In California, leftists are coming back for a third bite at the rotten apple of racial preferences. Having been resoundingly defeated in an affirmative action referendum in 2020, the establishment is trying to reintroduce this pernicious type of racism through the back door.
Instead of an up-front referendum reinstating racial preferences, which they know they will lose, the progressives of the once Golden State this time are trying to let the governor find exceptions that will gut the ban on affirmative action.
Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7, known as ACA7, was introduced by state Assemblyman Corey Jackson. In a press release, his office said that:
ACA-7 will allow California to directly combat these disparities by allowing the Governor to issue waivers to public entities that wish to use state funds for evidence-based or research-informed and culturally specific programs to increase life expectancy, improve educational outcomes, and lift specific ethnic groups and marginalized genders out of poverty.
The fear by the state’s long-suffering residents (those who haven’t fled to other states yet) is that this is a dishonest and duplicitous manner of reintroducing what the voters have rejected.
Californians have twice now pronounced themselves on racial preferences. The first was in 1996 with Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences in public education, employment, and contracting. It passed by a vote of 55% to 45%, a strong rejection of the use of race.
It was the first time Americans had had the opportunity to express themselves on educational racial preferences, which the Supreme Court found constitutional in some instances in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision.
The Left then tried to overturn Prop 209 in a referendum in 2020 with Proposition 16. A “no” vote would keep Prop 209 in place, supporting the idea that “government and public institutions cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.”
The “no’s” won by an even more resounding 57.23% to 42.77%, a 15-point margin, in a year when the voters of that state voted for President Joe Biden by 63.5%, edging former President Donald Trump by better than 34 percentage points. The losing “yes” side had overspent the “no’s” by around 14 to 1. And the “yes” side counted on the support of all the media and entertainment in the state.
But it was a rout by everyday Californians. Chinese-Americans led the fight to reject the measure, but Mexican-American districts also voted “no” on Prop. 16.
That’s why this year, the leftist assembly members are being devious. The press release, which appears to come straight out of a critical race theory graduate seminar at Berkley or UCLA, slams what the state’s voters have decided.
It says that,
Since its passing in 1996, Proposition 209 has served as a barrier toward implementing potential programs to assist vulnerable communities who have intentionally been neglected and left behind for over 400 years. This unjust law has substantially limited the state’s ability to address disparities in business contracting, education, housing, wealth, employment, and healthcare, which are deeply embedded in laws, policies, and institutions that perpetuate racial inequalities.
ACA7 claims that its goal is to lift “out of poverty specific groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations.”
But this is an underhanded attempt to reintroduce the abhorrent use of race in life-changing decisions.
As my friend Bill McGurn put it in the Wall Street Journal, “Apparently, the lesson the advocates of state-sponsored discrimination have taken from their defeat is that if at first you don’t succeed, try something sneakier.”
The broad coalition that opposed Prop 16 also smells a rat. “The exception will swallow the rule,” Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego, told me. A member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Heriot is leading the effort to oppose ACA7.
Heriot, Ward Connerly, a former University of California Regent, and other members of the broad coalition that defeated Prop 16, are gathering their forces again to oppose ACA7, but they rightly fear that the sneaky nature of the approach will lead Californians to wrongly believe that these exceptions will be rare.
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Among other things, they have created a petition opposing ACA7. It is intended to show senators that ACA7 will be no more popular than Prop 16. The petition can be accessed at change.org.
The anti-democratic nature of what California is trying to do — subverting the public will with talk of exceptions and woke concepts — should not confuse anyone.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.