As noted below, Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy Initiative, now known as CRECNO (Classification by Race, Ethnicity, Color, or National Origin), will go before the voters of California in the special election of October 7, along with the question of whether to recall Gov. Gray Davis.
There has been much speculation as to whether this confluence will help or hurt both measures. Minorities, who disproportionately support Davis, may vote in larger than normal numbers because of their strong interest in having the state continue to pay attention to their race, but conservatives, who generally detest both Davis and counting by race, may also be energized to vote in large numbers.
As usual, the “horse race” is not the most interesting aspect of this story, even though, also as ususal, it is what has attracted to most press attention so far. Far more interesting, I think, is the possibility that the Supreme Court may have inadvertently given the initiative a substantial if unintended boost. (I have long thought there should be a word to describe consequences that were unintended but easily predictable. I hereby nominate unintendable.)
Take me, for instance. (Hands off! I didn’t mean that literally.) Even though I understand the initiative allows the collection of racial data for law enforcement and medical purposes (and other purposes by petititon), I have nevertheless had reservations about it. Even though the government of California is riddled with Proposition 209 scofflaws who are still at large — indeed, still in office — collecting potentially useful racial data struck me as, on balance, at least reasonable and possibly desirable so long as the state was barred, as it is by the passage of Proposition 209, from granting racial preferences.
But now all bets are off. Because the Supreme Court did not overturn Prop. 209 in the recent Grutter case, and because it certainly did not require any state to grant preferences, its decision allowing preferences at least invites and indeed all but compels those of us who oppose states dispensing benefits and burdens on the basis of race to fight the matter out state by state. (This may cause the new neo-Frankfurtians in the legal academy to have some sober second thoughts about their newly discovered sympathy for courts avoiding politically contentious issues.) And what better way of killing off the preference industry than turning off the spigot of racial information from which the state has been greedily drinking for years.
Will some valuable information be lost? Perhaps. But the Court should have thought of that before standing aside and allowing overt racial preferences to pass by.
In the absence of Grutter I’m not sure I would have supported CRECNO. Post-Grutter, I’m sure I do. Perhaps Ward Connerly should send a thank-you note to Justice O’C thanking her for all his new recruits.
Again, you have fallen into the logical trap which assumes that mentioning race or measuring race automatically entails discrimination and that all such discrimination is racist & purposefully exclusionary.
Support of RPI will directly contradict the not only aims of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but those of Prop 209. It only goes to show that much conservative support is reactionary and not well thought out.
Cobb, I don’t assume that mentioning race automatically entails discrimination, and I do recognize that some racial data is important to collect (as do the sponsors of CRECNO/Prop. 54, who have made exceptions for law enforcement, medical, and fed-req’d data). If the Supremes had not just given the green light to racial preferences, and if Calif. officials had demonstrated compliance with instead of defiance of Prop. 209, I might well have opposed CRECNO. After all, Tom Wood, chief sponsor of 209, opposes it, as do others who dislike preferences. But in this world, at this time, banning the collection of all but essential racial data seems preferable to allowing preferentialists a free hand.
What good–public or private–is served by collecting “racial data?” No other relic of nineteenth-century pseudo-science (e.g., bumps on skulls) merits the respect that “race” does, and rightly so. It’s time to turn off the spigot by hereinafter simply refusing to classify people by race. Where there are no witches, you can’t witch-hunt.