Super Tuesday for Equal Rights

April 30th, 2007
Preferential policies fading state by state

By E. Thomas McClanahan

Eleven years ago, California voters approved a ballot issue banning racial preference by state government.

Now a campaign for a similar measure has begun in Missouri, Colorado, Arizona and Oklahoma.

What’s interesting about this new effort, announced last week, is the ho-hum reaction it generated. The story drew only dutiful coverage and any buzz was brief — a far cry from the sparks that flew during the original campaign in California.

It’s as if the nation is following an unspoken consensus, a tacit agreement that the time has come to roll back affirmative action to some still-unspecified extent, very slowly.

The issue rose to the top of the national agenda in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration faced pressure to deal with the bizarre trends apparent in civil rights policy.

Three examples suggest how radically the nation was veering from the lodestar of judging people by “the content of their character.”

•Companies faced government lawsuits for failing to hire minority workers in proportions that precisely mirrored the racial makeup of their available labor pool, based on Byzantine calculations by federal bureaucrats.

•The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that employers could be held liable even for failing to hire ex-convicts in numbers the government deemed appropriate. The argument: African-Americans and Hispanics had higher-than-average conviction records, therefore refusing to hire ex-convicts could contribute to racial disparities.

•In California, the Legislature twice passed laws essentially creating a racial entitlement to a college degree. The bills said state-university graduating classes had to reflect California’s overall racial makeup.

Those California bills were vetoed, but they sparked a movement that began nudging policy back toward the original intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which barred preferential treatment.

The California Civil Rights Initiative provided a model for successful campaigns in Michigan and Washington state, and it will serve as the model for the initiatives in Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma and Arizona.

Another thing that’s changed over the years is the nature of the debate. Publicly questioning affirmative action is no longer quite the taboo it once was, even among black people.

A quarter-century ago, racial preference had few black critics willing to make their arguments publicly.

Thomas Sowell was perhaps the most well-known. Later came other voices, such as Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele and John McWhorter. Ward Connerly, who is multiracial, helped lead the original campaign for the California initiative. Connerly is also behind the campaign in Missouri and the three other states.

These critics were uncomfortable with the unhealthy co-dependence bred by preferential policies, which tend to cast black people in the role of helpless victims and whites in the role of benevolent benefactors.

Black people still overwhelmingly support affirmative action, but these days more African-Americans are willing to question it. More are uncomfortable with, and vocal about, the downside of racial preference — namely its assumption of inferiority.

Even the distinctive language that envelopes race preference is demeaning. You hear people say, “We need more women on that board,” or “We need more black employees here” — a way of speaking that echoes how we describe faceless, interchangeable units of some commodity. It’s become so routine, no one bats an eye.

If a Missouri Civil Rights Initiative makes it onto the 2008 ballot, it would probably have a good chance of passing.

President Clinton, in his famous speech on affirmative action, promised to “mend it, not end it.” The mending process began in California. Now it is spreading, gradually, to other states.

To reach E. Thomas McClanahan, call (816) 234-4480 or send e-mail to mcclanahan@kcstar.com.