Groundbreaking Proposal Launched
in California to Free People from Boxes
by Kevin Nguyen
June/July 2001
American Civil Rights Coalition Chairman Ward Connerly officially kicked off the Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI) on April 11, 2001. Armed with newly printed petitions, he started a four-month drive to qualify the measure for the California ballot in November 2002.
The operative clause of the RPI says: “The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment.” There are exemptions for research, federally-funded programs, law enforcement and the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The state legislature is also allowed to exempt specific agencies if a “compelling state interest” can be demonstrated and approved by two-thirds of both houses and signed by the governor.
The practical effect of RPI would be to eliminate on most government forms the ubiquitous “race” question asked of job applicants, contractors, college aspirants and even insurance policy holders. Because the obsession with race is still prevalent even though race has been banned in California as a factor in doling out public benefits and opportunities, petition organizers say it is time to bring the house of cards that has been our racial classification system crashing down.
“Race” as a social construct has been used for too long to divide society, argued RPI proponents at their campaign announcement. It forces people into artificially created categories, either making people choose among a select few arbitrary categories or scattering people into as many as 126 permutations. As a sustainable way of sorting, separationg and profiling Americans, it is on its last legs.
Opponents argued otherwise, insisting that the tracking of racial data allows them to continue advocating for racial proportionality in a certain workforce, college campus or contracting pool. Susan Serrano, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, told the San Jose Mercury News that she regards the initiative as the “Racial Ignorance Initiative.” “That’s premised on the belief that there is no need to monitor racial discrimation or enforce civil rights laws,” she said.
RPI’s defenders responded by pointing to the measured approach they have taken, with carefully crafted exemptions to not impair the state’s ability to enforce civil rights laws. They also noted that state and local governments would have three years to phase our racial classifications and find more precise ways to measure societal problems more so along class, socioeconomic, geographic and/or non-racial lines.
Addressing the public policy implications of the proposal, the Pacific Research Institute’s Senior Fellow, Lance Izumi, remarked, “In our studies, we have seen that racial classification, as the Supreme Court has said, is highly suspect and usually leads to bad public policy.” In hyperbolic language reminiscent of the hysteria during the Proposition 209 campaign, Victor Hwang, managing attorney for the Asian Law Caucus, called RPI “much more dangerous than 187 or 209 because it wipes out civil rights enforcement in all arenas.”
Beyond the debate on the substance of the issues, RPI representatives indicated that their campaign was recruiting and relying on a statewide network of grassroots supporters to fill out petitions from now through August in order to present the constitutional amendment to voters. More information on RPI can be found at www.acrc1.org or by calling the American Civil Rights Coalition at 916-444-2278.
RPI’s detractors have not yet formed an opposing committee, though old-line civil rights organizations such as NAACP and ACLU have spoken out against the measure and complained that RPI would directly challenge their legitimacy and efforts for proportional representation. For them, the race industry would crumble without the numbers to prop it up. For RPI’s supporters, it is an easy price to pay to preserve one’s racial privacy and to keep government out of the business of sorting us out like so many jelly beans.
Kevin Nguyen is Executive Director of the American Civil Rights Institute.
Also by Kevin Nguyen
Copyright © 2001 ACRI. All rights reserved.