Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative

As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, before I began writing on race, I lost count of how many times I started to write a mash letter to University of California regent Ward Connerly. Emerging from a lifetime's conditioning to see racial preferences as justice incarnate, I came to see Mr. Connerly as a hero for spearheading the outlawing of race-based set-asides in California with Proposition 209 in 1996.

I am today as devoted as Mr. Connerly to combatting the sullen, fruitless identity politics now passing as racial uplift in America. One would then expect that I would welcome Mr. Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative, a proposition intended for the November ballot that would eliminate the classification of people by race in government documents, ridding us of having to indicate our "race" in the famous little boxes on application forms. But despite this proposal's initial temptations, its passage would cause more problems than it would solve.


Certainly our ultimate goal must be to "get beyond race," and this can only happen when Americans view themselves as people rather than as eternally conflicted members of ethnic groups. In many places, we are well on our way to this ideal. The rise in interracial marriages, for example, has created millions of new Americans who will likely resist attempts to shoehorn them into increasingly meaningless racial categories. Ours is a society more heterogenous and tolerant by the day.

But these people are the future. We, on the other hand, are stuck in the present, where for too many the "melting pot" metaphor has morphed into a "salad bowl." Gone are the days when blacks typically begged to be seen simply as "people." Today, the fantasy reigns of a nebulously conceived "black community," and the prospect of its disappearance is processed as "co-optation" by an oppressor race. Successful African-Americans are taught that their most urgent task is to maintain a "black identity"; legions of black women decry interracial relationships as white women "taking our men," and so on.

The tragedy of this is obvious. Any nation where groups co-exist separately in perpetuity is one infected by sharp socioeconomic discrepancies or hostile caste boundaries. Where these erode, people fall in love across interethnic lines, marry, and produce hybrid children. Human history knows not a single exception.

Wouldn't the swift passage of the Racial Privacy Initiative, which needs 1.1 million signatures by April 17 to qualify for the ballot, speed up the process of getting beyond race? After all, Mr. Connerly's H-bomb approach to ending racial preferences through Proposition 209 was brilliant and necessary. Those who screamed "resegregation" four years ago have now been soundly refuted. Minority applicants were less barred from California's universities than reshuffled: Many were admitted to solid second-tier schools rather than Berkeley or UCLA, while minority admits to flagship school Berkeley have risen every year since the law took effect.

So why not take the same approach with those pernicious little boxes? Tempting analysis, but flawed in this case. In fact, the Racial Privacy Initiative risks impeding our path toward a nation of "Americans" for two reasons:

First, one of the most crucial tools we need to make our way down this path is copious statistical data. I have found that there are few things more effective in weaning African-Americans away from victimologist ideology than hard data revealing that less than a quarter of black families are poor; that the discrepancy between black and white salaries is all but eliminated once we factor in regional wage differences and the disproportionate numbers of black women on welfare; that, in 1996, one in 12 black male professionals were managers.

Unfortunately, it is not enough to sing of role models like Colin Powell and Oprah Winfrey. Thinking blacks have been taught to be wary of "anecdotes" as dangerous distractions from "the real deal"; an illusion reigns that even residual racism puts a break on all but the extraordinary or lucky. Nor can one sway black audiences by appealing to the Constitution and the American tradition of individual achievement. Since the late 1960s, too often "black identity" has meant a distrust of the philosophical foundations of a country which once kept black people as slaves.

The statistics that trace the true course of black progress, therefore, are the best weapon we have against the crippling effects of victimology. When I speak on race, I so often see wary black audience members open up on hearing these numbers that I cannot embrace the prospect of such data no longer being collected.

Second, the Racial Privacy Initiative would interfere with another imperative in our quest to truly "get beyond race"; namely, working against black Americans' habit of voting only for the Democratic Party out of a sense that Republicans are somehow "anti-black." Because of this misconception, Democrats have little reason to work substantially for a group whose vote is unconditionally guaranteed, while Republicans justifiably wonder why they should expend political capital for people whose vote they cannot attract. The result is, effectively, political disempowerment -- which in turn further fuels black alienation.

Clearly blacks must spread their votes more widely. Yet the Racial Privacy Initiative would provide the victicrat squad with one more way to tar Republicans as against black progress, misleading African-Americans into the same self-defeating voting patterns we saw in the last presidential election. For better or for worse, most African-Americans today will not vote for those who question their desire to be "black" rather than American, which those little boxes fulfill.

Yet it would be hard to say that the silly little boxes are harming black people in any real way; surely larger factors are responsible for shoring up the "black community" ideology. Mr. Connerly will doubtless go down in American history as a hero while NAACP President Kweisi Mfume will be lucky to merit a footnote -- yet the Racial Privacy Initiative is, in the end, symbolic rather than proactive. And to be effective, social policies must split the difference between the moral ideals obvious to the few and the historical contingencies distracting the many.

Beyond the vocal fringe peddling victimology, most African-Americans are skeptical but open to reason. Ironically, we need to continue classifying people by the avowedly discriminating category of race, if for no other reason than the statistics garnered are so undeniably positive.

Mr. McWhorter is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and the author, most recently, of "The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language" (W.H. Freeman, 2002).