… because its proponents have not persuaded people like John Bunzel.
Bunzel, a former president of San Jose State and long-time fellow at the Hoover Institution, has written a number of trenchant criticisms of the excesses of racial preference, etc. He opposes Proposition 54, the Racial Privacy Inititative, not because he wants to preserve preferences but because he believes it will “do nothing to make that goal [a colorblind society] a reality.”
One may look forward to a time when racism and discrimination no longer scar our lives yet still oppose a measure such as RPI that would prevent policymakers from discovering areas where whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are treated differently by everybody from loan officers to teachers and doctors….
“But isn’t it discrimination,” some one will ask, “to classify people by racial categories?” The answer is no — unless the intention is to pit one minority group against another. It is not discrimination to record a person’s race or ethnicity when the openly acknowledged purpose is to eliminate racial inequities, not perpetuate them (emphasis in original).
I respect Bunzel and his argument. He is certainly being consistent with his past positions on this issue. Most of his current allies, however, are not. Whether the venue is voting rights or employment law, they have always vociferously opposed the argument that discrimination requires intent — of any kind, much less an intent “to pit one minority group against another.” (Of course, it must also be said that they are not even consistent in this view, since they also maintain that racial preferences in admissions are not discriminatory since they involve no intent to stigmatize, exclude, etc., etc.) To many of them discrimination exists wherever there is a “disparity” in racial representation.
Bunzel concludes that “[e]veryone in this increasingly fierce debate wants to see a time when people will treat each other equally and fairly.” On an abstact level this may well be true — certainly no one acknowledges that his position is discriminatory — but as a practical matter this assertion is surely false. Or rather, current ideas of what is equal and fair diverge so fundamentally that at the level the statement is true it is meaningless. Most opponents of Prop. 54 (though not Bunzel and a few like-minded souls) believe that treatment that is equal and fair always requires, and may always require, “taking race into account.” Virtually all proponents of Prop. 54 do not.
