Ward Connerly has an idea. It is simple yet revolutionary. And it needs to be debated seriously. It is this: The government has no business asking individuals to report their race or ethnicity on official forms.

Connerly, you may remember, was a driving force behind Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that sought to ban race and gender preferences in government employment, programs and contracting. The measure was approved handily by the voters in 1996.

But Connerly grew frustrated as he watched government officials ignore or seek to thwart the intent of that initiative.
As a follow-up, he has proposed a more radical measure. The only way to prevent the government from using racial preferences, he figures, is to prevent the state from recording the race of the people with whom it deals. This idea has the added lure of fulfilling an original dream of the civil rights movement, to create a color-blind society, or at least a color-blind government.

The Racial Privacy Initiative will appear on the next ballot, either the March presidential primary or an earlier special election if the attempt to recall Gov. Gray Davis from office moves forward. With certain important exceptions, it would prohibit state or local governments from classifying individuals by race, ethnicity, color or national origin.

This is obviously a controversial notion. Connerly, who is of mixed race himself and has always resented others' assumptions about his background, is ahead of his time. He believes our concept of race is not so much biological as it is a social construct invented, more or less, to divide humans and to advance the cause of discrimination. And he believes the concept is doomed as more Americans intermarry and have children of varied backgrounds.

Californians, on the natural, already have been at the forefront of this demographic movement, intermarrying and having multi-racial children at an increasing rate. Connerly's initiative asks the state's voters to leap ahead of the curve, to force the issue by limiting the government's ability to reinforce our racial and ethnic mindset with its collection of data on that subject.

But this idea runs counter to a major tenet of the Democratic Party, which has divided itself into ethnic caucuses and promoted an ethno-centrist view of the world. It's also a threat to a civil rights establishment that, ironically, has a vested interest in society's focus on racial and ethnic differences rather than the elimination of those distinctions.

Those powerful forces are now aligning against Connerly's initiative, and rather than debating it on its merits, they are beginning a campaign to mislead Californians about its provisions. Several of the state's highest Democratic officeholders gathered at the Capitol last week to condemn the measure, suggesting that it would wreak death and destruction across the land.

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante claimed that the initiative "would jeopardize our ability to provide health care" and hamper cancer research and other medical investigations into illness and disease. But the measure has a clear exemption for the collection of data from medical research subjects and from patients. It would not in any way prevent the gathering of this information.

Larry Grisolano, a veteran Democratic consultant who is working against the measure, said the initiative would prohibit even the "analysis or use" of demographic data that had racial and ethnic information within it. And Grisolano later put me in touch with Dr. Carmen Navarez of the Berkeley-based Public Health Institute, who said she believed the measure would prevent the state from handling U.S. census data, or from launching a marketing campaign to educate minorities about good nutrition habits.

But I don't see anything in the measure that would do any of this, and Connerly has said emphatically that the initiative is not intended to affect health care in any way.

Under the broadest possible interpretation, it is possible that health-related surveys of the general public by the government that are not considered medical research would be prohibited from seeking racial or ethnic data from respondents. But even if that were the case, the initiative still would allow the Legislature to override the prohibition if it concluded that the collection of the data was in the public interest.

Connerly's initiative seeks to force Californians to consider profound questions about who we are as a society, and where we're headed. It deserves a reasoned debate. Not a scare-fest.