August 5, 2003 Letter to Editor of Dayton Daily News
August 5, 2003
Dear Editor:
In its August 5th editorial, the Dayton Daily News really let loose with some major straw man arguments.
Their claim that test scores absolutely must be segregated by “race” is just plain ridiculous. Instead of focusing on the skin color of the student, educrats should be worried about how ALL students are learning as individuals, given that tests are taken on an individual, not a group basis. Academic achievement is an individual issue. The Daily News seems to be promoting Bell Curve style junk science with this assertion.
Next the editorial goes on to promote medical paranoia by asserting that without these completely unscientific check boxes people will start keeling over en masse. This is absurd. These check boxes do not take a person’s full history into account, nor do they account for unknown “racial” ancestries. An individual may identify themselves “racially” one way, while still having multiple “racial” ancestries. As such, these boxes are completely arbitrary and subject to the prejudices and preferences of those checking the boxes. Skin color and self-identity are one thing, genetics and ancestry are quite another. To make medical decisions based on skin color classifications promulgated via 17th century junk science is what the Dayton Daily News is promoting via this editorial. This is truly disturbing and irresponsible.
The editorial next goes on to claim that the information isn’t being collected for “nefarious or silly reasons” yet this nation maintains quite a nefarious record of abuses via these offensive classifications. Census data was used to intern Americans of Japanese descent, county and state “racial” data was used for decades in Virginia and other states to target “multiracial” citizens in eugenics campaigns. Nationally, these classifications were devised solely to inflate the populations of slave holding states to ensure their domination of Congress after the Revolutionary War. This was accomplished by including slaves in the Census counts, thus adding to the numbers used to set Congressional representation in slave states, ensuring that slavery would last several more decades. I can’t think of a more offensive function of government for the Daily News to defend.
Sincerely,
James Landrith
Founder, The Multiracial Activist
and The Abolitionist Examiner