Two weeks ago in California, the "Racial Privacy Initiative" (RPI), proposed by Regent Ward Connerly, was opposed by the University of California's Board of Regents. Among the dignitaries who turned out to assure its overthrow were Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson and state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell, who, according to the Sacramento Bee "are regents by virtue of their elective offices but seldom attend meetings" and "showed up to vote with the majority in opposing the initiative."

The opposition to the RPI -- which would prevent the State from demanding of people that they state their race on, say, school applications and other forms that define their individual relation to the State -- is ostensibly bureaucratic, which is why it seems to have such thrust in terms of supporting the public weal. In other words, it is an opposition that seems to support a valid public cause. If the RPI is ratified, or so the argument goes, the State will be obliged to forfeit the opportunity to collect valuable data that could aid in the tracking of diseases, the monitoring of racial discrimination in schools and jobs, and the distribution of wealth and opportunity among the public-at-large.

Like most bureaucratic constructions, this looks very legitimate on paper. Take racial information in the tracking of disease. If we know that an individual is "black", for example, we can deduce (or so we think) his susceptibility to high blood pressure and sickle-cell anemia; if he is of Azhkanazi Jewish background, then we can ascertain his susceptibility to Tay-Sachs syndrome. But what if he, like -- say -- Lennie Kravitz, is both black and Azhkanazi? Where do we end up then? In that little box at the top of the medical application form, Lennie would undoubtedly define himself as "black", but if he suffered from Tay-Sachs, who, among the medical expertise who studied that form, would be in a sufficiently informed position to realize that Tay-Sachs was the real complaint?

I cannot help but think that this aspect of what is patently not a bureaucratic issue but an ethical one is absurd. People have doctors, and they go to them, they use their services regularly. Is anyone fool enough to try and convince me that the State of California needs to know my race in order to ensure that my high blood pressure is adequately treated? This is nonsense.

We live in a society where, thanks to the ones and zeroes that populate the virtual world that Boulean algebra and the computer have enabled, we feel ourselves hag-ridden to log every item of information that turns up, whether it is of value or not. Like rodents that are gatherers, we store every little nut we get in our grasp, hoping it will come in handy at a later date. In Germany once upon a time, the centuries-old gathering of useless information led ultimately to people being gassed in Auschwitz because they were of, say, one-eighth Jewish blood -- and by God, there were papers to prove it.

This is not a bureaucratic issue, it is an ethical one. It has to do with the way our minds work to make our lives more decent and livable, the way we act and react toward one another, the way we perceive ourselves in the scheme of things, the opinion we have of ourselves as right-thinking individuals.

None of this has anything to do with the data that the State feels itself obliged to keep, the little nuts of information that it hoards against a winter of...what? Of whose discontent? And let us not forget the nut-gatherers, the bean-counters, whose job it is to keep all this data on file, comprehensible and accessible. As Milton said, 'they also stand and wait'. But for what? In the meantime, they are amply paid from the public coffers, paying off their personal mortgages and loans with our tax money.

The primary purpose of the RPI has, in fact, nothing to do with what it chiefly seems to oppose, the red-tape that encircles Sacramento (the state capital). It has to do with eliminating ancient wrong, with making a clean slate -- with starting over. The Bible tells us very clearly that we cannot be quit old grievances unless we allow ourselves to forget them, to let them go. Picking at the scabs of injustice suffered centuries ago by long-dead forebears is ridiculous.

The slave auction had a good many things in common with Sunday church. People came there dressed up to show their wealth and station. In shouting out their price they were 'testifying', and in paying for the human being that they had bought, they were, in a sense, redeeming Christ, buying him down from the Cross. You don't have to be a Christian to realize how crazy this analogy is, but it helps.

The rationale for all this was the categorization of human beings, the White Man as the Crown of Creation, the Black Man as the accursed Son of Ham, doomed to serve and wait on his brethren and the sons of his brethren forever.

Now in a slave-owning state, this categorization requires a certain bureaucracy. We need to know who is 'white' and who is 'black'. We need to know who are citizens and who are mere chattel. But at the ethical level, were not these people -- black and white -- tied to each other by bonds that we do not even understand today? Were they not -- in fact -- closer then? In 1890, laws were passed outlawing 'mixed-race' people. For two centuries, the Louisiana Creóles, for example, had lived as a people apart unto themselves, making their own way in the labyrinth of entrepreneurial activity that was heralding the dawn of a new world. Suddenly -- with federal authority growing weaker and carpetbaggers backing off -- the local authorities pounced on them: 'Dammit, either you're white or black', they said, and the whole Créole society was forced to choose sides. Families and whole communities fell apart, forever distancing themselves from one another based on skin color. I know this, because my grandparents were victims of it.

But this is today! (fanfare) Welcome to the twenty-first century! I'm your average big-city girl and my next-door neighbors are a couple with three kids; he's a WASP from Maine, she's a Filipina. I'm mixed-race (African, Native American, French and Irish), and my boyfriend is Russian-Jewish. My best friend at work is an Ethiopian girl, we often go on picnics in the park with her and her Chinese husband and their little boy. My boss is an Austrian guy with a wonderful sense of humor, and his wife, a French-Canadian woman, who looks like Cher and has Indian blood, is the world's best hostess. They have two kids who are grown, and the girl -- who is the eldest -- is about to be married to a dark-skinned, French-speaking Algerian.

Race??? Just what in God's name are we talking about? Get real here!

The Racial Privacy Initiative will unload us of a cultural and psychological burden that all of us are dragging behind us, like heavy rocks in a wet sack. It will free us of the need to blush every time some idiot asks 'But what are you?'

'I'm an American,' is the only real answer. Furthermore, the regents are mistaken -- not to say ignorant. This isn't about data-gathering, it's about loving ourselves, who we are and what we mean to one another.

Not one of us needs a label. Not one, not ever!

Susanne Heine

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