Connerly Plans to Take Race Out of the Record

“Connerly Initiative Promotes Racial Balkanization” (Commentary, June 4), the eloquent attack on UC Regent Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy Initiative, does not go far enough. Connerly’s colorblind approach was tried in the 1940s and 1950s but failed, so why does he want to foist a phony nostrum upon Californians?

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers and public agencies to compile data on race and sex. To have any integrity, Connerly should first propose that California secede from the United States before dismantling a commitment to racial justice for which so many gave their lives. In Hawaii, where half the population is racially mixed, overt racial identifications are a matter of pride and thus of mutual respect and aloha (love). Instead of making a self-contradictory assertion that intermarriage in California will make his own proposition moot, Connerly should visit the Aloha State and read about the history to learn what racial harmony is all about.

Michael Haas

Los Angeles

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I’m confused. Connerly now wants any reference to race erased from a great body of the public record (and so will eliminate its huge value as a source of readily available statistical data). I’m guessing that one-on-one racial awareness would continue, unless offices are to be staffed and interviews conducted by the blind, in bold support of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Oh, but then we would need to be unaware of blindness.... I think I’m getting a headache!

And yet the UC regents won the right to set racial quotas for research purposes at UCLA’s University Elementary School in Hunter vs. Regents. Is UC playing both ends against some kind of undefined middle, or is it just mutual ignorance of the right hand and left hand in tracking each other’s activities? I’m very confused.

W. Gregory Stewart

Los Angeles