Perspective: Race distinctions don't really help

When scientists working on mapping the human genome were asked how they chose their human subject, they said it didn't matter who it was since genetically people are 99.9 percent alike.

Funny, with so much in common we do tend to harp on our differences, especially when it comes to race. President Bill Clinton may have tried to start a national dialogue on race to bridge this chasm, but as is typical with this subject, the conversation quickly became a lecture, and pretty soon no one was listening anyway.

Many people of good will think the racial divide in this country is something we have to talk about if we're going to come to any resolution. But I think the opposite might be true. Maybe by casting everything in racial terms we are just exacerbating the problem, creating a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe, racial unity would come more easily if we stopped talking about race. And not only stopped talking about it, but stopped paying it any mind at all -- stopped tracking it, studying it or categorizing people by it.

This is another radical idea by the man who tapped into the national discomfort with racial preferences and sparked a modern movement: Ward Connerly. The California businessman who has spearheaded voter initiative campaigns to rid government-sponsored affirmative action now has a new proposal: end racial classification. He intends to offer it as an initiative on the California ballot in spring 2002.

In his essay "Towards a 21st century vision of race: Why we should get rid of the boxes altogether," Connerly argues that the very existence of racial classifications suggests there are inherent differences among people of different races, giving people a rationale for discrimination. Connerly believes: "racial discrimination and racial classification are two sides of the same coin."

As a practical matter, our race is becoming difficult to determine. Increasingly, we are a nation of (and I mean this in a good way) mongrels -- a testament to the success of our great melting-pot experiment. Even the Census Bureau has acknowledged the changing demographics of Americans and for the first time in the 2000 Census allowed people of blended racial backgrounds to check multiple race-identity boxes. (Of course, then the government ignored these results by counting people as black even if they identified themselves as a combination of many races.)

So why bother with this inexact, ill-fitting categorization? The government collects racial data for a variety of legal and sociological reasons. But Connerly argues that racial categories are harmful even when the government's purpose is to lift groups disadvantaged in the past. By doling out benefits based on race, group members are less likely to strive for personal excellence.

"A system of racial classification robs those on the wrong side of the classification of the intellectual and moral characteristics necessary for survival. In their drive to gain or maintain race privileges, they focus on things entirely outside their sphere of influence -- skin color -- and ignore what is within it -- individual development," writes Connerly.

Claude Steele, psychology professor at Stanford University, who is an ideological opponent of Connerly, has nonetheless conducted research that adds credence to Connerly's thesis. Steele has studied what is called the "stereotype threat," the fear of being unfairly judged on the basis of one's group affiliations. In experiments on the stereotype that blacks are intellectually inferior, he found that the gap between black and white college students on aptitude and IQ tests disappears when students are told the tests are not intended to measure intelligence. At the same time, the gap in scores returns as soon as you ask students to identify their race.

This suggests the more anonymous and race-blind the measure, the less threatening it is to members of racial minorities. Steele found that when young people are convinced that people won't judge their performance through the filter of race, they are more likely to succeed as individuals.

Connerly sees his initiative as a way to jump start a cultural shift in that direction: "At some stage we have to consciously say as a society that the profound change in our demographics has rendered our rigid system of racial classification obsolete." He says his views have been formed through personal experience, "When you have been in a relationship that is "interracial,' either dating or marriage, it gives you an entirely different perspective on race and you realize how irrelevant the lines we draw really are."

Connerly's view is heartening and optimistic. I would rather live in his world vision than the way we live today where everything in society -- education, employment, public safety, health, politics, etc. -- is defined in divisive racial terms. But when I pick up the day's newspaper and see a serious allegation that the Drug Enforcement Administration trained state police to target minority drivers as drug couriers, and an overblown claim that Florida's voting process is racially discriminatory because minority-heavy counties are more likely to use the now-discredited punch-card ballot system, I'm not sure we're there yet.

Back to Perspective

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

From the Times
Opinion page