The death knells for affirmative action
Mills, Nicolaus
It is called the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), and if enacted, it would end affirmative action in California. The state and its subdivisions would be prohibited from using race,...
...It is hardly surprising that a New York Times/CBS poll found that 71 percent of blacks, as compared to just 17 percent of whites, favor affirmative action...
...Does the black youngster from the suburbs merit extra consideration...
...It died in the Judiciary Committee...
...q 190 • DISSENT...
...Wood and Custred are not worried about the initiative being defeated in the State Assembly...
...The result is that opinion on affirmative action tends to break down along many of the same racial and ethnic lines that divide American society...
...They have already made the welfare and balanced-budget issues theirs...
...For California Governor Pete Wilson, who used his support of Proposition 187, the referendum that would deny most publicly funded services to illegal aliens, to win a come-from-behind victory over liberal Kathleen Brown, the CCRI may even be the issue that makes him a presidential candidate...
...The result would be no set-asides for minority contractors, no special admissions programs for colleges, no race-based hiring in government jobs...
...At the 95,000 companies employing the 27 million workers covered by federal affirmative action programs, the policy often means hiring one person over another in order to meet a mandated goal...
...If they can do the same with affirmative action, they will have redefined the politics of the decade...
...After months of testing the California political waters, Wilson has formally endorsed the initiative...
...I don't think that it's fair to give preferences based on race or gender," he declared when asked about the CCRI...
...To make matters worse, with the passage of time it has become increasingly difficult to determine who deserves the preference affirmative action brings...
...Those who see themselves benefiting from affirmative action regard it as a social necessity...
...The initiative has the support of such conservative Republicans as William Buckley and Pat Buchanan, as well as former Secretary of Education William Bennett...
...It will take 615,000 signatures to get the CCRI on the ballot for 1996, but given the interest the initiative has already aroused, that task can be easily accomplished with enough financing...
...The state and its subdivisions would be prohibited from using race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin to discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group...
...You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains," Johnson declared, "liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all others' and still justly believe you have been completely fair...
...However, since the 1960s affirmative action has come to be a zero-sum game for many...
...In a state in which an estimated five thousand white men were told recently that they could not take the qualifying test for the Los Angeles Fire Department until it met its minority and gender hiring goals, the CCRI has become the wedge issue...
...Republicans are increasingly confident the CCRI will force the electorate to choose between them and a Democratic party wedded to minority preferences...
...Liberal anger with the initiative runs deep...
...Those who see themselves being hurt by it regard it as unfair...
...I think that what we should do is make those judgments based upon merit after affording real equality and opportunity of success...
...A parallel situation is true for colleges, where in the name of diversity a student with lower test scores and grades is often accepted over one more academically qualified...
...Or they can break with their past and declare that the time has come to replace affirmative action with a more inclusive liberalism in which real equality— beginning with identical funding for suburban and urban schools—becomes the goal of social policy...
...Their confidence is easy to understand...
...Last year the CCRI was introduced in the State Assembly by Republican Bernie Richter of Chico...
...At stake for the Democrats is their ability to win major elections...
...In the prosperous 1960s there was no sense that affirmative action might be a zero-sum game in which one group's gain was another group's loss...
...For Republicans, on the other hand, the CCRI provides every incentive to stay with the politics of meanness that brought them into power in 1994...
...They can oppose the CCRI and become still further identified as the party of minorities in America...
...Their headquarters are in a tiny office on Martin Luther King, Jr...
...The CCRI is the brainchild of Thomas Wood, the executive director of the conservative California Association of Scholars, and Glynn Custred, an anthropology professor at California State University at Hayward...
...The Civil Rights Act of 1991 notwithstanding, current support for affirmative action hangs by a thread...
...What is more, they will have done so by taking from the Democrats the moral ideal on which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rest—the belief that we are a colorblind nation in which racial entitlements have no place...
...If so, what do we say to the unemployed mineworker's son from West Virginia who may have received a far worse education...
...The CCRI thus presents Democrats and Republicans with very different challenges...
...No other single piece of legislation promises so clear a referendum on American politics in the nineties...
...The problem is that the longer Democrats wait to make such a break with their past, the less likely the decision is to strike voters as principled...
...As Eva Paterson, the executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, observed in an interview in the Washington Post, "You can call it Willie Horton goes to college...
...They believe that political momentum is on their side and that the passage of Proposition 187 by such a wide margin shows that voters are angry and willing to take matters into their own hands...
...Way in Berkeley, but the smallness of their operation belies the importance the CCRI has for California and the nation...
...At the time it was opposed by both the black and Hispanic caucuses, and in 1995 it is certain to have their opposition again...
...What Johnson had in mind by way of fairness were the job training and education programs of the Great Society...
...Before affirmative action is buried at the polls, Democrats need to begin negotiations for the programs that would replace it by reaching out to all in need...
...The best case for affirmative action was made thirty years ago by President Lyndon Johnson as the South's Jim Crow laws were being dismantled...
...A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey found that two out of three Americans oppose affirmative SPRING • 1995 • 189 Right Turn action, and according to a Los Angeles Times poll, 73 percent of Californians support the CCRI...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
