Ending the anachronism of racial labels
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JAN. 4, 2002
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Ending the anachronism of racial labels
Predictably, 'civil rights' establishment drags its feet
Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired a nation when he voiced his dream for a color-blind nation, a nation in which little children would be judged by the content of their characters, "not the color of their skin."
Today, another black man is attempting to move that agenda forward after a long national detour. Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who successfully battled to dismantle race- and gender-based preferences and set-asides in his state's college admissions programs in 1996, has now launched a petition drive to bar any state and local government agencies there from classifying people by race and then gathering race-based data about them.
The irony is that those who oppose Mr. Connerly's new initiative are not bullet-headed white racists with white hoods and firehoses, but rather many in today's "civil rights" establishment -- big-government toadies and rent-seekers who argue that identifying people by race is necessary for the special quotas and set-asides which are the only way (they would argue) their particular, favorite minority groups can get ahead in life.
Though the measure would exempt police agencies who need to describe suspects by race, hospitals that might need racial and genetic date for research, and (since no one now dares invoke state supremacy under the 10th Amendment) federal programs which count people by skin color, many who would otherwise claim a share of Dr. King's mantle are obviously worried.
"My worry is that when you stop collecting data it becomes possible to sweep certain issues under the rug," protests Hugh P. Price, president and CEO of the National Urban League. "Without data, it would be difficult to keep track of minority children are doing academically, to keep track of discrimination in employment," and so forth.
But this exposes an essential fallacy. For such statistics prove virtually nothing. If a black child is subject to racial prejudice in the schools that's abominable. But -- lacking systematic new Jim Crow laws, which are unimaginable -- prejudice by its nature is something best discerned and demonstrated individually.
If the number of black or Hispanic children doing poorly in the schools is below average, that doesn't prove willful and systematic race-based discrimination against them, any more than a finding that Jewish or Asian children may be doing better in school demonstrates willful race-based prejudice on their behalf.
(In fact, efforts to water down the curriculum to "equalize outcomes" are themselves racist, if they end up lowering the bar on the theory that "challenged" minority students "can't succeed" if asked to read Shakespeare. Just ask Marva Collins of Chicago's Westside Prep.)
As black author and economist Thomas Sowell has exhaustively demonstrated, the fact that retail stores in many inner-city black neighborhoods tend to be owned by Lebanese or Koreans -- or that merchants in East Africa tend to be East Indian -- has far more to do with vocation and cultural tradition than with prejudice: Such "disparities of outcome," far from being suspicious, seem to be a rule of nature.
Otherwise, where are the federal racial quota police to investigate the obvious conspiracy against short white men (not to mention women) when it comes time to hire NBA forwards and NFL wide receivers?
"We don't ask people what religion they are, what their party affiliation is or what their sexual orientation is," points out Mr. Connerly. "So why is it critical to ask about race?"
Interestingly enough, Mr. Connerly's proposal seems to be striking a chord with the Golden State's multiracial community. They -- like golfer Tiger Woods, who claims Asian as well as European and African ancestors -- are left scratching their heads by government forms which anachronistically insist they choose only one grandparent when identifying themselves by "race."
Visitors from other cultures find this Anglo-Saxon fixation on racial labeling equally strange. Iranian immigrants report with a mixture of humor and dismay that -- en route to settling in America -- they have found their respective government ID cards describing them as "black" while resident in England, "Asian" while living in Canada, and finally "white" upon crossing Niagara Falls. When a Singaporean newspaper reporter of mixed English, Chinese and Filipina heritage earnestly asked what box to check under "race" when applying for her Arizona press pass in Phoenix, recently, the sheriff's clerk took one look at her and told her to check "Hispanic" -- the one race with which the reporter was pretty sure she shared no ties whatever.
Mr. Connerly needs 700,000 valid signatures to put his measure on the California ballot next November. It's about time.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $96 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
