CONNERLY'S BILL MAY HAVE A POINT.

Byline: Earl Ofari Hutchinson Local View

A half century ago the NAACP and other civil rights groups waged a titanic fight against racial tracking. This was the practice in which government and private employers routinely demanded that all job applicants check a box designating their race. This was a blatantly discriminatory device many employers used to deny jobs to African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.

The 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts explicitly forbade discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. Implicit in the laws was that race could no longer be a factor in hiring or public contracting.

But in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson reversed gears. He signed a landmark executive order mandating contractors doing business with the government to keep data on the race of job applicants and hires.

State and federal agencies took the cue and began compiling data on race to determine if private businesses as well as their own agencies were discriminating against minorities.

Racial tracking was transformed from a device to promote discrimination to a device to promote workplace diversity, isolate patterns of discrimination, and to initiate remedies to attack racial discrimination that varied from withholding state and federal funds to lawsuits.

But now in a back to the past twist, Ward Connerly, a University of California regent, says that racial numbers are discriminatory, intrusive, and racially divisive.

Connerly's main point is that since California is a racial melting pot, with no clear racial majority, race is a meaningless, antiquated designation that belongs in the scrap heap.

He has launched a new campaign to qualify his Racial Privacy Initiative for the March 2002 ballot. It would bar the state from collecting racial data in public education, contracting and employment.

The measure sounds racially innocuous, even egalitarian, and so far has not ignited the bitter turmoil his anti-affirmative action, Proposition 209 did in 1996.

In fact, Connerly's reasoned pitch for wiping out racial designations has even made a few civil rights groups take momentary pause. They say they will take a hard look at the initiative to see whether it will hurt minorities.

There's a good reason why it's a tough one to call.

Take the issue of racial profiling as one example. It has stirred terrible fury among African-American and Latino leaders. It has sparked demonstrations, lawsuits by dozens of African-American and Latino motorists, and prompted denunciations by many state and national officials, including President George W. Bush.

The practice is so damaging that the Justice Department has wrung promises from the LAPD to collect racial data on motorist traffic stops. Dozens of other police agencies in the state, including the California Highway Patrol, have begun voluntarily keeping data.

Without the stats on who's being stopped, it would be hard to prove whether police officials are right when they claim they don't profile minorities, or black and Latino leaders are right when they claim that officers do.

Where the numbers show that a police department is guilty of profiling, city and state officials have a powerful weapon to compel police to stop the practice. Critics say that the Connerly initiative would strip that weapon from public officials.

But LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks, and police officials in other cities, insist that keeping stats on race is costly, cumbersome and counter- productive.

The better way to deal with instances of police misconduct, they say, is better officer training, supervision and vigorous investigation of and action on complaints of abuse.

Critics also complain that the initiative will make it tough for state agencies to determine whether insurance companies deny coverage to applicants on racial grounds, to track hate crimes, to discover whether diseases such as sickle cell anemia, AIDS, and hypertension are higher among minorities and to properly allocate funds and services for their treatment and prevention.

They further contend that it will widen even more the imbalance in state spending between middle-class and poor school districts, and free contractors from disclosing whom they hire and promote.

But there are already a legion of laws on the books that prohibit this kind of discrimination and faulty reporting and there are an equally large number of enforcement and regulatory agencies whose job it is to oversee public and private businesses, service agencies, and school districts to ensure they don't discriminate and allocate equitable funds and services for programs for the needy. With or without the Connerly initiative, it's a job they would have to do.

If his initiative forces state agencies, and that includes the state Legislature, to do an even better job of combating discrimination then all Californians might be better off because of it.

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Photo: (color) WARD CONNERLY

Aims to ban collecting racial data