Well before the Court issued Students for Fair Admissions, archconservatives broadcast far more ambitious plans to dismantle the building blocks of race consciousness. The second Trump Administration now levies once-fringe demands: that employers abandon racial data collection, disparate impact doctrine, and even voluntary inquiries about racial self-identification. Such attempts to suppress information about race undermine our ability to redress its harms and the bedrock status of race consciousness within a democracy. This Article is the first to demonstrate how informational norms have assumed a crucial role in instantiating—or resisting—“colorblindness” in the Trump Era.

Through a conceptual integration of race studies, information science, and law, this Article reinterprets the legal frameworks governing information about racial identity. It introduces the term race-conscious data to refer to information that permits society to communicate racial identity, regardless of whether it is digitized. The Article then advances a new taxonomy of ideological positions regarding racial data gleaned from legal, social movement, and lay sources: (1) Liberal Data Guardians, (2) Race-Conscious Dignitarians, (3) Colorblind Regressives, (4) Libertarians, (5) Techno-Authoritarians, and (6) White Nationalists. A modernized taxonomy captures the full range of thought and rhetoric beyond right/left typologies in regulatory choices and their ideological assumptions.

Posing the question of race-conscious data to ideological formations uncovers the racial functions of competing legal claims. It reveals descriptive and normative values, particularly when race-silencing is selectively applied to spaces that confer material benefits of citizenship to non-whites. Workplaces and other fora for racial dialogue illustrate the compelling legal and practical barriers to a federal “colorblind” regime. Labor’s particular relationship with conceptualizing material harm will prove crucial in helping society navigate beyond abstraction ad absurdum. It remains possible to chart future policies addressing race, inequality, and law. As before, multilevel conceptual frameworks fill a vacuum in today’s debates over data’s functions as potentially beneficial, exploitative, or otherwise harmful.

Continue reading Race-Conscious Data: The New Political Taxonomy.