California’s race initiative could threaten our state

The man who sparked the repeal of affirmative action in Washington four years ago is back, and we should be concerned.

Ward Connerly, the self-proclaimed pariah of the "civil rights industry" whose Proposition 209 in California was the template for this state’s Initiative 200, is now peddling the Racial Privacy Initiative to Californians. It’s an effort to drive a final nail into the coffin of civil rights groups and the people they protect.

Should this initiative pass in our nation’s most diverse and populous state, there is little doubt that it would make its way north.

The RPI’s mission is to abolish the "race" category on government forms. Sounds good — after all, we Americans need to be focusing on what brings us together, not what sets us apart. Unfortunately, doing so would make it impossible for social workers and civil rights groups to collect statistics verifying whether race is a factor in the inequities present in so many aspects of American life. If we ignore racial inequities, how can we alleviate them?

Proposition 209, which abolished affirmative action at state schools in California, yielded an immediate 50 percent drop in enrollment of underrepresented minorities at that state’s most prestigious universities. And as the battle raged over "reverse racism" in California in 1995, the Economic Report of the President revealed that whites were four times as likely to be offered a job as blacks, among equally qualified candidates.

The RPI sets a dangerous precedent that would shield us all from taking responsibility for the vast disparities in opportunity and power that will continue to be present in this country. Race continues to be an issue. We need to know more about the demographic of America, not less, to figure out why.

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