Vote No on Proposition 54 [Continued]




Maybe some will argue that the examples I have illustrated are limited to 
only police departments and are not representative of U.S. society as a 
whole.  First, U.S. police departments are a representation of U.S. society, 
in that they are composed of its citizens.  However, the reason I have 
focused on criminal justice and police departments is because they are 
among the most concrete examples of government entities that have 
historically and contemporarily displayed racist attitudes and practices.  
It is important to show that racism is infused into our society, not only 
individually, through a person's prejudice and actions as a result, but 
collectively, in our country's institutions, such as police departments, 
businesses and education.

Which brings me to the focus of this article:  Proposition 54, also known 
as the Racial Privacy Initiative.  In the upcoming elections, we 
Californian's will decide, through this proposition, whether the state will 
continue to use racial information to improve the lives of those that have 
been historically discriminated against.  I admit, that last sentence was a 
bit loaded.  Proposition 54 seeks to legally prohibit classification by race, 
by state and other public entities.  Nicademiks is flatly against Prop. 54, 
just as it is against Proposition 187 and 209. 

But Rafa, doesn't that sound like a great idea, to do away with the gathering 
of racial information as a method of achieving the color-blind society that 
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once dreamed about?  Umm….No!  Like most 
justice-loving individuals in this country, I too would like to live one day in 
that society that Dr. King once dream of, but the harsh reality is that we are 
still leaps and bounds away from that goal.  And pretending that we live in 
that color-blind society today will not alleviate the injustices that remain from 
the past and the injustices that still occur today.

How are the examples of racism I gave earlier in the article related to 
Proposition 54?  My main point is that racism still exists today.  It cannot 
be claimed that racism is a thing of the past.  It is not limited to the 
examples I gave, but instead is infused into all aspects of society, 
including business, medicine and education.  What Proposition 54 
seeks to do is prohibit the gathering of racial information completely, 
or close to it.  This means that police departments will not be as effective
investigating abuses by officers that may have been motivated by race, 
such as the Dialo and Louima cases.  This also means that medical 
organizations will not be allowed to gather information about an individual's 
racial background.  This is devastating in the sense that certain diseases 
tend to affect certain communities, and the lack of this information will 
negatively effect how medicine is administered, to everyone including 
whites.  Lastly, our educational system may have legally moved away 
from the segregated, separate but equal philosophy, but we still live in a 
society that is separate and unequal.  With white flight to the suburbs, 
our society is still racially segregated.  And inner city schools cannot 
compete with their suburban counterparts.  In essence, we still live in 
a separate but unequal society that Brown v. Board of Education sought 
to destroy.  In a country that promotes itself on the claim that it provides 
equal opportunity for all, our education system flies in the face of that 
belief.   

So why should we vote against Proposition 54?  For all those reasons 
illustrated above.  Proposition 54 is about racial issues as a whole.  It 
seeks to eliminate the consideration of race in all aspects of American life, 
starting with government.  It wants to make race irrelevant.  But race matters!  
Although the proposition sounds reasonable by name, the effects would 
actually hamper the ability of our society to combat discrimination and 
abuses based on race.  Medical association, civil rights groups, educational 
organizations, and law enforcement have all opposed the proposed measure.  

We do not live in a color-blind society.  Proof of that has been established 
time and again through studies that take race into consideration.  If race 
is taken out of the research equation, how would we know that inequality 
exists?  How would we know that certain communities face discrimination 
with regards to housing, criminal justice, medicine and education?  How 
would we know if we are moving towards that color-blind society so many 
of us long for?  The truth is without this information, we would not know that 
injustice exists on a structural level.  It seems to me that the proponents of 
the proposition do not want a color-blind society, but instead want a society 
that is blind…to racial injustice.  So don't be blind sighted, get educated 
and vote no on Proposition 54.  
  


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- September 16, 2003 

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