Editorial: No ‘Multiracial' Box

UC Regent Ward Connerly's proposal to add a "multiracial" check-box to UC admissions applications is a poor attempt to solve a larger problem: the U.S. Department of Education categorizes students under only one ethnicity.

When the regents vote on this proposal tomorrow, they must turn it down-there are better ways to serve multiracial applicants than by simply placing them all in one umbrella category.

Instead of conforming to the inadequate restrictions of the federal bureaucracy, the UC Regents should be pushing on behalf of its diverse student body for multiple racial categorization.

Labeling all individuals who consider themselves part of more than one race with the term "multiracial" completely ignores the diversity of their multiple heritages.

The department of education is in the process of reviewing its procedures for gathering racial data, and must change its program to allow students to identify with multiple races.

Each person's racial data should be accurately filed, instead of arbitrarily narrowed down to just one race. This means allowing students to be classified with as many racial categories as they choose, at both the national and UC level. This will mean no change in current procedure for UC campuses, and will not be a massive overhaul for the U.S. Department of Education.

Racial data is used in both the scientific and academic worlds, for everything from determining a race's risk for a particular disease to reworking an educational program to better serve its participants. Placing all multiracial individuals in a blanket category could hinder these types of programs.

Everyone from the Multi-Cultural Students Union to ASUC to By Any Means Necessary has come out in opposition to this proposal, and The Daily Californian stands with them in protest of this misguided attempt at reconciliation with multiracial students. The regents must vote no on this proposal on Tuesday.

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