California’s 2003 Racial Privacy Initiative sought to shield private racial discrimination from state scrutiny

Evidence

The Racial Privacy Initiative was a ballot proposition placed before the California electorate in the November election of 2003. It was intended to restrict state government from collecting any racially identified data save principally for criminal justice investigations (police profiling) or certain sorts of medical research. It was designed to make it impossible to track ongoing racial discrimination across a wide range of social indices, including residential, educational, and employment. While the proposition failed significantly to garner electoral support, its terms of conception should be noted. The Racial Privacy Initiative was not a proposal to outlaw racial discrimination, to address past or to redress structural racism. It was, to put it bluntly, the “protection of private racial discrimination initiative,” the undertaking not just to privatize racism but to protect ongoing discrimination in private, to restrict it from scrutiny and from intervention. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1767

Categorization

• XREF: A hard, verifiable instance of the erasure-of-recording mechanism that destroys evidence of discrimination — weakens any contact/institution data thesis relying on official racial accounting. — connects to: California’s Racial Privacy Initiative would have blocked tracking of discrimination data — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1767; Banning racial data collection protects private discrimination from scrutiny — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1767; Eliminating racial data collection protects rather than ends racial discrimination (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• California’s Racial Privacy Initiative would have blocked tracking of discrimination data #corroborates (1.00) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1767
• Banning racial data collection protects private discrimination from scrutiny #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1767
• Eliminating racial data collection protects rather than ends racial discrimination #expands (0.92)
• Privatizing race frees racism to circulate unchecked in private life #expands (0.90)
• Refusing to count by race masks ongoing structural racial restriction #expands (0.85)