This Tuesday, Americans will vote in an election widely seen as a referendum on the war in Iraq. Those who live in Michigan will have a chance to weigh in on another war – one waged in the name of racial and gender equity. They will be asked to decide, in essence, whether affirmative action is advancing or retarding progress in that struggle as they consider a ballot initiative to eliminate “preferential treatment” in the public sector.
For Ward Connerly, the prime mover behind the Michigan proposal and the man who pushed an almost identical proposition to passage in California in 1996, the issue could not be clearer. Affirmative action, as he sees it, is a cancer, eating away at racial harmony.
Connerly’s critics are eager to prove him wrong. Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, argues that special efforts are still needed to enable deserving women and people of color to succeed.
Understanding what happened in California is fundamental to understanding what may happen in Michigan. One thing is clear: The sky did not fall in. Most people went about their business after passage of Proposition 209 pretty much as they had before because the fate of most people – black and white, male and female – has little to do with affirmative action.
But in two areas, minority enrollment in the state’s top public universities and contracts awarded to women and minorities, Proposition 209 was a watershed event. In 1998, the University of California-Berkeley enrolled less than half the number of blacks it had the previous year and nearly half the number of Latinos. At UCLA, the numbers of incoming “underrepresented” minorities also dropped precipitously. Over the years, the numbers have crept up, but they are still nowhere near what they were pre-Proposition 209.
The impact on small entrepreneurs was even more striking. No one has yet done a comprehensive study, but the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that it hit many very hard. A number of minority-owned firms that once thrived have vanished, said Frederick Jordan, founder of F.E. Jordan Associates, a civil and environmental engineering firm. Prior to the proposition’s passage, it was easy to find minority firms to do work on major transportation projects, said Jordan. But “all the firms were wiped out. In 1996 in San Francisco, I could’ve produced 10 or 15 African- American firms that could do any kind of work. Today, I can’t find anybody.”
A new study released by the Discrimination Research Center confirmed Jordan’s assessment. According to DRC’s analysis, only one-third of minority firms certified to do business with the state Department of Transportation in 1996 are still in operation. The study also noted that contracts awarded to minority businesses by Caltrans had dropped more than 50 percent since passage of Proposition 209.
Its proponents were fond of arguing that minority students would benefit because they would finally be free of the “stigma” associated with affirmative action. California’s experience seems to say that assumption is not necessarily true. The stigma seems to linger.
Kimberly Griffin, a black UCLA grad student in higher education, routinely encounters students who assume that she met some lower standard to get in: “People on campus, even though there’s Prop. 209, think there’s still affirmative action and there are still quotas.”
It is also far from clear that barring consideration of race results in a better match between university and student, or that it improves graduation rates.
Despite the California experience, few people involved in the early debates seem much interested in revising their old assumptions. That is not particularly surprising. Nor is it surprising that much of the debate over Proposition 209, and over Proposal 2 in Michigan, is driven mostly by emotion and preconceptions.
In a sane world, the battle in Michigan, and the battle over affirmative action writ large, would offer an opportunity to seriously engage a question that both sides care about: How do you go about creating a society where all people, not just the lucky few, have the opportunities they deserve?
But until we begin to move toward an answer, the debate over affirmative action will continue, even if it is something of a sideshow.
Ellis Cose is a contributing editor and columnist for Newsweek. This article is adapted from “Killing Affirmative Action: Would Ending it Really Result in a Better, More Perfect Union?” published by USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism (www.justicejournalism.org/cose).
