To be fair about this, maybe I'm the one who is confused and not Ward Connerly. I just don't understand his recent actions. I cheered when his organization drafted the Racial Privacy Initiative, which if passed, will prohibit the state of California from classifying individuals according to race, ethnicity, color or national origin. I'm all for it. But then he recommended keeping the Standardized Assessment Test (SAT) for all students applying to the University of California, where Connerly is on the Board of Regents.

In the words of Ward Connerly, "those divisive little boxes on state forms will have to go." However, the College Board, which owns the SAT and refuses to stop using race on its forms, should be allowed to continue. Sure sounds confusing to me. Is it OK to have those race boxes if you use them nationally, but not on only a state level? Should any university system be able to pick and choose when to use racial classifications or does Ward Connerly really want to do away with all of them?

When my son took the Preliminary Scholastic Achievement Test (PSAT) last year, there was no adequate racial box for him. He was told to check "other." He refused, and told the test administrator that "other" means "different from my peers." He was told he had to check a box, and only one box. He wrote in and checked his own box: multiracial. This caused a flurry of correspondence, since we were told that his test might be invalidated.

Some interesting things came out of that correspondence. We learned that:

* Students do not have to check race at all on the test forms.

* The College Board will not indicate that the race question is optional on the forms, so students do not know it's optional.

* The College Board still will not allow students to check more than one race.

* Although the ACT test added a multiracial category many years ago at the request of Project RACE, the College Board will not.

* The College Board may eventually add the ability to check more than one race, but will not divulge how they will tabulate the responses.

Why is the College Board so interested in race, anyway? Because they sell the racial data they collect. It's a little money maker. A few weeks after my son took the PSAT, he received a magazine in the mail. It had five teens on the cover who all looked like minorities. Inside was information on colleges looking for minority students. A few days later, we received the same magazine with five different teens on the cover who all looked white. Can you guess what kind of students they were appealing to?

The SAT is a vehicle that keeps classifying and separating by race. How could Ward Connerly be for something like that if he wants to do away with racial classifications? Perhaps he can use his influence to appeal to the College Board to do away with their "silly little boxes" that Connerly professes to loathe so much.