| The Last Word
Posted Aug. 4, 2003
By Woody West
Connerly wages a one-man campaign against racial favoritism.
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Connerly Has a Dream: A Color-blind Society
One day when the last neo-Marxist professor has been retired from a
public university, when the last "diversity" trainer and the
last "multicultural facilitator" have been told to vacate
their cubbyholes by sundown, and when the American Association of
University Women reluctantly announces it no longer will issue its
scathing annual report on how the nation's schools discriminate against
females because 75 percent of undergraduate degrees are being awarded to
women - on that glorious day - there should be a cheer for Ward Connerly.
As surely as that day of revived national sanity will come, there will
be a number of men and women, black and white, to be honored. Connerly
is prominent among the principled band of black Americans - Tom Sowell,
Walter Williams, Shelby Steele, Stanley Crouch, among them - who
relentlessly have been savaged for insisting on the ideal of a
color-blind society and putting their reputations and energies behind
their advocacy.
Connerly has been a relentless foe of racial preference, which is called
everything but what it is - quotas. As a regent of the University of
California system, he began years ago to argue against the practice as
it became noxiously rooted in California and national politics. He
sponsored Proposition 209 in California that passed in 1996 and
proscribed the bureaucrats from granting preferential treatment to
individuals and groups on the basis of sex, race and the other
categories of group identity. He also led a successful 1998 drive in
Washington state to ban racially weighted affirmative action.
Connerly is not loved by the race hustlers (Crouch's stinging
description). He will be even less loved by them if, as seems likely, a
new California racial proposition is voted on in the autumn. This one,
known as CRECNO - Classification by Race, Ethnicity, Color and National
Origin - would prohibit the state from identifying Californians by those
categories that are fuel for the vast array of government engines that
keep antidiscrimination programs running at expensive cruising speed.
"Race is irrelevant" after 30 years of civil-rights laws and
enforcement at every level of government, contends Connerly, and so do
growing numbers of Americans dispirited by ritualized complaints of
various victimhoods. If CRECNO passes, huff the opponents, it could
damage efforts to diversify the workplace; "diversity" being
the all-purpose banner of racial preference, a label that has become an
essentially undefined and undefinable dogma of the left.
If the initiative passes, it would end civilization as we know it,
opponents wail. As state law, it would cripple efforts by researchers to
collect data to help understand why certain minorities suffer from some
illnesses, and why members of certain groups are more likely to become
teen-age parents, drop out of school and (worst of all, apparently)
smoke tobacco at an early age.
Carefully collected and analyzed statistics do have value, of course.
Too often, however, they have been crafted to justify a predetermined
ideological theme of progressive social engineering. "Opponents
said they suspect that Connerly's motives go beyond
color-blindness," according to one news story. Indeed, say these
"opponents," his real motive is to advance Latino claims of
affirmative action, as Hispanics have become the dominant national
minority group in the United States and might be a majority of
California's population by 2030. In plainer terms, this means that
Connerly thinks there already are more than sufficient
government-protected groups of social victims. But it is a tactic of
devious combat that, when you can't rebut an opponent's arguments,
assail his motive as dishonorable.
Connerly not only doesn't back off from these attacks, he opens a fresh
front. In wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Gutter v. Bollinger
(the University of Michigan racial-preference case), he plans to launch
a ballot initiative there similar to the one that succeeded in
Washington state to proscribe racial preferences of any kind.
In the Michigan case, you recall, Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,
writing with the majority to sustain racial preference in admissions,
said that, yes, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution still guarantees
equal protection of the laws for all citizens and in 25 years, say,
racial and ethnic preferences no longer may be necessary. The 14th
Amendment then would be revived. But, in effect, it will be suspended
for that interlude.
O'Connor's dismal reasoning makes Connerly's campaign in Michigan all
the more vital. As expected, his planned initiative there instantly
roused opposition. Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who had to do a
full grovel to the NAACP after he and several other Democratic
contenders ignored the organization's summons to appear at its
convention, squeaked that a Michigan ballot question would be
"divisive and destructive" - as if racial preferences were
not.
Depressingly, there are reports that some Michigan Republicans also are
alarmed that a successful Connerly ballot question against racial
favoritism might have an electoral backlash. Greg McNeilly, executive
director of the Michigan GOP, is quoted by National Review's John J.
Miller as saying, "Our hope is that our opposition prevents it from
getting on the ballot."
Let us devoutly hope that there are Republicans in Michigan of higher
principle and ideals, and that Connerly - and the United States - can
record another victory against state-sponsored discrimination. If we go
much farther down the road of racial favoritism, we might as well hold a
constitutional yard sale: The 14th Amendment would be worth a few bucks
as a memento of a once idealistic society.
Woody West is an associate editor for Insight magazine.
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