The war in the Balkans is showing us what real ethnic strife is. When the Serbs go at the Ethnic Albanians of Kosovo with a cleansing vengeance, it’s hard to come up with a hate crime in America that reaches that magnitude.

Asian Americans may mention Vincent Chin. But Chin was one man. Blacks can mention the Byrd dragging in Texas. But once again, one man, not a village. The fact is, for all our faults in this country, we have done remarkably well as Americans to get along in our democratic society.

Yet, there are some people who like to compare the ethnic politics of America, specifically California, with the Balkans. They say the different groups competing for public resources are contributing to a “Balkanization of California.”

It’s fiery rhetoric, especially as ethnic minorities become the majority in California. But it’s more dangerous when it leads people to wrongheaded solutions.

For example, one response to a “Balkan-like” California has been to eliminate race and ethnicity from public policy.

Make everything and everyone colorblind! This is what you might call “benign ethnic cleansing.” Make race and ethnicity irrelevant. We’re passing out spoils based on merit, not pigment.

It’s rather ingenious. Who doesn’t buy into Martin Luther King Jr.’s moral notion about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin? I certainly do. But I just don’t buy the bastardization of the good reverend doctor by the likes of Ward Connerly, the UC regent making a name for himself as the social engineer to end all social engineers, the man who has taken it upon himself to undo affirmative action with a Prop. 209 style approach. The fact is, colorblind policies don’t work.

The colorblind admissions policy of the University of California, the most prestigious public university system, is a case in point. It creates neither fairness nor diversity.

Oh, it works for Asians and whites. They continue to be over-represented in the applicant pools and in admissions. But everyone else? Forget it.

The acceptance numbers are out. This is the time of year when university officials gladly take off their blindfolds to see what they have wrought. The results, to be charitable, are modest at best for the second class of freshmen to be admitted under UC’s colorblind admissions process.

For example, of the 8,197 students accepted into the class of 2003 at UC’s Berkeley flagship, 13.2 percent are African American, Latino or American Indian.

13.2 percent is higher than last year’s 10 percent at Berkeley. It’s also slightly higher that the 9 percent acceptance rate for those groups throughout the UC system this year.

You can spin that as a colorblind victory all you want. Those who voted for Prop. 209 certainly are, with a certain degree of moral relief. Voting against affirmative action didn’t hurt all that bad now, did it?

But consider that in 1997, before any colorblind rhetorical malarkey was put into place, African American, Latino and American Indians represented 23 percent of those accepted at Berkeley.

In two years, the meager total of disadvantaged, underrepresented groups accepted into Berkeley just dropped by half.

If the Dow Jones dropped 50 percent there’d be a public outcry.

But a 50 percent drop in minority admissions at the top public university system gets barely a shrug. Worse still, the whole thing is spun out in the media with misleading headlines. “Cal Accepts More Minorities,” blared one newspaper.

Lie? Well, a half-truth at best.

If you look at the ethnic breakout of the acceptances to Berkeley, you see how misleading a “more minorities” headline really is. Chicano-Latinos were at 9.3 percent, or 741 students. African Americans were at 3.5 percent, or 276 students. American Indians were at 0.5 percent, or 39 students.

But wait. Just because a few minorities are getting big fat letters from UC in their mailboxes doesn’t mean they’re going to accept UC. After all, some of these students are also going to get fat letters from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the like. My hunch is most will forsake the blue and gold. And that would make the actual students yielded from this batch of colorblind admits embarrassingly low.

Last year, half of the African American students accepted said, “No, thank you.” If that happens this year, then take the 276 African American students and realize it actually could be a measly 138 students. Latinos rejected Cal at a 58 percent rate. So take the 741 admitted and you wind up with a net of 311 students. Native Americans rejected Cal 55 percent of the time. That leaves just 17 Native Americans. UC’s colorblind admissions machine is actually the incredible shrinking minority machine.

What’s frustrating is that, as ethnic minorities become a more dominant majority in the state, their numbers in public institutions like Cal are actually shrinking. Can we expect nothing less when we make race irrelevant?

The opposite of affirmative action really is a kind of benign ethnic cleansing. By turning colorblind, all the UC system has done is wash its hands of responsibility to the majority of the state. Instead, it has created the justification of traditional “market shares.” The latest admitting class at Berkeley is 40 percent Asian and 35.9 percent white. It definitely puts Asian Americans in a tough moral spot. What’s good for society may not be the best choice for any of us as individuals. And that’s the problem—most of us are buying into how the accepted inequity is just one grand colorblind accident. Who cares anymore, anyway? We’re off the hook. We’re a society that, in an attempt to avoid “Balkanization,” has deluded itself into thinking that when it comes to fairness, race and ethnicity just don’t count. So why call yourself an Asian American?

Emil Guillermo’s essays are available in a new book, Amok. Send $19.95, plus $2.00 shipping and handling, to: Amok, P.O. Box 81, Orinda, CA 94563. E-mail: emil@amok.com.