Sep 15, 2003
Those annoying “little boxesâ€
Why does California need Proposition 54?
Well, according to RPI’s website (http://racialprivacy.org), “Race should become a private matter that is no business of government’s. Think how refreshing it would be to throw out the entire system of checking little boxes.”
Those damn little check boxes! Wouldn’t it be so much nicer if race and ethnicity could be blurred and obscured to the periphery, so that they were no longer factors that divided us?
Wouldn’t it also be nice if our world leaders could all meet together once a month to hold hands and sing camp songs around a fire…? Imagine that, we would have never had the destruction of 9/11 if Osama had been holding Dubyah’s hand on a regular basis…!
But let’s not confuse the issues. However well-intentioned this Proposition 54 might have been at inception, what’s appearing on the ballot is a confused jumble of crap that’s going to confuse state and federal legislators, law enforcement and the health care community alike.
Jean Ross, from the California Budget Project, argues that four questions should be posed in consideration of Prop. 54:
1) Does the state’s collection and use of voluntarily provided data on race and ethnicity offer social, public health and research benefits?
2) Would Proposition 54 limit the state’s ability to evaluate the effectiveness of public programs or identify disparities in the availability of public programs and services?
3) Would Proposition 54 limit the ability of faculty and staff at the UC and CSU to engage in research?
4) Would Proposition 54 limit or prevent public access to all data that is collected by the state?
