Outside The Box

OUTSIDE THE BOX

Colorblindness Is Golden
Will Californians vote to join the human race?

BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, April 3, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST

When America's best symphony orchestras evaluate potential musicians, the candidates audition "blind"; they play their instruments behind a screen so the auditioning committee does not know the musicians' race, sex or appearance but only hears the quality of their performance. Auditions are thus an honest meritocracy, and better symphonies are the result.

Now comes California's newest ballot proposition: the Racial Privacy Initiative. "The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment," it states. The initiative exempts medical and law-enforcement matters, and includes counties, cities, school districts, the state university system and any other political subdivision of California's government. It would bring an honest meritocracy to government and give people better opportunities, much as blind auditions give us better music.

The Racial Privacy Initiative does not yet have enough signatures to get onto November's ballot--the deadline is April 19--but consider the impact it would have on the way California treats its citizens.

Millions of Californians would suddenly, in Martin Luther King's words, "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Public schools and universities could no longer report student grades or test scores, disciplinary action, graduation or dropout rates by race; state agencies could no longer identify the racial composition of their workforce; contracts could not be assigned or policies made based on race. The practical result, as Shelby Steele put it in The Wall Street Journal last week, is that the Racial Privacy Initiative "transforms a black fourth grader who can't read into simply a fourth grader who can't read." Which prompts the question: What is the matter with that?

It is difficult to think of a more profound change in the way America works. For three decades the U.S. government's policy has been to require more and more race-based measurements and actions. President Clinton expanded the number of racial and ethnic categories in the 2000 Census to 63 from five, and then directed that if an individual checked multiracial boxes declaring himself both white and a member of a racial minority, he must be counted as a member of the minority.

For 10 years, until Congress discovered and outlawed it in 1991, the U.S. Department of Labor "race normed" the results of job tests, adding points to the scores of minorities so that racial groups as a whole tested equally. Colleges admit minority students with lower SAT scores in order to increase the diversity of the student body. The president of the University of California wants to abandon the SAT completely--to stop measuring college applicants' abilities--for it results in the admission of "too many" Asian-Americans and "too few" blacks and Hispanics. If an employer uses a merit-based hiring standard--say a high school diploma--and it turns out fewer minorities have one, the employer must find a way to give a preference to minority candidates to remove the "disparate impact" of merit.

Why is it national policy to overrule the concept of merit? Why do we insist that the standards our society uses to measure excellence be adjusted to insure equivalent outcomes among various racial and ethnic groups, that any testing system must produce roughly equal outcomes among men and women, Hispanics and Asians, blacks and whites and native Americans?

Because there is a deep philosophical divide in American thinking about race. Today's Conservatives believe the colorblind principle of merit is the fairest way to treat individuals. Today's Liberals take the view that merit is unfair to minorities, who must be given an advantage in the present to make up for the discrimination they suffered in the past. This view has the support of many of America's institutions--governments, corporations and philanthropic organizations--since it gives them a politically correct way to atone for the unfairness of yesterday.

But that is a dangerous attitude, for the understanding that individuals can better their circumstances through effort and skill is essential to America's social compact. Merit is the glue holding all groups in America together. Public policies should not rig outcomes. If our policy is to falsify the measurement of skills instead of working to improve the abilities of the less skilled, we delude ourselves and put our society at risk.

California's Racial Privacy Initiative offers a new level of freedom. The freedom to not be racially classified by the state's view of "fairness"--to be judged on ability, not skin color. It also offers equality of opportunity--offering a better quality of life in hard work and achievement.

Some years ago several Michigan legislators complained that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra did not employ enough black musicians and should hire more. They were demanding not blind but deaf auditions--the auditioning committee should put on earmuffs and observe only the race of the performing musician.

The Racial Privacy Initiative will help us do better than that. California ballot initiatives have changed the way the nation thinks about race. Proposition 209 ended government preferences based on race or sex; Proposition 227 is requiring that all children be taught English by ending bilingual education. If Californians enact the Racial Privacy Initiative in November, they will strike a blow for the principle Justice John Harlan pronounced in his lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson: "Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears Wednesdays.