The rhetoric of affirmative action's defenders has already heated up. Charges of racism flow easily from their lips. At the Senate hearings on the CCRI, Democrat Assemblywoman Barbara Lee said of arguments advanced by supporters of the initiative: "The Ku Klux Klan uses the same arguments to justify their positions. They are very active in this state, and they do purport to support the rhetoric of these bills." Wood says he is "very disappointed" by the "vehement and angry" rhetoric of his opponents.
Interestingly, none of the Democrats who hold major statewide offices has actually come out against the CCRI. "Many Democrats are looking for a third way, some way to defend affirmative action without supporting the status quo," says Jeffe.
One such Democrat is Assemblyman Louis Caldera. "The authors of this initiative have clearly touched a hot-button issue," says Caldera. "You can't manipulate people into caring about the initiative unless there is already existing concern. We need to address the legitimate concerns that people have about affirmative action, but this initiative is too broad and too blunt an instrument to do that."
Some, including Wood and Custred, have suggested rebuilding affirmative action on socioeconomic grounds, giving preferential treatment to people from poor or working-class backgrounds. Supporters of current affirmative action programs oppose this notion. "Discrimination in this country is based upon race, not economic class," says Allan Parachini, public affairs director of the ACLU of Southern California. "A 16-year-old African-American male driving a car in the wrong neighborhood is likely to be stopped and harassed by the police whether he is the son of a banker or the son of a poor person."
Some Democrats, however, are talking about adding class-based categories to existing affirmative action programs or means-testing programs to keep wealthy minority members from benefiting. "We need to make sure that there is opportunity for whites from disadvantaged backgrounds, and we could perhaps restructure the programs to keep minorities who have had lives of privilege from taking advantage of them," says Caldera.
While this approach has the cautious support of many affirmative action defenders, others worry that any talk of reform distracts from the more important goal of preserving affirmative action and may help weaken it. "We are aware that some people who think that they are on our side say that economic considerations should be added to affirmative action programs," says Parachini, "but we just don't think that this is a problem of anywhere near the magnitude of discrimination based upon race."
Early signs are that those seeking a third way will have a difficult struggle with their allies. At first, Willie Brown supported the idea of adding economic considerations to affirmative action. But Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton reported early this spring that Brown regaled some lunchtime guests with a story of how he told President Clinton, who has suggested "fine-tuning" affirmative action, "By the way, Mr. President, if you do decide to leave us on affirmative action, next time I see you on a bandstand, make sure you have a banjo rather than a sax." Brown's aides told Skelton that Brown was referring to the banjo-plucking retarded Southern boy in the movie Deliverance.
Ruling out reform of affirmative action, such opponents of the CCRI will try to portray the initiative as an attack on equal opportunity, not quotas. "We have to clarify that quotas are already illegal except in certain narrow cases ordered by the courts to correct proven past discrimination, and the California Civil Wrongs Initiative cannot overturn those court orders," says Joe Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles.
Then what will the CCRI get rid of, according to its critics? "It will eliminate any program that requires affirmative outreach to underrepresented minorities or women," says Michael Harris, a staff attorney with the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. "Programs that require, for example, broader advertising to recruit a more diverse pool of applicants....It will also ban using race or gender as one criterion in deciding among a group of qualified individuals."
When asked why such programs are needed to ensure equal opportunity, defenders of affirmative action point to the recent federal "glass ceiling" report on women in corporate America or the small numbers of women and blacks at the top levels of California's largest companies. But whatever one thinks of those numbers, they don't seem to have much to do with the CCRI, which does not apply to private-sector affirmative action programs.
Still, if the supporters of affirmative action can successfully portray the programs as furthering equal opportunity, they will probably win the debate. Polls consistently show that a large majority of Americans oppose racial and gender preferences and quotas. But those same polls show that most people, including most whites, support the idea of equal opportunity. An April nationwide poll designed by Louis Harris for the Feminist Majority Foundation, for example, found initial support for the CCRI of 81 percent. But when people were asked if they would support the initiative if it ended programs that help women and minorities achieve equal opportunity in education and employment, support plummeted to 30 percent.
Opponents of affirmative action argue that many, probably most, such programs result in de facto quotas. Sometimes the quotas are open, they say, pointing to a California law setting a goal of giving 15 percent of state contracts to minority businesses and 5 percent to firms owned by women. But usually, argue the CCRI's backers, the preferences are hidden. They cite the state's higher-education system, particularly its medical schools, for evidence of reverse discrimination.
Officially, the University of California system has no racial quotas, and the universities jealously guard admissions and test-score data that might suggest otherwise. But the Los Angeles Times and other sources have reported that the Board of Regents commissioned a study of what enrollment would look like if affirmative action were abolished. According to the Times, if admission were based upon academic performance and economic need, black enrollment would drop by half, to less than 3 percent of the student body. Latino enrollment, now 13 percent, would drop to 11 percent. The number of Asian-American students would increase by between 15 and 25 percentage points, bringing the total at the system to between 48 percent and 58 percent, compared to the current level of 33 percent. White enrollment would increase by merely 5 percentage points.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Berkeley, probably the most competitive campus, has done its own study. If admission were based on academics alone, Asians would rise from 41.7 percent of the freshman class to between 51.6 percent and 54.7 percent. The white portion of the freshman class would increase from 29.8 percent to between 34.8 percent and 37.3 percent. Hispanic enrollment would drop from 15.3 percent to between 3 percent and 6.3 percent. Blacks would go from 6.4 percent to between 0.5 percent and 1.9 percent.
The situation isn't much different at the UC professional schools. Admissions officers at the University of California's five medical schools deny that race plays a part in admissions. "Candidates are judged by three equally weighted criteria: academic performance and test scores, clinical or research experience, and personal characteristics and experience," says Linda Grannell, an admissions officer at the University of California at Irvine's medical school. "This last would include their potential to render medical service to underrepresented populations."
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