Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

While disturbing, I wonder if Obama realizes that it will be hard to control access to the database by Congress, and that analysis of such data may reveal some truths that he would rather not have known.

I have worked in the credit industry, for major credit bureaus and analytics consulting firms. They all gathered information used in evaluating credit risk - the kinds of information which allowed you to decide which credit risks to accept and which to decline. Race was not a factor, and lenders went to very great lengths not to gather race or even race proxy data. Insurers behave likewise. All of the analytics crew had hunches that black were very much higher credit risk across all income levels, but we had no way to prove it, and it could not be discussed within any of the corporations due to the fear that there would be claims of racial discrimination.

I lived in Atlanta for some years and routinely saw outrageously bad and risky driving behavior by black drivers. This was an anecdotal observation, but insurance underwriters, prohibited from collecting race data or rating insurance based on race, probably thought about the same question.

Now that Obama wants to assemble the data, we may have the ability to answer these questions without running afoul of antidiscrimination laws. If that dataset is then placed in the public domain, you would then be able to answer questions about black drivers and the loss exposure they represent relative to non-black drivers. And credit scores could be compared by race, holding income and other attributes constant.

I understand what they think they are doing, but there could be incredible and unanticipated backlash once people have the chance to understand how much subsidy there is between the races. For example what if loss ratios for black drivers of a certain category (females, 21-34, for example) were, say 59X that of non blacks of the same gender and age parameters. Since present law prohibits discrimination in insurance rates by race, those differences are homogenized into rates, causing non-black drivers in that segment to subsidize black drivers in that segment.

I would urge the GOP to investigate the collection of this data so they know exactly what it is and can subpoena copies of the data (and publish it into the public domain) for independent analysis.

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