information on how disease affects different groups.

Both of us would have been comfortable in the Emeryville Court. We would have broken bread together and reveled in true integration.

There would have been differences.

I would look at Latino folks and wonder if they have been hassled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service because of an accent or their last name.

I would look at women and wonder if they had hit the glass ceiling. I would look at young black men and wonder if they had been stopped by the police simply because of their youth and their skin color. I would wonder if Asian Americans had encountered hostility because of their perceived foreignness.

Until people like myself no longer think about those consequences of race and ethnicity, society will need to collect information about race. I hope that Connerly is unable to qualify this misguided initiative for the ballot. If he does, please vote no.

See you at the Food Court. I am the African American woman buying the poor at the Indian food stand.

Eva Paterson is executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco.

C2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page C - 8

	"The irrelevance of race"