"Racial Preferences Are Dead."

Anti-quota activist Ward Connerly on..

Michael W. Lynch from the February 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

That was the thing that prompted me really to get involved. I felt that after all I'd gone through to get this changed at one of America's most prestigious institutions, it could all be lost--and not because the voters didn't embrace the principle that I pursued, but simply because of an inept campaign to gather the signatures.

Reason: The media like to portray Prop. 209 as a Republican Party ploy to elect its candidates in California. I saw a campaign energized by ordinary citizens. What was the role of the grassroots in Prop. 209?

Connerly: If anything, the grassroots used the Republican Party, rather than the other way around. This was truly an ecumenical campaign of libertarians, Democrats, and independents. Independent State Sen. Quentin Kopp played a phenomenal role in this campaign. So did Republicans, firefighters, policemen, housewives, and black people who really didn't like the voice of Jesse Jackson, that Energizer Bunny of doom and gloom. But we realized we needed money, and the Republican Party was able to give us that.

Reason: Is it significant that this now-national debate was sparked in California, the most ethnically diverse state in the country?

Connerly: There is a correlation between the degree of natural ethnic diversity and tolerance of policies which classify us by ethnic background and "race," and then confer benefits on that basis. When you have the kind of [ethnic and racial] differences that we have in California and a government policy which classifies us into basically five groups and says, "Three of you are going to get preferences at the [state] university and two of you are not," that is bound to create tension. It's bound to create its own energy to get rid of the damn policies.

Reason: Did affirmative action have to turn into a quota system in which different applicants are held to different standards?

Connerly: I'm not sure that we really knew what we wanted when we embarked on this detour. We had a feeling that if we stayed on course, it wasn't going to get us to where we wanted to go. We saw some bumps in the road and so we thought, "Let's avoid those bumps and let's see if we can get to grandma's house a little faster by taking this detour."

At first, I really thought that affirmative action was just a stronger version of equal opportunity. You used to see at the bottom of job announcements, "We are an equal opportunity employer." Then it became, "We are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer." I thought that was just a stronger dose of equal opportunity. But we didn't adopt "affirmative action" as a word of art, we didn't run it through the gauntlet of Congress and other public-policy forums. We didn't do that and, as a result, it meant different things to different people.

For some of us--certainly for me--the idea that affirmative action has evolved into a system of different standards for people is something I never, ever thought was what affirmative action meant.

Reason: Until you were confronted by the data?

Connerly: That's right.

Reason: How large were the preferences at the University of California?

Connerly: They were huge. At the San Diego campus, for example, if you are American Indian, African American, Chicano [of Mexican heritage], or Latino [other Latin American heritage], you get an automatic 300 bonus points. There is no means test, there is no citizenship test, there is no residency test; it is a race preference that is given solely based on checking the box. The significance of a 300-point preference is huge. In many cases, five points can be decisive.

At Berkeley, a middle-to-upper-income black student with a 3.0 grade point average who was not a California resident had a better chance of being admitted than a 4.0, low-income, California resident who was Asian or white.

Reason: Do you think the president is sincere about his "conversation on race"?

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