EDITORIAL
Another Bad Initiative in California
The New York Times
August 4, 2003

A misguided proposition to bar the state government from classifying people by race will now appear on the Oct. 7 ballot in California, complicating an already chaotic election that will also decide whether Gov. Gray Davis will be recalled from office. We hope the voters take the time to focus on this side issue and reject the proposition.

Supporters of the measure call it a step toward a "colorblind society." But the initiative, a brainchild of Ward Connerly, a University of California regent who also led the campaign to ban affirmative action in the state, is the opposite of what it appears. It would, among other things, complicate enforcement of antidiscrimination legislation as well as state programs aimed at improving health care and education for minorities.

The Classification by Race, Ethnicity, Color or National Origin Initiative, as it is formally known, would prevent state entities and other public operations from sorting people by race. That could make it harder to break down test scores by race and thus measure the relative educational performances of whites, blacks and other groups.

The initiative contains exemptions allowing for the racial identification of "medical research subjects" and criminal suspects. These exemptions are too narrow. Critics fear that public health databases would not be able to collect statistics needed to tailor programs to communities with unusual problems, such as exposure to toxic materials. Similarly, even though the law enforcement exemption would allow police to identify individual suspects by race, data could not be accumulated in sufficient quantities to, say, identify a pattern of racial profiling. Nor could the state track patterns of racially motivated hate crimes, though it would still be able to do so for crimes based on gender and sexual orientation.

Early polls suggest that more than half the public supports the initiative — not surprising since almost everyone likes the idea of a colorblind society. California is cursed by initiatives that sound wonderful but turn out to have terrible consequences in the real world. Most of these Trojan horses fail once people get a better idea of what's involved. It's up to opponents to educate the public in the short time remaining before the election.