Connerly starts push to end tracking race Connerly starts push to end tracking race
UC regent begins gathering signatures to ensure the measure will appear on ballot in 2002
By Carrie Sturrock
Contra Costa TIMES STAFF WRITER
SACRAMENTO - An initiative drive that would prohibit the state from collecting racial data on individuals has sparked opposition from civil rights organizations. Ward Connerly, a University of California regent who championed the end of affirmative action, began collecting signatures this week to put an initiative on the March ballot that would outlaw tracking race in everything from university admissions to the makeup of school districts.
The practice, he says, is divisive in a state where no race holds a majority and people increasingly consider themselves multiracial. Opponents argue that collecting such data is crucial to preventing discrimination and allocating state resources. A group that includes the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, the Asian Law Caucus and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has started a joint research effort to assess the initiative's potential impact.
"Without any statistics on race, ethnicity, color and national origin, agencies won't be able to monitor discrimination in the schools and in employment, even though evidence has shown significant racial disparities in those areas," said Susan Serrano, an attorney with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco. "It's going to be extremely harmful and very far-reaching." Connerly says it will bring about the end of a race-obsessed culture.
"This is significantly going to affect the culture of our society," he said. "Imagine the whole nation of people understanding that we don't come from different races, but that we're part of the whole human family." Connerly's organization, the American Civil Rights Coalition, started Wednesday collecting the 670,000 signatures needed by Aug. 31 to get the initiative on the March 5 ballot. An African-American businessman, Connerly chaired the 1996 Proposition 209 campaign that ended racial preferences in university admissions and state hiring and contracting.
The latest initiative has far greater scope, he said. "It's not only saying you can't treat them differently, you can't classify them," he said. Race-based initiatives have generated some of the state's most contentious disputes. Aside from Proposition 209, voters approved Proposition 227 in 1998 to limit bilingual education and Proposition 187 in 1994 to deny public services to undocumented immigrants. Opponents characterize this latest initiative as the second half of the attack on affirmative action.
"Not only will we take away affirmative action but we don't even want to know what it's doing to our community," said Victor Hwang, managing attorney for the Asian Law Caucus. The proposal, which Connerly calls the "Racial Privacy Initiative," includes several exemptions. It would exempt medical research and, for 10 years, the Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
The two sides disagree on whether police departments intent on eliminating racial profiling would be able to continue collecting racial data on whom officers stop. Connerly's organization says departments could still do that. But there's much it would indisputably end. Although the federal government would still require the University of California system to collect information on race and ethnicity of enrolled students, the initiative would bar the university from asking applicants such questions.
There's no justification, said Kevin Nguyen, executive director of the coalition, which believes the university may be using the information in ways prohibited by Prop. 209. The university says that's not the case. "It's helpful in examining the extent to which the university is serving all the people of the state of California," spokesman Brad Hayward said.
The initiative would prohibit the Department of Insurance from collecting data on whom insurance agencies cover. "There's a presumption that discrimination goes on unless you provide data to the contrary," Nguyen said. "It's rooted in a more widespread mentality among some government bureaucracies -- that racial proportionality equals no discrimination and that racial disproportionality equals discrimination."
Opponents argue the initiative would hinder the attorney general and local law enforcement agencies in documenting hate crimes. They contend it would prevent health organizations from tracking racial and ethnic differences on a host of issues from neonatal mortality rates to diseases like sickle cell anemia.
And it could affect the state's high-stakes school ranking system -- the Academic Performance Index -- which relies heavily on racial data to determine winners and losers in an accountability system that divvies up a $677 million pot to schools that show improvement. But by collecting racial data, Connerly argues, the state is ignoring the sentiments of a contingent that shuns easy categorization. New census data show that nearly 2.7 percent of Californians identify themselves as multiracial, more than most other states.
And in 1999, nearly 14.5 percent of all babies born were multiethnic or multiracial. Increasingly, Connerly noted, applicants to the University of California refuse to give their race, a number that's grown by 91 percent since 1997 to 3,737. Like Prop. 209 did, Connerly believes the initiative has the power to spark discussions nationwide. So do others. "I think if it does pass here, you're going to see similar measures throughout the country, and you will see a federal counterpart to this," Hwang said. Carrie Sturrock covers higher education.
Reach her at 925-943-8155 or csturrock@cctimes.com.
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