California’s Racial Privacy Initiative would have blocked tracking of discrimination data

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

• QUESTION: The irony of the privacy framing — erasing race data presented as protecting privacy while actually protecting discriminators from scrutiny — is worth probing further against the logic of contemporary data-privacy movements.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘colorblind’ and ‘privacy’ rhetoric as dismantling the evidentiary infrastructure needed to prove ongoing discrimination — how data-removal functions as a deregulation of the racial order.
• XREF: connects to: California’s 2003 Racial Privacy Initiative sought to shield private racial discrimination from state scrutiny — 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