In the midst of the tragi-comic recall fiasco that has Ah-nuld
loudly promising to terminate the car tax and other entities,
Californians have at least one chance for moral and intellectual
clarity on the ballot. Proposition 54, UC Regent Ward
Connerly’s initiative to ban Classification by Race,
Ethnicity, Color, and National Origin, is a noble and necessary
step toward reaching the colorblind, multiracial America envisioned
by the Civil Rights heroes of the early 1960s.
Connerly, notorious for his fight against affirmative action as
practiced in the UC system, is really just completing the circle
with this latest campaign. Affirmative action was simply the most
egregious part of a diseased and corrupt system whose heart
Proposition 54 is now trying to stab, if only in one state.
California, the most multiethnic state in the country, is a fine
place to begin the revolution.
Proposition 54 sympathizers have sagely noted that the same
methods used by racists in racist times are now employed by state
bureaucracy. What is most egregious is that this is now done in the
name of racial progress and social justice.
Well, we know what is often said of good intentions, and it
certainly applies here. The final obstacle that prevents parity of
minority achievement in the United States (and frankly, when we say
“minority” in this guise we usually mean blacks and
Latinos) is not white racism but what I would instead call
“racialism,” racism’s photonegative on the left.
By this I mean a liberal ideology, ingrained since the late
’60s, which cannot accept any option except to fetishize skin
color and ethnicity and to institutionalize double standards for
the fetishized groups as the only mechanism for redressing
historical oppression.
This is wrong ““ monumentally, tragically wrong.
Affirmative action may have been defensible as a stopgap measure in
the beginnings of desegregation, though even in that case it is
still arguable as to where it helped and where it harmed. It is
certainly ludicrous circa 2003 in which we have a large and vibrant
black professional class, Asian immigrants that routinely
outperform whites and blacks academically despite their upbringings
in serious poverty with a language barrier, and, hovering over the
whole mess, a steadily increasing degree of racial admixture that
renders the whole enterprise virtually nonsensical.
I have never been all that interested in the complaints of
whites who call racial classification “unfair” to them,
though I certainly see how one can come to think so. The unique
evil has always seemed to me, on the other hand, what this system
does to the very groups it claims to protect.
For example, statistics released during the recent disaster at
the University of Michigan revealed that black applicants in the
lowest quintile of grades and test scores have around an 85 percent
chance of admission; Asians and whites have to reach the top decile
to be afforded such good odds. Someone please tell me how this is
in any way conducive to achievement or uplift in black communities?
I’m sorry, but when a black child grows up in a country that
tells him his “D” equals his white or Asian
neighbor’s “A” that child is a second-class
citizen by fiat, and it is heartbreaking to see “Civil
Rights” (for that term surely deserves scare quotes these
days) advocates insisting that their wards are in fact cripples,
hopeless and lost without our benevolent leg up.
The libel that is spread against Connerly and Proposition 54 is
barely worth getting into; however, for good measure there are
clear provisos in the bill that exempt medical research and, with a
sunset clause, the Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
People who claim to oppose the bill on those grounds are liars and
are merely showing what they truly believe: fetishized or protected
groups won’t be able to compete in a colorblind, meritocratic
marketplace should Proposition 54 pass.
Such people are the real racists and the real reactionaries. In
the 21st century, colorblind is the only road to a final
realization of Langston Hughes’ “dream
deferred.”
Schulman is a graduate student in the political science
department.