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This article does not need to be excerpted, as it does not violate the WP/LAT Exlusion.

Everybody knows -- but no one wants to say -- that the Democratic Party has become the party of special interest bigots and racial dividers. It runs the one-party state that controls public services in every major inner city, including the corrupt and failing school systems in which half the students -- mainly African American and Hispanic -- are denied a shot at the American dream. It is the party of race preferences which separate American citizens on the basis of skin color providing privileges to a handful of ethnic and racial groups in a nation of nearly a thousand. The Democratic Party has shown that it will go to the wall to preserve the racist laws which enforce these preferences, and to defend the racist school systems that destroy the lives of millions of children every year.

On the other side of the aisle, the Republican Party has shown itself to be tongue-tied and lame-brained when it comes to opposing this racist stain on American life. Republicans rarely mention the millions of young victims claimed by the Democrats' racist school policies every year. They are too cowardly to openly challenge race preferences that constitute a true American apartheid. Consequently, for nearly a decade it has been left to one man and those he inspires to take on these injustices and he is doing so again in the upcoming California recall election.

Ward Connerly has placed Proposition 54 - - the Racial Privacy Initiative -- on the October California ballot. The new law would bar the government from inquiring into a citizen's racial identity. The Constitution does not mention race or use the words "black" and "white" to describe its citizens. The census was devised by the founders to set the number of congressional districts, not to balkanize America into racial categories. Democrats have turned it into a system to define Americans by skin color. Every Democrat legislator and every so-called "liberal" spokesperson is opposed to Connerly's proposition because it would threaten their apartheid programs. The time has come to challenge this system and set Americans -- particularly African and Hispanic Americans who its prime victims -- free.

[The following editorial appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 4]:

The Color of California

As if the unprecedented effort to recall California Governor Gray Davis isn't enough excitement for one special election, the campaign promises some racial fireworks as well.

Sharing ballot space on October 7 with Mr. Davis's would-be successors will be Proposition 54, also known as the Racial Privacy Initiative. The measure prohibits state and local government entities from collecting and using racial data. It reads, in part: "The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment." For champions of identity politics, and the media are certainly among them, these are fighting words.

The main proponent of Prop. 54 is Ward Connerly, the University of California Regent behind the state's successful Prop. 209, which banned public-sector racial discrimination in 1996 and prompted copycat initiatives elsewhere in the country, most recently in Michigan.

Mr. Connerly has said the goal of his current initiative is to get the state government "out of the racial classification business" and move us one step closer to a colorblind government. The backers of Prop. 54, he says, "seek a California that is free from government racism and race-conscious decision making."

That sounds like a core American aspiration, or at least it was until racial preferences became a political industry. Mr. Connerly can take comfort in the fact that many of his current critics -- educators, civil rights groups, Democratic public officials, liberal journalists -- also predicted catastrophe if Prop. 209 passed. They claimed, for instance, that minority enrollment at state
universities would plummet without racial preferences. It didn't happen. Both minority enrollment and, more importantly, minority graduation rates, have increased.

Now these same folks are claiming that if Californians aren't forced to check off some hyphenated-American box on a government form, medical research will suffer and anti-discrimination laws will go unenforced.

Not true. The Racial Privacy Initiative makes exceptions for data collection in both areas. If black mothers in Oakland are suffering uniquely high infant-mortality rates, nothing in Mr. Connerly's measure would prevent a proper response. Nor would it have any bearing on the large body of federal law -- the Voting Rights Act or the No Child Left Behind Act -- that require the collection
of racial data for enforcement purposes.

Some of our friends (scholars James Q. Wilson and John McWhorter) object to Prop. 54 on the grounds that racial statistics are essential to social scientists like themselves. They have a valid point that statistics showing racial progress can rebut political demagogues.

But that must be measured against the damage done by explicit state endorsement of racial categorization. As for the statistics, Prop. 54 affects only state entities. Reams of racial data would continue to flow from federal agencies -- like the Census Bureau and the Education Department -- or any nongovernment sources in California wishing to provide such information.

It is true that these limitations make Mr. Connerly's crusade largely symbolic. Still, the reaffirmation by American voters that racial distinctions should be irrelevant to government policy would be welcome right about now. All the more so given the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold racial discrimination at the University of Michigan. The decision effectively requires the
nation to view itself (at least for another 25 years) through a racial prism that many Americans already find obsolete. In the name of "diversity," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has cast her lot with the grievance groups who profit from racial balkanization.

As opposed to legal and business elites, average Americans are showing an increasing uneasiness with traditional racial categories. The demographic trends are illustrative. According to Joel Kotkin of Pepperdine University, nearly a third of second-generation Asians and Hispanics -- the largest ethnic minority -- marry out of their ethnic group.

In 1997, one in seven babies born in California were to parents of different races. The 2000 Census offered 63 different ways to self-identify and found that 40% of people under 25 belong to a racial or ethnic category other than "non-Hispanic white." What box does Tiger Woods check, and why should he have to check one?

A nonpartisan Field Poll released last month shows California voters supporting Prop. 54 by 50% to 29%, though it is hard to know how its presence on the Gray Davis recall ballot will affect it. Mr. Davis opposes it, and people who think he's been a splendid governor tend to be Prop. 54's strongest opponents.

It seems to us that there's little danger from a public endorsement of a proposition that seeks to make America less racially self-conscious. The opposite danger is far more troublesome, especially as we become a more racially polyglot nation. Down the path of the Supreme Court's recent Michigan decision lies a nation divided by race, not united in common principle.

Prop. 54's success would be a fitting rebuke to the Supreme Court (all the more potent because it would come from the nation's largest and most racially diverse state) and a public reaffirmation of the Constitution's colorblind commitment to equal protection under the law.