Why I support the RPI A while back godless capitalist wrote about why he opposed the Racial Privacy Act. I found myself torn-on the one hand, I agree that it makes collecting data rather more difficult. On the other hand, the general color-blind thrust of the Racial Privacy Act appealed to me. Godless' most damning criticism was that RPI will weaken the ability to make judgements about the possible differences between races. He is perhaps correct that non-governmental organizations will take up the slack and use it as a hammer for their own distorting agenda. But I think he overstates his case. Our case has been mostly made insofar as the symptoms have been diagnosed. I believe the opposition just refuses to acknowledge the sickness. The fact is that social science data can be sifted and resorted in whatever way sheds favorable light on the ideology in question-that the government does it doesn't shield one from bias (note how the government allows people to check all their racial ancestry on the CENSUS, but assigned multiracial people to the "minority" group to please the liberal racialists). The difference will be that now the biases will be more obvious-and perhaps people will be more attuned to it. Another point is that the RPI itself will only have a limited affect on racial statistics. Prior statistics will still exist, and one can collect large samples from states like New York, Florida or Texas where it isn't in force. How much more social science data do we really need to convince people about race differences? We've had decades of a consistent 15 point gap between blacks and whites-spanning Jim Crow, desegregation and the rise of the black middle class. And yet the dominant position still remains that the gap is an artifice of social discrimination and oppression. What will really convince the opposition-what they'll have a harder time dismissing-are genuine structural differences (neurological) between races on average in the neocortex itself. The reality of medical and health issues being affected by race will convince many on an everyday level as the genetic frontiers of treatment advance. The possible connection between certain alleles and intellectual ability or behavioral tendency, and the likely differential frequencies of these alleles in population X vs. population Y, will convince people. A few hundred more studies on IQ differences or differential academic performances won't add much to our case, the return is just not worth the price. And what is the price? The price is more government control over our lives as individuals-over our legal and political status being subsumed into corporate (race, gender and class) entities that act as mediating institutions between the individual and the state. Knowledge is power-and the more official information the state has, the more power it has. I will grant that power can be used for the good, but I must state that I believe that Acton was right, power does corrupt and our current spoils system is the logical final step toward a culture and a political class concerned with numbers of particular groups rather than the inherent rights of the individual. The rejoinder is that we will still know that blacks are 10% of the population, but only 5% of college students via third-party surveys. But as we've noted, these studies can be contested, and it will be far harder to set quotas on private studies than governmental sanctioned numbers that speak with a certain neutral authority. The government will be forced to cease situational application of universal laws when it is unable to ascertain the state of matters on the ground. Now, it is true that I believe that races are different. I also believe that private organizations-individuals or corporations-should be able to take race into account in their everyday decisions. But why do I favor ignoring its reality in the case of government? The government is an extension, an embodiment, of the concept of law, and law should be blind. The fact is that human beings are not equal in a host of traits. But before a judge we are all granted the same privileges and handed the same penalties. Our genes may "predispose" us to violence-but there is an a priori assumption that one is still responsible for one's actions. The government may still believe that racism needs redressing-that justice must be served. But without targets painted by its own surveys-how can any political body execute the race-conscious agenda without being asked if it is being arbitrary? Evolution, our biology, has progressed without government intervention. We don't need it now-what we need to do is starve the beast of its sustenance, and what is nurturing it in the end is information.