Racial Privacy InitiativeDiscussion Ward Connerly's

Racial Privacy Initiative

Discussion Ward Connerly's most recent brain child, I told a friend (a right-wing watcher so good, I suspect it's part of his job, though I never asked) that some Conservatives opposed it because it would make opposing divieristy programs like that of the University of Michigan and Boston's public school program harder by denying them de facto "evidence." He'd never seen it, and I forgot where I read it, so it was off to Daypop and Google.

Daypop led me to VDARE (the less said about which, the better) and a post on The Hoosier Review which I could only read in Daypop's cache. It links approvingly to another VDARE post.

Google led me to a non-vomitous John Derbyshire article in NRO that discusses the debate on the right.

What is surprising, and makes for a good debate, is that some conservatives are against RPI. They have two sets of arguments: one respectable and one less so. The more respectable argument is: "Without hard data on race differences in attainment and the progress of racial minorities, the race hucksters ? the Sharptons, Jacksons, McKinneys, and Mfumes ? will be able to make any claims they like, and nobody will be able to refute them." The less respectable argument goes something like: "Real progress in dealing with racial issues won't be possible until the 'no such thing as race' dogmas have been decisively refuted. You can't build sensible policies on falsehoods, and you can't refute falsehoods without data. If you pretend that every group is equally capable of everything, or even just equally interested in everything, you get into absurdities and counterproductive policies ? look at the Title IX fiasco."

The counterargument, put forward by Connerly himself, is that our governments need to stop taking notice of our race (or, in the case of "Hispanics," pseudo-race) as decisively as they stopped taking notice of our religion when the First Amendment was ratified. It's none of their business. True, it's difficult for our governments to wean themselves off their race fixation, which is as old as the Constitution itself. And we all know that once they have their fingernails dug into any one part of your flesh, it's awfully hard to pry them away. But if we could once get government people out of the race business, we might have a fair shot at racial peace, as we have had religious peace for 209 years.

Any Jewish readers out there? Have we had religious peace in this country for 209 years? If so, whence the ADL and Abraham Foxman?

Any Islamic readers out there? Do we have religious peace?

Then there's the Christian Identity Movement. And didn't folks take particular note of JFK's Catholicism?

This is off the top of my head, and no one should think I'm equating these religions—but the fact that I have to make that disclaimer is significant. I don't really know what this has to do with RPI or how that should be reflected in Connerly's argument, but I suspect what he calls religious peace is actually an overwheming predominance of one religious traditions to the point that (for the most part: see ADL) the others are just written off as part of the lunatic fringe. Given the demographic trends, that's just not going to happen as regards race.

posted by Prometheus 6 at 6/5/2003 07:37:35 AM |

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Posted by Prometheus 6 on June 5, 2003 - 7:37am :: Old Site Archive
 
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