WSJ: Affirmative-Action Opponents Seek A Ban on Collection..

Affirmative-Action Opponents Seek A Ban on Collection of Ethnic Data

By ROBERT TOMSHO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


Stung by last week's Supreme Court decision allowing race to continue to be
considered in college admissions, affirmative-action opponents plan to
attack such diversity programs by denying them a crucial commodity: data.

Their first battleground will be California, where, as early as this fall,
voters will be asked to decide on a "Racial Privacy Initiative." If passed,
it would bar state and local government entities from maintaining databases
related to citizens' race and ethnicity and -- except where the federal
government requires it -- even collecting such information on forms
involving school enrollment, job applications and government contracting.

The measure is opposed by a far-flung group that ranges from civil-rights
advocates who fear it will block efforts to stop racial profiling to
health-care providers concerned that it will hamper medical research. The
initiative has "a lot to do with how important health, education and
law-enforcement programs are delivered," says Jay Zeigler, co-director of
the Coalition for an Informed California.

Still, there are signs that many people are increasingly reluctant to give
up such information about themselves, and in California, early polls
indicate that the initiative has the backing of 48% of the state's voters,
even if many also say they are unsure of its details. Affirmative-action
opponents hope a victory will stir up sympathetic legislative activity and
ballot-box initiatives elsewhere. "I think it could spark a firestorm, state
by state," says Edward Blum, senior fellow at the Center for Equal
Opportunity, a Sterling, Va., advocacy group opposed to affirmative action.

The California initiative's leading advocate is Sacramento businessman Ward
Connerly, who was also a leader of the successful 1996 campaign to pass
California's Proposition 209, which bars government entities in the state
from using racial preferences in hiring, contracting and education. Mr.
Connerly's efforts inspired voters in Washington state to pass a similar
initiative two years later, and in 2000, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush changed his
state's university admissions procedures after Mr. Connerly threatened to
launch an initiative campaign there.


In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling, Mr. Connerly is already assessing
whether to launch a second initiative campaign, in Michigan. Collecting the
data necessary to categorize people by their backgrounds only heightens
race's divisive influence upon society, he maintains. "I think deeply
embedded in the psyche of the American people is the notion that we want to
be colorblind," says Mr. Connerly, whose ancestors included Irish, French,
African-Americans and Choctaw Indians.

Although she is Caucasian, Jessica Peck, of Arvada, Colo., couldn't agree
more. When Ms. Peck applied to attend graduate school at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore two years ago, she refused to check off the box
indicating her racial and ethnic background. "We are just too diverse as
students and as Americans to have a simple race box to tell the government
who we are," says Ms. Peck. She subsequently earned a master's degree in
government from Johns Hopkins and is now director of the Campus
Accountability Project, an advocacy group in Golden, Colo., that seeks to
end the collection of racial data as part of college admissions.

By law, public and private colleges and universities are required to ask
prospective students about their race and ethnicity on applications and to
report the results to the federal government. Students aren't legally bound
to answer such questions, however, and a growing percentage don't.

Nearly 18% of those who took the SAT in 2002 didn't respond to questions
about their race and ethnicity, up from less than 10% in 1997. The College
Board, the association that administers the SAT, uses such data to ensure
that test questions are fair to all races. Schools also buy lists of SAT
test takers to use for recruiting purposes.

Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, 9.5% of the students
admitted for this fall provided no ethnic data, up from 6% a decade ago.
Johns Hopkins officials estimate that one out of five of its applicants
doesn't reveal his or her race or ethnicity and say that most of the "no
reports" appear to be Caucasian and Asian-Americans who apparently believe
that reporting their race will play against them.

Opposition to the gathering of racial and ethnic information has not always
been ground occupied by conservatives, reverse-discrimination activists or
cagey college applicants. After World War II, early United Nations
proclamations denounced the sort of government racial classifications that
the Nazis had employed. During the civil-rights era, liberals argued for
banning application photographs, which were used to screen African-American
students out of many universities.

More recently, the issue has divided scholars. In 1998, the American
Anthropological Association issued a statement denouncing the whole concept
of "race" as a mode of classification "devised to rationalize European
attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples." Last year,
that helped prompt the American Sociological Association to issue a defense
of collecting and studying racial data.

The loss of such information would be a huge blow to efforts to ferret out
discrimination, says Troy Duster, a New York University sociologist. "It may
well be true that we are all alike at the DNA level," he adds, "but that
doesn't stop the police from profiling or the bank from giving out loans due
to pigmentation."

Observers say the California initiative has yet to create much of a
political stir there, but that could change quickly. Initiative supporters
have collected enough signatures for the issue to appear on the ballot in
the next statewide election.

That would be in March 2004 unless opponents of Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat,
succeed in their effort to hold a statewide recall vote this fall. If held,
such a recall election is expected to draw conservative voters to the polls
in large numbers. "That will be helpful to the initiative," says Sherry
Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern California.
"I think it could easily pass."

Copyright 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Abe Kohen" <akohen.DeleteThis@xenon.stanford.edu> wrote in message news:<bdudp7$10rsur$1@ID-102750.news.dfncis.de>...
> Affirmative-Action Opponents Seek A Ban on Collection of Ethnic Data
>
> By ROBERT TOMSHO
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

It's not a bad idea, but people are so short-sighted. To do this
right we must really make it the case that every "large decision" can
be made in a completely race neutral way. Of course this implies some
of the things I've talked about in other threads (complete equality of
opportunity from prior to birth on), but race should be completely
hidden from getting loans, college admissions, getting a job.

This implies that face to face interviews are gone. Interviews can be
done through a computer system that masks race. Names would have to
be omitted, in favor of a good hash. Address would also have to be
omitted. Past high school and college attendance would also have to
be omitted. Standardized tests would likely have to take their place.

With that said, I think we need to equalize opportunity first though.

I've yet to see anyone put together a proposal for a race-neutral
world. It might be a vision, but these steps in the dark seem to be
just randomizing what a goal might be.

KSG