California voters will decide in November whether their state will uphold its generation-old ban on racial preference in public institutions.
A new ballot initiative, known as Proposition 16, would undo the results of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which voters approved in 1996 in a campaign co-chaired by Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn. Also known as Proposition 209, the older initiative prohibited discrimination and preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.
“Proposition 16 forsakes the only principle that can nourish and sustain equal rights: each is alike before the law,” Arnn said in an email. “That principle was strengthened in the California constitution by Proposition 209. To weaken it is to abandon the hope of the nation pursued from its beginning by the greatest Americans, including those who built our college.”
In 1996, 55% of voters supported the California Civil Rights Initiative.
Proposition 16, which is on California’s ballot this year, would reverse it. Other measures on the ballot include establishing a task force to study reparations, implementing racial quotas for private corporations in California and a required minimum number of underrepresented minorities on their boards of directors, and requiring every high school student take a course on ethnic studies in order to graduate.
Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-79) introduced ACA 5, the bill that put Proposition 16 on the ballot, stating that “the ongoing [coronavirus] pandemic, as well as recent tragedies of police violence, is forcing Californians to acknowledge the deep-seated inequality and far-reaching institutional failures that show that your race and gender still matter.”
According to Arnn, Proposition 209 intended to treat everyone the same, with a few exceptions.
“Its intent was simple: race and sex are not factors to be taken into account in government employment, contracting, and admissions except where they constitute “bonafide” (this word is taken from the 1964 Civil Rights Act) qualifications for the job, contract, or matriculation,” Arnn said. “An example might be hiring police of one race or another to patrol the neighborhoods predominantly of that race. In other cases, all are to be treated the same.”
Prop 209 was co-written by Glynn Custred and Tom Wood. Custred is a professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University East Bay, and Wood received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley.
After hitting the press circuit to spread the word, Custred and Wood eventually met Arnn, then the president of the Claremont Institute, who expressed his interest and desire to help the campaign.
“He surprised and delighted us by saying he was backing it,” Custred said. “He was our first campaign manager and it was an important phase in the campaign since he brought the weight of the Claremont Institute to bear on the issue.”
Arnn eventually passed the campaign torch to Ward Connerly, a regent of the University of California. Connerly now also heads the “No to Prop 16” campaign.
Arnn said that in “neither the California state constitution nor the federal Constitution is there a barrier to giving college admission preference to people who are poor.”
“During the 1996 campaign, I asked the opposition why that was not enough,” Arnn said. “If it is not enough, it seemed a logical fact that those who support race preferences want to admit richer people of one color over poorer people of another. There is a Stanford study from a few years back that says that most of the students admitted under racial preferences come from the suburbs, not the inner city. I think that is a shame and hope to be able to help with it.”
Custred said Prop 209 aimed to bring the country closer to the American Founding principles of human equality.
“Our principles did not correspond with our practice,” he said. “After 1964, we are finally reaching a point where we are bringing our principles into practice. Individual rights, not group rights. That was our message and it seemed to work. Now what’s happening is a reaction taking us back to segregation, to a time when people were counted not by the content of their character but the color of their skin.”
Attempts to erase moral responsibility through racial reparations only serve to undercut human equality, Arnn said.
“If unnamed individuals or groups are claimed to harm some people who are identified only by their color (and not by any harm that has come to them), then the connection between the law and moral responsibility is broken,” Arnn said. “If people are punished for crimes that they have actually committed, then they have selected their own punishment. If they are punished for crimes that others committed, or may not have been committed by anyone, that is injustice, and injustice breeds more of the same.”
Audrey Dow, who works for the Campaign for College Opportunity and currently assists the Campaign to pass Prop 16, said that proponents of the Prop 209 “fundamentally misunderstand the difference between equality and equity.”
“Proposition 209 had a critical flaw in its logic,” she said in an email. “It assumed that we live in a colorblind world where race doesn’t matter when we know race is a determining factor in so many aspects of life from where you go to school, where you live, to how your resume is reviewed when you apply for a job.”
According to Dow, there has been a “systemic failure through affirmative action” to adequately represent minority groups.
However, an editorial from Aug. 28 in the Orange County Register points out that since the passage of Prop 209, diversity has actually increased in the state.
“From 2014 to 2018 alone, the proportion of California’s state civil service that was non-White increased from 53.9% to 57.5%…Both public employment and public university enrollment have continued to diversify even after passage of Prop 209, [which] contradicts the idea that Prop 209 is an impermeable barrier to diversity and opportunity,” the editorial said.
In a memo, Connerly criticized the authors of Prop 16 for wanting quotas, rather than true diversity.
“The State of California has completely gone crazy over racial grievance,” Connerly wrote in the memo. “Together, these measures demonstrate again that backers of racial preferences have never cared about so-called ‘diversity.’ They have always wanted racial quotas. Now, they even raise the ante with forced racial indoctrination and mandatory payment of money based on race.”
The campaign’s executive director, Wenyuan Wu, said “Prop 209 is not a categorical ban on affirmative action.”
“There are a plethora of legal analyses to prove that Prop 209 is a ban on discrimination and preferential treatment, not a ban on affirmative action,” Wu said. “Reasonable race consciousness is perfectly legal under Prop 209. Prop 16 is a mandate that would kill California’s constitutional principle of equality under the law.”
The media has attempted to portray the “No to Prop 16” campaign as “a conservative crusade,” according to Wu.
“We think we are on the side of reason and morality,” she said. “This is not a partisan issue.”
Prop 16 will be put on the ballot just 24 years after Prop 209 became law.
“California has moved steadily to the left for 25 or 30 years,” Arnn said. “Factors include the movement of people in and out of the state, the leftward march of the education system and especially of its elite graduates, the dominance of one political party, and the machine that party has been able to build.”
Custred said that Prop 16 may be passed because of the success of the Left’s march through the institutions.
“Universities, schools, and entertainment introduced the idea that Blacks can never be properly represented. A whole generation of younger people started to believe that,” he said. “The reigning value of those days has flipped and become something else.”
Despite the move leftward, public support has faltered. An article from the Los Angeles Times cited a poll published by the The Public Policy Institute of California showing that 31% of likely California voters surveyed said they would vote for Prop 16, while 47% said they oppose it. Twenty-two percent were undecided.