Keeping it real
By J.P. Gownder
September 1, 2003
Colin Powell is not black. Nor is Halle Berry. Tiger Woods, with an Asian mother and mixed-race African American father, isn't black either.
At least, this is the reductionist assumption underlying Proposition 54, the so-called Racial Privacy Initiative, on the Oct. 7 ballot. The initiative would prohibit any government agency in California from collecting data on race, ethnicity, color or national origin.
Supporters argue that, among other things, there's no longer a rationale for collecting racial data because the number of mixed-race citizens is growing. They claim that "a remarkable blurring of racial lines" has rendered the concept of race meaningless. And they say that by asking Californians about their race, the government "sanctions racial classifications," forcing an increasingly multiracial populace into traditional categories of "hyphenated Americans." Yet neither race nor its effects will be dissipated by a ballot measure that seduces with a simple message of a "colorblind society."
