Ward Connerly: standing on principles, not a mission

As an African American opposed to affirmative action, Ward Connerly has grown accustomed to being despised by his own kind for doing his own thinking.

In 1996, Connerly was a regent of the University of California system who helped lead the effort to dismantle state-sponsored racial and ethnic preferences in the Golden State through a ballot initiative called Proposition 209.

Connerly is now chairman of the Sacramento-based American Civil Rights Institute. Since the passage of Proposition 209, he has taken the fight to other states.

In November, with his support, Michigan voters approved an initiative to amend the state constitution to bar public institutions from considering race or sex in public education, employment or contracting.

Already, the initiative is headed to court. Yet Connerly plans to push ballot initiatives in three or four other states in the 2008 election, as part of what he calls a "Super Tuesday"-type offensive.

Those efforts will get a boost from white males, who love to jump on the victim bandwagon and claim to be wronged by "reverse discrimination." And that's fine with Connerly.

"If a black person says he was discriminated against, we have a duty to find out if that is true or not," he told me. "If a white person says the same thing, we have an equal duty to find out if it's true or not. There is a duty incumbent on policymakers to say, 'Look, we don't think there is any evidence that this has happened. Moreover, we have policies that ensure you will be treated just like everyone else.' "

Did you catch that? "We don't think there is any evidence that this has happened." Connerly's words confirm what I've always suspected: That he is skeptical of the popular claim concerning white males. For him, this crusade is a principled stand, not a rescue mission. Others, who want to end preferences, feel differently.

"There is one camp," he said, "and I'm in it — which says that there are certain principles that you hold dear in a democratic society. There is another camp that is probably borderline racist, the KKK'ers and others, who — and they're small — they just don't want those N-word people and minorities getting all these benefits that they don't get. They don't care about the principle, they just have these attitudes that are racist. Then there's the group that believes that they're losing contracts or jobs because they're white males."

Meanwhile, a decade after Californians put an end to racial preferences, the numbers of African Americans at the University of California are atrocious. At present, black students represent 3 percent of UC freshmen systemwide.

The poor showing doesn't bother Connerly.

Black students weren't the only group to see their numbers at UC go down when racial preferences were scuttled. Whites also suffered. Yes, whites. White students now account for about 32 percent of the freshman class at UC campuses, down from almost 40 percent 10 years ago.

Enrollment figures went up for Asian Americans and Hispanics. Asians now account for about 42 percent of the UC freshman class, up from 36 percent a decade ago. Hispanics now make up just over 16 percent, up from 13 percent.

The fact that the gains Asians have enjoyed seem to have come at the expense of whites casts doubt on the theory that affirmative action hurts white applicants. It also suggests something that sounds counterintuitive — that, under affirmative action, when the competition was between whites and Asians, it was the Asians who lost out and the whites who benefited.

Ten years ago, the UC system operated under numerical-admissions goals according to race. For Asians, those goals turned into ceilings. And the effect was to spare whites from having to compete head-to-head with the one group that cleans their clocks: Asians. So now that race is no longer considered at UC, and naturally the numbers for Asians have gone up while those for whites have dropped.

Connerly admits that, during the battle for Proposition 209, some college administrators told him that they were worried about Asians "taking over" at some UC campuses.

Could be. If this trend keeps up, people may start to clamor for targeted outreach efforts and preferential treatment for white students to give them a leg up in competing with Asians.

That sounds familiar.

2006, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Ruben Navarrette's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com