Hutchinson is a second-year graduate student in the Asian
American studies department.
By Phil Hutchinson
I am responding to Ian Eisner’s column (“RPI helps
create a colorblind U.S.,” Viewpoint, April 10th). A
“colorblind” U.S. is the hope and goal of many
Americans. Many understand the dangers of submitting to the status
quo, and I applaud Ward Connerly and his conservative
contemporaries for their attempt to bring our society to that
as-yet elusive ideal of color blindness.
However, the Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI) is not the solution
to this perennial dilemma. In fact, its implications are
perniciously retrogressive. Eisner likewise demonstrates in his
article a faulty understanding of race and the way it operates in
our society.
To debunk the arguments of the RPI, let me construct the
following scenario: the year is 2020, and imagine that you, the
reader, were born in the year 2002, the same year of the passage of
the RPI. You were raised in Brentwood, where you have lived and
stayed all your life. Because government policies are colorblind in
accordance with the rules of the RPI, there is little talk of race
and while you “privately” know that you are a member of
a particular racial group, you rarely think about its impact on
your life; you are never asked anything about it by others.
You decide to take a trip around the various areas of Los
Angeles and its immediate surroundings. Your first stop is Simi
Valley. The tract homes are beautiful, the lawns are all trimmed,
and only one building is taller than two stories. Mothers play with
their children at the pristine park nearby, and there is little
sign of unrest or crime. You realize that this is a wonderful place
to raise a child and make a mental note of Simi Valley as a
possible destination.
Your next stop is South Central Los Angeles. Here, smog proves a
ubiquitous element that almost prevents you from seeing the
dilapidated homes whose windows are boarded if not barred. You
witness unkempt lawns and omnipresent litter. In the distance you
hear gunshots. South Central is quickly crossed off your list and
you vow never to return.
One matter did catch your attention when comparing these two
places. You could not help but notice that most of the people you
saw in each place were of different racial groups. Since you rarely
think about race (because it is never presented to you by the
outside world), you have little way of explaining what you saw. You
have heard of past days where your race indeed mattered, for
example, when black people were enslaved, but you’ve also
heard this was just a minor blemish on the history of our wonderful
country. Didn’t we debunk race as an anthropologically
bankrupt concept and thus disallow governmental classification of
race because of the 2002 RPI?
You begin wondering why this is. Various ideas come to mind. The
people in South Central, who aren’t mowing their lawns or
going to college and are participating in crime, might have
something wrong with them! After all, everyone has equal
opportunity in this country. The RPI proves that to you: after all,
race is simply a “private” matter. So if those people
in South Central would just work hard like everyone else,
wouldn’t they succeed too?
And deep inside your soul comes the inkling that those people in
those particular racial groups may be inferior. You clearly see
that members of certain racial groups live in certain areas and
behave in certain ways. Whether you believe it or not is beside the
point: race has “become” real, and it now
“seems” real because people that belong to certain
racial groups tend to live vastly different lives and ascribe to
vastly different realities.
Though the government is colorblind, you find yourself
thoroughly unable to not think in terms of race because of the
differences you have seen during your trip to Simi Valley and South
Central. Your attitudes toward these racial groups are thus
irreparably altered, despite the fact that you have been told time
and again that race, via the RPI, is simply a private matter, and
nothing more. You are now “thinking” in terms of race
because you have seen the material reality attached to its
members.
There are many issues a brief story such as this can never
capture. The RPI denies the previous history of racism and our
continuing need to recognize that our society has been thoroughly
shaped by notions of race and racism. The presence of an act such
as the RPI will make the material disparities between racial groups
almost impossible to explain, because we will have convinced
ourselves that race is a thing of the past, and that we have now
moved “beyond” race.
While Eisner correctly observes that multiracial births are
“up 40 percent since 1980,” he provides no historical
reasoning as to why this would be so, ignoring the laws which
prevented members of different races from marrying. If those racist
laws had never existed, the racial demographics of our country
would be vastly different. In another vein, if it had been illegal
since the inception of our country to discriminate on the basis of
race, it wouldn’t be that blacks largely live in South
Central ghetto poverty and that wealthy suburbs such as Simi Valley
are overly populated by whites. But since this past discrimination
unfortunately happened, it altered the racial landscape we live in
and we now see its effects. Like it or not, we will continue to
“see” race, with or without the RPI. If we believe that
racism has nothing to do with the current state of affairs, we are
simply lying to ourselves and denying our checkered history.
But this is exactly what the RPI purports to do; its very tenets
demand our belief in the idea that we currently live in a
racially-just society and that it is now these “racial
profiteers,” and not the white power structure, who are to
blame for our continued racial problems. Though the blame has been
deftly shifted with an ideological sleight-of-hand, the quandary
remains.
In Eisner’s words, the RPI “is a critical step on
the path to a colorblind society.” But is this really what
will happen?