"Racial Preferences Are Dead."

Anti-quota activist Ward Connerly on..

Michael W. Lynch from the February 1998 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

There are other institutions--like United Way, the Salvation Army, and [professional basketball player] Kevin Johnson's St. Hope Academy in Sacramento, which takes kids after school and provides them with a home away from home--that can provide the information. Do they go to church? If they do, then the church can sort of provide that. If they don't go to church, they probably watch television. If they watch television, maybe our government ought to induce some of these stations to provide public-service announcements that hit these kids: Have Michael Jordan or somebody making a statement that, "Hey, I understand that Chevron has some jobs for young kids who want to work this summer. Come on down." There are all kinds of things we can do.

That's part of the reassurance package I see us having to do to let people know that we are serious. As a conservative, I plead guilty for my colleagues who are not doing enough to provide that reassurance package. We lack the credibility because it seems we're only preoccupied with eliminating the preference system. We have not done our job to say, "We're doing this because we want you to live a better life, because we think you can do it on your own without having to suffer this taint, this stigma."

Reason: Much attention has been paid to your rise from humble beginnings to a successful businessman--usually in an attempt to somehow show that it was not the result of hard work.

Connerly: The defenders of preferences don't want any good news. They don't want to believe that the American dream is realizable for black people. It contradicts their whole value system. Their arguments rest on the notions that Americans are bad, that white people cannot be trusted, that you have to have this gun to their head to make them do the right thing, and that black people need this system to navigate the daily transactions of American life. That we can't make it without it--not because we're not talented, but because we won't get a fair deal.

It is really hard to defend affirmative-action preferences. The only arguments you can use are either that we need diversity just for the sake of diversity, or that America is still racist. You have to embrace one of those two. And you find that you can't win those arguments at the end of the day. So you don't deal with the issue as an issue.

One of my detractors is a guy named Marion Woods. Marion Woods was former California Gov. Jerry Brown's welfare director. He is married to a cousin of mine. He sat at my Aunt Hazel's house--my Aunt Hazel supports me--and he said, "We're going to bring him down, we're going to bring him down." And the way that you bring him down is you take him as a candidate, you don't deal with the issue as an issue. You deal with it as a candidate's campaign. You try to find things that will somehow discredit the individual.

Reason: An anti-preference initiative recently lost in Houston and federal anti-preference legislation is stalled in Congress. What do these outcomes say about the future of racial preferences?

Connerly: Racial preferences are dead. All that is required now is to give them a decent and honorable burial. The defeat of the Houston initiative and the cowardice in the House Judiciary Committee are speed bumps that slow down the movement to end preferences. But they won't stop it.

The Houston initiative occurred in a political community in which black people represent 26 percent of the population, Latinos 33 percent, and Asians 6 percent. In this environment, you can construct a political calculus of women and minorities allied against white males. That is precisely the political equation that the mayor [of Houston] crafted. You should not be surprised when you can get people to vote on the basis of their racial identity and defeat measures like the Houston Civil Rights Initiative.

It would have passed if the original language of the initiative had been what the voters were voting on. The language that appeared on the ballot--along the lines of "Shall the City of Houston prohibit affirmative action for women and minorities now and in the future?"--was not the language that people had signed the petitions for. [That language] was about preferential treatment. When the mayor was able to make sure the voters were voting on "affirmative action," and not on patently preferential treatment, the election was lost.

Long term, the heavy lifting involves our having the courage to go into black neighborhoods, into Latino neighborhoods, and into Asian neighborhoods, and to make the case that their rights are no more secure than anyone else's when our government has the power to make you check a box--and to confer benefits on the basis of the box.

Reason: What is the payoff for all of your efforts? What is your vision of the post-preference future?

Connerly: My vision of the post-preference future is probably best summed up by Janice Camarena Ingraham. Janice is a white mother of four, three when I first met her. When her first husband, who was Mexican American, died, she had to go back to school to support her family. She enrolled in a remedial English class, which was part of a program restricted for African Americans at San Bernardino Valley Community College.

On the first day of school, the instructor said there were two people in the class who would have to leave. Both were white women, and one of them was Janice. Janice sued and the case was settled out of court. As a result of this experience, she became convinced that this was a fight that was worth fighting until the end. There was another program, the Puente program, for Latinos and Chicanos. Janice realized that one of her daughters could attend the Puente program, but the other two could not, since their father was white. Janice came away believing that something was wrong in this country when one of her daughters could attend a class but the other two could not.

When Janice had her fourth baby in early November 1997, she refused to check the box on the birth certificate indicating racial and ethnic identity because she wanted a raceless baby.

For me, this whole movement leads to the goal of not checking the silly boxes, of not even wanting the boxes. That is where we are heading. We are going back to what John F. Kennedy said in 1963, that "race has no place in American life or law." The influence of our movement, the one thing that I can pass into my grave feeling very good about, is that we started the momentum so that now Americans are genuinely believing and rededicating themselves to the proposition that we really do want to be a raceless society.