Making Colorblindness a Reality

Sometimes you are accused of being what you really are. Recently -- and dismissively -- I have been accused of being "colorblind" on matters of racial policy. This is a charge of naiveté. To want public policy that is blind to the race and ethnicity of citizens is seen by many as a kind of social libertarianism, too preciously principled for reality. How can we know the reality of race in America if, out of a perfectionistic idealism, we refuse to see it?

But now I will share this accusation with many of my fellow Californians and others who, from a distance, support Ward Connerly's new Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI). This initiative, which is gaining signatures for next November's ballot in California, will prohibit state agencies from classifying Californians by race, ethnicity, color or national origin for any purpose having to do with public education, contracting, or employment.

This means that in California there would be no more of those "little boxes" for different races and ethnicities that so often also mean different fates. Schools and universities would not be able to report the racial make-up of their student bodies or make policy based on such information. The Department of Motor Vehicles, the state hospitals and the park service could not say what percentage of their work force is Hispanic, or how many office managers were black. Preferential affirmative action would be impossible to practice.

The California department of education would no longer be able to show us test score gaps or differences in dropout rates between white, black, Hispanic and Asian students either. There would be only low scorers and high scorers without a racial or ethnic correlation. Dropout rates would be high or low by school, by socio-economic status, or by region, but not by race or ethnicity. And the state might channel jobs to fledgling contractors, but not because those contractors were black or Asian or white.

We are not used to this in America. We are used to a delicate balance of power between two categories of racial information: data that shows minorities as victims of unfairness and data that shows them not to be. Are most black fourth graders in the District of Columbia public schools unable to read because of a structural racism that keeps their schools underfunded; or is it because their adequately paid black teachers neglect to teach them and their parents don't care? We all need numbers to fight this war. And we are used to having them.

I think the underlying problem goes back to a great mistake that America made in the late '60s. We decided to give resources and preferential treatment more to victims of racism than to people who simply suffer cultural and economic deprivations. Even President Johnson's Great Society programs used poverty largely as a proxy for racial oppression. But the regime of race-based affirmative action and welfare "rights" that began in the early '70s was justified primarily by past discrimination. More and more racism was the lever one pushed to get entitlements and preferences, and cultural deprivation became more important as evidence of racism than as a problem to be overcome in its own right.
Thus, claims of racism became more profitable than claims of deprivation. And this, in turn, became an incentive to one of the greatest corruptions of American social reform in the last 40 years: the dogma that disparities between blacks and whites always prove racial victimization. If blacks don't get into selective colleges or qualify for home loans or ace high-stakes tests at the same rate as whites, then racism is proven and preferential treatment is justified.

In responding more to racism than to poverty, America not only made racial disparities profitable but also generated a vast civil-rights grievance industry that has been far more obsessed with finding disparities than with helping people overcome deprivations. In fact this priority means that the grievance industry can win money and preferences without ever having to show progress against poverty. This is why civil-rights organizations don't inspire blacks to higher achievement, but instead hammer away at the government and foundations for money in the name of racism. It takes hard work and fearless leadership to dent poverty in even a small way; but racism brings money with no accountability to real world achievement.

And then, arrayed against all this is a much smaller "conservative" debunking industry that tirelessly argues that today racial disparities are rarely the result of ongoing racism. We are dissenters from the corrupt priority of chasing the profits in racism over human development. And our struggle is hard because this priority literally sets the terms of social virtue in America so that conservatives always look bad when measured against it.

But, in truth, conservatives long ago won the intellectual argument. What is needed now are precisely the kind of "citizen uprisings" that are represented in that infamous series of California statewide initiatives -- 209, against racial preferences; 227, against bilingual education; and now RPI, prohibiting the state from classifying citizens by race. Here, argument is pushed into reality. Here there is a kind of freedom movement not altogether unlike the original civil-rights movement in which democratic principles were also used to break up a racialist hegemony.

In the 19th century Frederick Douglass made possibly the best intellectual argument ever written for black freedom, but it was another 100 years before a movement penetrated the glib racialism of the establishment, appealed to a deeper sense of moral right in people, and won new anti-racialist laws.

In itself RPI is a rather modest proposal. It does not reach beyond California nor into the private sector. And it exempts law enforcement and medicine altogether since undercover police work and medical treatment often appropriately require knowledge of race. But, in another way, it is not modest at all since it radically extends democratic freedom with a new idea: freedom of race.

If RPI passes next fall, the state of California will be the first government in American history to be largely without the authority to classify its citizens by race. That authority would transfer to the citizens of California, who would be the first Americans with the sole authority to privately decide their race without accountability to their state. This is radical because it is not just the "option" not to check a box; it is a transfer of authority from state to individual so the individual comes to possess a brand new freedom. The state loses an intrusive and -- if history is any indication -- an abusive power.

I like the new personal freedom here, but I like even more the fact that it transforms a black fourth grader who can't read into simply a fourth grader who can't read. It goes toward lifting the veil of race from deprivation. Now we can get out the phonics books and teach reading, and forget about "culturally specific learning styles." And all the multicultural musings of state bureaucrats would become as unenforceable as their religious musings.

There can be no principled opposition to RPI. Even politicians don't run from it as much as from the fierce grievance groups that oppose it. Finally RPI can only be smeared as naive or impractical, as if sophistication in America requires collaboration with racialism. But in this case, it's better to be a little naive than afraid.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author of "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America" (HarperCollins, 1998).