Katherine Corcoran of The Mercury News on Ballot measure name dispute:
The battle over the so-called racial privacy initiative on the Oct. 7 recall ballot has already started — with its name.
Opponents of the measure, which would create a state constitutional amendment banning governments from collecting racial or ethnic data on people, are trying to get the word out that “racial privacy” is not the official name on file at the California Secretary of State’s Office.
Of course, they have a problem with the name. They can’t beat the initiative in public opinion polls and they can’t beat Connerly on philosophical grounds. So, in a most cowardly manner, they have now attempted to derail it another way – by using a technicality that would set a new precedent.
As a member of the small steering committee for the RPI, let me make this plain – we will win this fight and defeat these “racial” classification segregationists. The categories will fall and children will stop being indoctrinated into this disgusting form of mental collectivist segregation. And no, I didn’t say that the RPI was the solution to “racism.” Neither did Ward, although many of the RPI’s opponents have publicly lied by claiming he did. The elimination of classifications is merely another step on the long path towards that goal.
I made my support for this initiative quite clear previously. As a man who can check more than one “racial” classification box, an “interracially” married husband and father of two “multiracial” children, I can say without reservation that these classifications, born by the early government of this nation to further the hideous enterprise of slavery, eat at the soul of person. They force people to think in terms of us vs. them based solely on inaccurate, government created boxes.
“Racism” and “racialism” aren’t ingrained or instinctive. They’re learned. And they can be unlearned, and better yet, never taught. These proponents of such segregational classification schemes reduce a person to the status of a mere serf at the mercy of a myriad different special interests who have no real interest in the person’s well-being, only in how including that individual in their number increases their ability to manipulate social and political will. Those who participated in the recent efforts to reform Census classifications know exactly to what I am speaking. I believe the RPI will succeed and spread to other states until it eventually achieves critical mass forcing Congressional action. Further, it will awaken those arrogant elites who live to force the one-drop rule and other “racialist” designs on their fellow Americans. Ya’ll know who you are. (Julian Bond, I’m talking to you.)
In order to defeat “racism” we must first deal with the collectivist “race”-think born of such classification schemes. In order to further that goal, we must abandon yet another vestige of our pitiful slavery heritage – “racial” classifications.