… of yer damned bidness!

Let’s end America’s toxic preoccupation with racial taxonomy

The late, great John Patrick Hunter was a liberal journalist for The Capital Times. He won national fame for an Independence Day stunt in 1951 when he asked Madisonians to sign his petition. (Only one consented. Hunter’s petition consisted of the Declaration of Independence. It was the era of Joe McCarthy and American disgust for Communist oppression.)

I worked with John later in his career. Although liberal in outlook (and a Unitarian), he was always fair to Republicans, something of a free thinker, and a fierce defender of the First Amendment. He liked to boast that, under “Race” on his driver’s license, was typed “N” for negro. It is instructive that the Wisconsin DOT quit recording race years ago.

The Blaska Policy Werkes, after voluminous research and executive fiat by its director of operations, hereby calls on the Congress of the United States, the State of Wisconsin and every governmental unit within to prohibit, under punishment of law, the collection of data relating to race. Do it in time for the upcoming U.S. Census.

Call it the Rachel Doleazal Law. John Patrick Hunter, born in the hills of West Virginia, was as white as a Confederate colonel.

Wouldn’t you like to know?

What is “race” anyway except a distraction; a divisive distinction signifying nothing that should concern government? The Census Bureau would more productively record height and weight.

The Werkes has long held this position and now finds company in a familiar and an unfamiliar name: Ward Connerly and Mike Gonzalez. Connerly and Gonzalez write:

It’s time Census Bureau stops dividing America. … For four decades our government has been engaged in the unsavory practice of designating official groups, and standing against any reform is a coalition of special-interest liberal organizations that depend on it for funds and prestige.

They cite the familiar Ancestry.com TV commercials. “Today, you can spit into a vial, send it to genomics companies and discover that you are not Irish, as you thought, but instead 60% English.” Perhaps the authors are not “authentically black” or hispanic.

Identity politics is corroding government and domestic comity.

• The Dane County Board of Supervisors mandates, by ordinance, that its every action be viewed through “racial equity lens.”
• The Madison Common Council succumbed to a small pressure group’s claim that the entire law enforcement system is racist.
• The Madison school board is considering evicting educational resource police officers from school hallways solely because a majority of those arrested for criminal activity are black  —  even though doing so would produce more chaos.
• Wisconsin’s flagship university campus teaches “The Problem of Whiteness.”

“When a disproportionate amount of students of color in Madison school district are struggling, it is imperative to analyze practices through a racial equity lens.” School board member Dean Loumos said that!

In other words, the school district is poised to decide policy based purely on race, not behavior! How is that constitutional?

Identity politics is destroying America

And elected Donald Trump in reaction. The Constitution demands a color-blind, especially after enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Ending the toxic preoccupation with racial taxonomy would put an end to the mischief caused by identity politics. Even former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz has soured on the Democrats’ obsession, writing in “The politics of grievance” “that a society that encourages the obsessive identification of grievance is one that probably only deepens its fissures.”

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“Racial Equity” does not seek equal treatment for all students. Instead, it demands statistical equivalence in discipline referrals and suspensions for students of every racial group, regardless of those students’ actual conduct. — from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

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The Weekly Standard examines what happens when everything is race in  a toney suburb of Minneapolis.

For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. … but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution.

The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.”

“Equity” in this context does not mean “equality” or “fairness.” It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting “white privilege.”

… “All teaching and learning experiences” would be viewed through the “lens of racial equity,” and that only “racially conscious” teachers and administrators should be hired. [to] reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap. … The school system’s obsession with “white privilege” now begins in kindergarten.

Results? Four years into the Edina schools’ “equity crusade,” black students’ test scores remain poor.

For further study and brownie points: More Americans are checking “Some Other Race” on government forms. (Related here.)

Blaska’s Bottom Line — The Doleazal Rule would not prevent the University of Wisconsin from squandering resources on race and gender studies (as much as they do promote hate and division, as we wrote here); that is the responsibility of the Board of Regents. But it will stymie government decisions based solely on race rather than real factors like conduct, income, health, employment, education, etc.