Barring the success of a last-ditch lawsuit by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, California’s special October 7 ballot on whether to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis also will include a ballot initiative, Proposition 54, sponsored by University of California Regent Ward Connerly.
The initiative says: "The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment." Dubbed the "Racial Privacy Initiative," Prop 54 follows up on Connerly’s Prop 209 (approved by California voters in 1996) that prohibits the state from using race as a factor in school admissions, or in state jobs or contracts.
HUMAN EVENTS’ Joel Weckerly interviewed Connerly last month about Proposition 54 and about Connerly’s new campaign to enact a version of Prop 209 in Michigan. Here are excerpts from the interview.
HUMAN EVENTS: What’s the main principle guiding your efforts?
CONNERLY: If you go back and you look at the founding of the nation, we are a group of individuals, a group of persons, if you will. In the Constitution, we have enshrined the principle that every person shall be guaranteed due process of law and equal protection of the law. We then codified that in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The central question that was on the table during the Civil Rights movement was: Does each state have the right to determine for itself the rights of its black citizens? The Supreme Court, the President, and the Congress-by passing the ’64 Civil Rights Act-said, no, that civil rights are individual rights that attach to every person and they will be accorded the protection of those rights, regardless of what state they’re in.
When you think about the decision that the court handed down on June 23 [affirming the use of race as a factor in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School], namely that any institution of higher education may consider one’s race and give "race preferences"-as Justice O’Connor said; she didn’t say affirmative action, she said "race preferences"-in the interest of diversity, that means that every state now has a right to do whatever it wishes.
That’s a contradiction of the 1964 Civil Right Act?
CONNERLY: It’s a contradiction of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and it has enormous implications for this country. It means that if you and I go to Arizona, now we’ve got to look up the law there and see what our rights are as American citizens. If we go to Colorado, there might be a different package of rights. We go to California, race preferences are not allowed. We go into Nevada, race preferences are allowed. We then go into Washington State, race preferences are not allowed. Our rights as Americans will change each time we cross the border of a state. So civil rights cease to have any meaning according to this decision. It is one of the most profound changes in American public policy with respect to the rights of citizens that you can imagine, and the public is totally unaware of the implications of this. . . . the court now believes that George Wallace and Lester Maddox were right: States should have the right to decide who goes to their colleges.
Why does California need the Racial Privacy Initiative? Where does the state still inquire about racial status?
CONNERLY: They inquire when you apply for a job. Some counties-not all, but some counties-will inquire when you’re born, on your birth certificate. They want to know whether you are black or of Mexican descent, whether you’re Asian, or whatever. They will inquire when you apply for admission to K-12. They want to track you and see what the graduation rate is of your race. They will inquire if you bid on a job. They will inquire if you apply for college, even though they’re not supposed to be able to do anything with that information as a government agency. But they will inquire. In some instances they inquire when you die. They want to know what was the race of this person that died.
They inquire-not just government agencies, but other agencies, non-profits, for example, health care institutions-will inquire when you go into the doctor. That would be exempted by this initiative because medical research and medical patients are exempted. But there’s so many transactions in the course of a person’s life where the government wants to categorize you, and it does so largely for political reasons. . . . [The U.S. Census Bureau] now has 63 different racial categories-you can check as many boxes that you want.
Do you feel this is almost skirting your Proposition 209, saying, "We’re not going to directly obey what the law says?"
CONNERLY: While there are some who probably deliberately want to skirt it, this is an instance in which we are dealing with a very deeply entrenched paradigm, and it is slowly going to have to be changed. It is being changed by this sheer phenomenon of people marrying across these lines of race and ethnicity and having children-children not neatly fitting into any box or another.
If you saw last week’s Parade magazine, there was a cover story that I would commend to you about the phenomenon of interracial children. I don’t even like the term "interracial" because it suggests that there is more than one race. I think that honestly there’s a human race. The good Lord didn’t create different races. But this article is about young people who just don’t fit into one box or another. There are other stories that I’ve recently seen about the growing number of students, who when they apply to college, just absolutely refuse to check any box. At the University of California, it’s one of the most rapidly growing demographics, if you will, that we have at the university: people that just decline to state.
Liberals who oppose your proposition are saying that researchers won’t be able to collect data and understand why minorities suffer from heart disease, AIDS, etc. Are these substantial arguments?
CONNERLY: No, they’re not, because in the initiative there’s an exemption for health care and for medical research. Now their argument is: "Well, but there’s a lot of data that we get from general population information that we will need." First of all, that is not true. I’ve rarely seen-I’ve never even seen-any health agency that goes to the general population figures. The census, for example, shows that 12% of the people in Michigan are black. Well, first of all, we don’t know what that means. Are they native-born people of African descent? Are they Caribbean? What are they? What’s black? But I have yet to see anyone who goes to that body of information and tries to draw conclusions about health conditions based on that. When you’re treating people, you don’t-and I’ve talked to a lot of physicians-even though you ask them their race, you’re doing that to kind of capture the overall background of the person. But you don’t diagnose a person on the basis of these general population statistics.
And if they want to do that, all they have to do is to go to the legislature and invoke Clause 2 in our initiative, which says that if you can find a compelling reason for racial categories, the legislature with a 2/3rds vote in each House, and with the signature of the governor, can override the initiative in any area except public education, public contracting and public employment. Those are the three areas already covered in our constitution as a result of 209.
