July 21, 2003 -- Margaret L. Snyder: Little Boxes, Little Boxes…

Once upon a time the little boxes served to enable many states to enforce segregation laws. Now they enable governments to discriminate in favor of the descendants of the people against whom they used to discriminate and others who look like them or can claim racial kinship. Official discrimination in any form is always to be avoided (and is in fact prohibited by the 14th amendment to the Constitution) but…

What are the unintended effects of all those little boxes?

A recent article in Parade Magazine spoke of the difficulties facing biracial children, who, it claims, now number about 4.5 million. Their troubles start the first time they are asked to check off a little box.

Now, think about it. When the United States government, or your state, or the local school district hands you an official form asking for information, you just assume that this information must be very important. The school asks children things like their parents’ names, where they live, when they were born. A child understands that all of this tells important things about who he is. If they ask him to check off a little box on race, his race must be important too. So naturally a child who knows he doesn’t “fit” in any of the boxes feels torn. He has no officially recognized identity!! What will he do???

Those little boxes have an effect on the rest of us too. Every one of us thinks more about race just because we are asked over and over to identify ourselves by race. We know that the observer, by the act of observing, changes the behavior of the observed. (That is why psychologists observe through one-way glass.) So it is when the state gathers information about race from us. The mere act of gathering the information changes the way we think. We think differently about race than we otherwise would.

Whether one was left-handed or right-handed used to be important. Until near mid-20th century, parents and teachers forced left-handed children to use their right hands. Then they figured out that this was silly and probably detrimental. But if every time we filled out some form we had to declare whether we were left-handed or right-handed, we’d all feel much differently about handedness today. If there were a stigma attached to left-handedness, then the left-handed would feel a little ashamed whenever they filled out a form and the right-handed people would feel sorry for the left-handed people. Or maybe the perception of left-handedness would have changed so that it would be regarded as an especially desirable quality. Then the right-handed people would feel ashamed, etc., etc.

Either way, we would tend to take note much more of which hand people used and we would probably always be trying to discern ways, other than the obvious, in which left-handed people are different from right-handed people. We would think in terms of a human population divided into two kinds of people: lefties and righties.

Neither our racial identity nor which hand we use to write should be any concern of the government’s.

Soon after successful businessman Ward Connerly became a regent of the University of California he learned that the university had different standards in admissions for applicants of different races. It was through his courageous efforts that California was able to vote in 1996 to eliminate race preferences in state education, hiring and contracts. Since then he has undertaken to get another initiative on the ballot of the next statewide election (which could be soon if the recall vote on Governor Gray Davis comes to pass). He calls it the Racial Privacy Initiative and it would forbid the state of California from identifying its citizens by race, except in very limited contexts such as medicine and law enforcement.

One young woman quoted in the Parade article says, “If I could have any wish, it would be to go inside people’s heads and flip the little switch that controls racial categorization and racism.” She is right to include racial categorization and racism together. They go together. You can’t have racism unless people categorize each other by race. Let’s get rid of racial categories. It’s a good next step in getting rid of racism.

(Item: Ward Connerly announced on July 8, 2003, that he does not plan to wait 25 more years in the hope that maybe then the Supreme Court will strike down racial preferences. He will join with others to promote an initiative in Michigan to forbid the practice of race preferences in that state.)

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Margaret L. Snyder is an adjunct professor of foreign language
memls01@moravian.edu