Ward Connerly is at it
again. The crusader who engineered the shoot-down of affirmative
action in California and who indirectly brought on the One Florida
war in Florida by threatening to do the same here, is pushing an
initiative to stop California from collecting any data on the race
or ethnicity of its residents.
If Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative passes on the primary
ballot next March, it will be more difficult to know how blacks or
Asians vote in California or whether the state's college campuses
are more or less racially diverse from one year to the next.
Tracking employment discrimination will go out the window, along
with data on how the state's education and economic policies impact
minority kids. In Connerly's eyes, that would be a victory for
Americanness -- the notion of a country where race is dead as a
concept (except in law enforcement -- the initiative doesn't touch
racial profiling).
Call it California dreaming -- but a lot of well-meaning people
are keen on doing away with the idea of race. After all, cracking
the human genome has made definitive something we always knew, deep
down -- that race is a phony concept encapsulating the shock of
Europeans upon first seeing Africans, and made more potent by the
need of Natural Law-abiding Christians to justify breeding and
selling people like cattle. The largest minority group in the
country -- Hispanics -- aren't even a ''race,'' but rather a
amalgamation of Spanish- and Portuguese-speakers from a smorgasbord
of ethnicities. As for ''African-Americans'' -- my father is from
the Congo; trust me, they're about as African as Yao Ming.
Sunday, conservative pundit George Will on ABC's This Week
With George Stephanopoulos asked an interesting question. Since
only one of Connerly's four grandparents is black, is he African
American, or just American? Here's another: If Connerly walked into
a Wal-Mart in Davie, would he be treated like an American or a
potential shoplifter who needs to be followed around? Or, if
Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia drove through Beverly Hills in
identical Bentleys, which one would be more likely to get pulled
over by the cops?
If race is often a crutch for lefties (one more word about ''Dr.
King'' out of the Democrats, and I'll scream) and it's the right's
wheelbarrow. Republicans make a lot of noise about getting past race
-- promoting meritocracy over ''victimocracy.'' But it's Republicans
who put on a Showtime at the Apollo presidential-nominating
convention then turn around and warn black voters not to forget
their rent receipts; they're also who nominated a mediocre,
right-wing jurist to the ''black seat'' on the Supreme Court who
later beeyatches about the stigma of affirmative action.
It's the right that makes excuses for white students with blandly
praiseworthy resumes who don't get into the colleges of their
choice. It can't possibly be that the university simply didn't want
them -- it had to be that black kid who took ''their'' spot (not the
athlete, not the legacy, but one of those black applicants for
sure).
And it's the right that's so fixated on racial politicking that
they make it their business to try to pass laws outlawing the mere
mention of race by colleges, employers and governments.
The problem is, if you stopped quantifying racial data tomorrow,
discrimination would still happen -- under the radar. Connerly would
still be followed around the store. Thomas would still get pulled
over more often than Scalia. Black guys would still dominate the
court but never run the NBA. Black people would still get hired and
promoted less often, and there'd still be few blacks in the
boardroom or in the newsroom. Blacks would still be arrested more,
lose their voting rights more and face more poverty and higher
unemployment.
That's the way it is. And hiding race under a bushel won't change
it.
Joyannreid@hotmail.com
