On the surface, it sounds pretty innocuous — when it comes to judging others, we should be colorblind. Beneath the surface, however, something more sinister is afoot. There is a movement to minimize race when addressing the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws.

While some of these efforts grow out of an honest attempt to move us forward, many others are not designed to help us become colorblind — they want us to act as if we’re totally blind.

One of the primary leaders of this movement is Ward Connerly, the Sacramento businessman who helped pass Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action petition in California. Connerly, who benefited financially from a state affirmative action program before he mounted his anti-affirmative action horse, is leading yet another attack on people of color. He calls it the “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which would prohibit California authorities from collecting any race-related data. Twice postponed, the ballot measure is now expected to come before voters in the next presidential election.

“The goal of the Racial Privacy Initiative is to acknowledge the increasing irrelevance of race classifications, the growing percentage of our population who are ‘multiracial’ or ‘multiethnic,’ and the desire for privacy when it comes to the question of ‘what is your race?’” contends Connerly. “There is no reason the government should classify its citizens along lines of skin color, ethnic background or where their ancestors came from.”

As usual, Connerly misses the point. The purpose of collecting information on race — or income, for that matter — is not to “focus our attention on what divides us, rather than what unites us.” Without collecting information, it would be impossible to know whether we are making progress in certain areas and falling down in others. Evidently, Connerly thinks that by blinding ourselves to the facts, the problem will somehow vanish into thin air.

Even some African-Americans argue that instead of using race as a yardstick, we should base certain programs on income. That’s fine if one is developing an anti-poverty program. But this is not about an anti-poverty program, the kinds that Congress oppose. People who discriminate don’t do so based on the amount of money in one’s bank account.

When “Butch” Graves, the son of “Black Enterprise” magazine’s publisher was accosted by New York police, it was not based on his income–he could have bought and sold half of the department. They saw one thing–his race. They saw race even though he did not come close to fitting the physical description of the “suspect” they were seeking.

When Deval L. Patrick, the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the first Clinton administration, left a White House meeting and couldn’t get a taxi on Pennsylvania, it wasn’t because he didn’t have the money or the job. It wasn’t even because he was going to the “wrong” section of town. It was because of his race. When Danny Glover encountered a similar experience in New York, he wasn’t passed up because he was carrying a lethal weapon.

It is not the victims of racism who are using race to divide us. And rather than focusing on racism, Ward Connerly would have us ignore it and hide behind a cloak of “racial privacy.” There is little privacy in America, racial or otherwise.

Some states that have eliminated affirmative action are promising to compensate by stepping up their “outreach” efforts. No amount of outreach has reached far enough, as we have seen in California, Texas and Florida. All three have tried to increase Black enrollment by declaring that the top percentage of each graduating class — 4 percent in California, 10 percent in Texas and 20 percent in Florida — will gain automatic admission to state universities.

In every instance, however, the numbers of Blacks attending state universities slipped under this plan and except for Texas, students at the head of their class are not guaranteed admission to the top-tier schools in the state, producing another form of educational apartheid.

Selecting only the top of the high school class presents a different set of problems. First, these are the students who are likely to be accepted into the flagship universities, anyway. Second, such a program encourages some Black students to remain in deficient schools so that they will have a better chance being ranked at the top than if they were to transfer to a more competitive school.

So even trying to avoid the issue of race has racial implications. If students were prohibited from obtaining a college degree in the past based on their race, then race should be taken into consideration in trying to open up doors that were previously closed. No one says it should be the only factor, just one of many.

Ward Connerly argues: “Asking about a person’s race simply diverts precious time and effort away from the real solutions.” No, if you want real solutions, you have to deal in the real world. And in the real world, there is no racial privacy.