Kudos to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors for
opposing the ill-conceived and deceptively named racial privacy
initiative, which has qualified to appear on the March 2, 2004
ballot in California.
Kudos to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors for opposing the ill-conceived and deceptively named racial privacy initiative, which has qualified to appear on the March 2, 2004 ballot in California.
The proposition would be more accurately named the racial ignorance initiative. This initiative has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with political correctness taken to ridiculous extremes.
The Ward Connerly-backed proposition would prohibit the state – and any public agency or government within California – from collecting data on the ethnicity, national origin, color or race of individuals. For those of you who are having difficulty placing Connerly, he’s famous for leading the University of California Board of Regents to end race-based admissions in 1995, and the author of 1996’s successful Prop. 209, which banned affirmative action in California based on gender or race.
The racial privacy initiative’s fatal flaw is that it assumes information can be evil. After all, the initiative seems to assume, if the racial data can be used for nefarious purposes, the collection of the data itself must be an evil practice and therefore needs to be banned.
That’s like arguing that because religion has been used for evil purposes – from the Inquisition to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack, from the ongoing strife in Northern Ireland to the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, to name just a few – that religion itself must be evil. Of course we shouldn’t close churches and outlaw prayer because some people have committed heinous acts in the name of or inspired by their faith; we also shouldn’t outlaw the gathering of information because some people don’t like the way the data is used.
Important information on the state’s population, educational systems, health care and voting trends, for example, can and should be tracked from many points of view: age, gender, place of residence, income level and, yes, even race.
It’s important to know if a racial group is more impacted than others by a certain disease, or if one group is being denied admission to schools disproportionately, or if large numbers of another ethnic population choose not to vote, so the problems can be accurately studied and solutions found.
To close our eyes to important information because it’s politically incorrect is short-sighted and foolish, to put it mildly.
Supporters of the racial privacy initiative argue that their proposition will allow the state legislature to provide exemptions to its non-classification rules if it “serves a compelling state interest.”
But it also requires a two-thirds majority to make that finding, as well as the governor’s signature. Requiring a two-thirds majority in Sacramento, especially, is a huge hurdle to overcome. Besides, the mere presence of the racial privacy initiative will cast a political-correctness pall over any attempts at data gathering.
Let’s not ignore valuable information in the name of political correctness. Anyone who has issues with how racial information is used – as Connerly himself did with affirmative action admissions in UC schools – should attack the use of the information, not the collection of the data.
Information is not evil. Ignoring information is absurd to the point of irresponsibility.
