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Since January 1997, the year in which ACRI was founded, it has been our primary mission to protect and defend the principle of equal rights for all Americans. The principle of equal rights is embodied in the American Constitution as well as statutory law. The right to equal treatment is the centerpiece of American culture. It was the quest for equal treatment that provided the moral fuel for Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead the national campaign to end the Jim Crow era and the oppression of Americans who were identified as “Negroes.” The principle of equal treatment for all remains a subject that is under constant attack from a variety of opponents.
This site seeks to provide a useful and enlightened forum for the discussion of numerous issues relating to “race.” We welcome the submission of articles and columns from all sources. Unsolicited items should be directed to: info@acri.org
This site seeks to provide a useful and enlightened forum for the discussion of numerous issues relating to “race.” We welcome the submission of articles and columns from all sources. Unsolicited items should be directed to: info@acri.org
The Duo That Defeated the ‘Diversity Industry’
Californians rejected racial preferences even more soundly this year than in 1996. Will the Supreme Court reverse itself next?
By Tunku Varadarajan
Nov. 20, 2020 3:33 pm ET
Ward Connerly, 81, is a black Louisiana native who’s spent the past quarter-century campaigning against racial preferences. Wenyuan Wu, 33, is a Chinese immigrant who has recently become an activist opposed to anti-Asian discrimination in higher education. They joined forces this June.
He’s the grizzled mentor who says he got out of his “rocking chair” to defend “the American creed.” She, his protegee, is outspoken about freedom in the classic American way, yet deferential to the older man in a manner that’s unmistakably Asian. She refers to him as “Mr. Connerly” throughout the interview, which is done on Zoom—Ms. Wu speaking from rural Georgia, where she lives because “the cost of living is low”; Mr. Connerly from an office near California’s capital, Sacramento.
The pair led the team that vanquished California’s progressive elite on Nov. 3, when Proposition 16—a ballot referendum that would have reinstated racial preferences by state and local government agencies, including universities—was defeated, 57% to 43%, according to the latest count. Mr. Connerly is president and Ms. Wu executive director of Californians for Equal Rights, known widely as No on 16, the principal committee organized in opposition to the ballot measure. “Mr. Connerly is captain of the team,” she says impishly. “I’m the enforcer.”
The result should be “chastening for the left and the race activists,” Mr. Connerly says. Joe Biden carried California nearly 2 to 1 over President Trump. That means at least 3.5 million Biden voters cast ballots against the racial-preference amendment, which Democratic lawmakers put on the ballot and Mr. Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, endorsed.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened. Proposition 209, the constitutional initiative that banned preferences in the first place, won California voters’ approval in 1996, even as Bill Clinton was carrying California on his way to re-election. Although the state has shifted considerably to the left since then—Mr. Biden’s vote share exceeded Mr. Clinton’s by more than 12 points—the rejection of racial preferences appears to have been even more resounding this time. Proposition 209, styled the California Civil Rights Initiative, had less than 55% support.
Mr. Connerly led the 1996 ballot effort after persuading his fellow University of California regents to ban preferences in UC admissions earlier that year. The state was the first to adopt a ban on racial preferences. Eight more have done so since, five by ballot measure (Washington, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona and Oklahoma), two by legislation (New Hampshire and Idaho), and one by executive order of the governor (Florida). Mr. Connerly says proudly that “37.7% of people in our country live in a state that is free of preferences.”
All this despite the outsize clout of preference proponents. No on 16 had to overcome a vast funding disparity. Whereas the referendum’s backers had a war chest of $27 million, “we raised a little over $1.7 million,” Ms. Wu says, “and nearly all of our funds came from 7,000 Chinese-American donors of modest means.” Asians are harder hit than whites by racial preferences in higher education; Ms. Wu estimates their admissions to UC schools would have fallen as much as 50% if Proposition 16 passed. When an NBC reporter raised this point with a Democratic state senator, he shrugged it off: “Black and Hispanic people have even greater concerns.”
The Yes campaign received $6.5 million from a single donor—Quinn Delaney, chairman of the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation, which says it aims to “eliminate structural racism.” The largest contribution received by No on 16 was less than 1% as large—$50,000 from Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit group that has sued Harvard, alleging that it discriminates against Asians.
“Patricia Quillin, wife of the Netflix CEO, gave $1 million,” Ms. Wu adds, then goes on to list other givers of “big sums”: the California Teachers Association, Blue Shield, the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. Other donors include Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, as well as owners of the San Francisco 49ers, the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers. By contrast, Ms. Wu says, the lone $50,000 donation accounted for “only 2.9% of our funds.”
If No on 16 was a grassroots movement, the Yes campaign was a redwood grove. Ms Wu calls opponents the “diversity industry” and “Big Diversity”—“like Big Pharma, Big Tobacco!” The Yes on 16 website boasts nearly 900 endorsements from politicians, nonprofits, newspapers and other corporations. When I ask Mr. Connerly how his side managed to prevail, there’s no false modesty in his answer: “First of all, you could say that we just ran a masterful campaign. That would be one explanation.”
Another would be that in 1996 preferences had long been the rule, so that “we had to convince the people of the state that equality was the right way to go, and that it would not produce adverse consequences.” And today “there’s no systemic racism in the state of California,” Mr. Connerly says. “There were still remnants of that back in 1996.” By now, “it may very well be that the question of equality—of equal citizenship—is accorded the same kind of stature in our culture as that of liberty,” an ideal Americans recognize as “self-evident.”
“Equal citizenship is not negotiable any more,” Mr. Connerly says. “You get the same rights, same responsibilities. You own just as much cultural stock in the country as anyone else.” Black people “have not always been accorded equal citizenship, I can tell you, because I know a little bit about that,” having been born in the South in 1939. But America has overcorrected for past wrongs. “Black people have been accorded a certain stature in American life” because of their history, Mr. Connerly says. “In the race sweepstakes right now, being black means that you get preferred stock.” Unless you’re a “race advocate,” he adds, “that is not a good thing.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 of 1965 required government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” That, Mr. Connerly says, “began an era of racial bean-counting that has brought us to where we are today, with ‘diversity’ and ‘affirmative action’ on steroids, being used not really for black people, but to remake America.” Proposition 16, he says, was intended to “transform California and usher in the use of race unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our country.”
Yet the racial debate isn’t black and white any longer. Mr. Connerly says Asian-Americans have “had the temerity to rise up and say, ‘Hey, what about us?’ ” Ms. Wu is an example. Regarding affirmative action, she asks: “What should we really affirm? Do we affirm rigid racial lines that are outdated, or do we affirm real-life disadvantages that cut across racial, ethnic and gender lines?”
Ms. Wu came to the U.S. in 2009 from Wuxi, population five million—“a small town by Chinese standards.” She earned a doctorate in international studies from the University of Miami and was “perplexed” when it dawned on her that Asians, “as a group, are being scapegoated in education to fulfill a narrative of very shallow diversity.” It shocked her to discover that America wasn’t living up to its ideals as a “land free for everyone.”
She hears from parents in New York’s Chinatown who fear their children will be squeezed out of the city’s specialized public high schools because of their leftist mayor’s push for “diversity.” They tell her that they worry their kids will be unable to “redeem the American dream.” These are poor parents who don’t speak English and have told their children: “You work hard, you study hard, you’re going to get out this ethnic enclave. You’re going to get out of Chinatown.”
When politicians and school administrators say there are “too many” Asians in elite classrooms, “I feel minimized,” Ms. Wu says. “I feel stigmatized that I was reduced to a racial box—that my hard work is being blamed for the lack of so-called proportionality in these institutions.” Mr. Connerly, listening, can’t contain himself. “I have a more visceral reaction,” he says. “I am repulsed by that kind of language, because I have lived it. That’s what’s wrong with prejudice. You don’t see people as individuals.”
Mr. Connerly describes the Asian-American fight for educational equality as “probably the truest civil-rights movement of our time.” The civil-rights movement in the 1960s, he says, “was about civil rights, yes. But it became about advancing the condition of black people.” That’s why “you have people who have accused me of not really being a civil-rights guy—because civil rights in their mind is Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. But those guys are race advocates.” Mr. Connerly offers a test for whether people are “really pro-civil rights”: “It’s when they will defend the right of a white person—a white male—to be treated equal to everyone else.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the use of racial preferences in college admissions to achieve “diversity” in a series of rulings: University of California v. Bakke (1978), Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Fisher v. University of Texas (2016). On Nov. 12, the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Harvard’s favor in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, rejecting the claim of anti-Asian discrimination.
Mr. Connerly is confident the U.S. Supreme Court, with a newly minted 6-3 Republican-appointed majority, will reverse that decision and overturn its precedents. “With Prop. 16 having been rejected as decisively as it was—strike ‘decisively,’ make that overwhelmingly—and with the court having been reconfigured by President Trump, we might get the decision that we need sooner than one would have thought.”
Stressing that he’s “only reading the tea-leaves,” Mr. Connerly says the Supreme Court could “go back to the Bakke case and say the Constitution is colorblind. They would look at the 14th Amendment. They would also say: We’re not legislators, and the Congress has already ruled in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that there should not be discrimination on the basis of race. Why have we been ignoring this command for all these years?”
In a final flight of imagination, Mr. Connerly adds, “They’ll ask Justice [Clarence] Thomas to write the majority decision here, to end racial preferences. And Justice Thomas will write, ‘Free at last. Free at last.’ ”
Mr. Varadarajan is a Journal contributor and a fellow at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
Californians rejected racial preferences even more soundly this year than in 1996. Will the Supreme Court reverse itself next?
By Tunku Varadarajan
Nov. 20, 2020 3:33 pm ET
Ward Connerly, 81, is a black Louisiana native who’s spent the past quarter-century campaigning against racial preferences. Wenyuan Wu, 33, is a Chinese immigrant who has recently become an activist opposed to anti-Asian discrimination in higher education. They joined forces this June.
He’s the grizzled mentor who says he got out of his “rocking chair” to defend “the American creed.” She, his protegee, is outspoken about freedom in the classic American way, yet deferential to the older man in a manner that’s unmistakably Asian. She refers to him as “Mr. Connerly” throughout the interview, which is done on Zoom—Ms. Wu speaking from rural Georgia, where she lives because “the cost of living is low”; Mr. Connerly from an office near California’s capital, Sacramento.
The pair led the team that vanquished California’s progressive elite on Nov. 3, when Proposition 16—a ballot referendum that would have reinstated racial preferences by state and local government agencies, including universities—was defeated, 57% to 43%, according to the latest count. Mr. Connerly is president and Ms. Wu executive director of Californians for Equal Rights, known widely as No on 16, the principal committee organized in opposition to the ballot measure. “Mr. Connerly is captain of the team,” she says impishly. “I’m the enforcer.”
The result should be “chastening for the left and the race activists,” Mr. Connerly says. Joe Biden carried California nearly 2 to 1 over President Trump. That means at least 3.5 million Biden voters cast ballots against the racial-preference amendment, which Democratic lawmakers put on the ballot and Mr. Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, endorsed.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened. Proposition 209, the constitutional initiative that banned preferences in the first place, won California voters’ approval in 1996, even as Bill Clinton was carrying California on his way to re-election. Although the state has shifted considerably to the left since then—Mr. Biden’s vote share exceeded Mr. Clinton’s by more than 12 points—the rejection of racial preferences appears to have been even more resounding this time. Proposition 209, styled the California Civil Rights Initiative, had less than 55% support.
Mr. Connerly led the 1996 ballot effort after persuading his fellow University of California regents to ban preferences in UC admissions earlier that year. The state was the first to adopt a ban on racial preferences. Eight more have done so since, five by ballot measure (Washington, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona and Oklahoma), two by legislation (New Hampshire and Idaho), and one by executive order of the governor (Florida). Mr. Connerly says proudly that “37.7% of people in our country live in a state that is free of preferences.”
All this despite the outsize clout of preference proponents. No on 16 had to overcome a vast funding disparity. Whereas the referendum’s backers had a war chest of $27 million, “we raised a little over $1.7 million,” Ms. Wu says, “and nearly all of our funds came from 7,000 Chinese-American donors of modest means.” Asians are harder hit than whites by racial preferences in higher education; Ms. Wu estimates their admissions to UC schools would have fallen as much as 50% if Proposition 16 passed. When an NBC reporter raised this point with a Democratic state senator, he shrugged it off: “Black and Hispanic people have even greater concerns.”
The Yes campaign received $6.5 million from a single donor—Quinn Delaney, chairman of the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation, which says it aims to “eliminate structural racism.” The largest contribution received by No on 16 was less than 1% as large—$50,000 from Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit group that has sued Harvard, alleging that it discriminates against Asians.
“Patricia Quillin, wife of the Netflix CEO, gave $1 million,” Ms. Wu adds, then goes on to list other givers of “big sums”: the California Teachers Association, Blue Shield, the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. Other donors include Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, as well as owners of the San Francisco 49ers, the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers. By contrast, Ms. Wu says, the lone $50,000 donation accounted for “only 2.9% of our funds.”
If No on 16 was a grassroots movement, the Yes campaign was a redwood grove. Ms Wu calls opponents the “diversity industry” and “Big Diversity”—“like Big Pharma, Big Tobacco!” The Yes on 16 website boasts nearly 900 endorsements from politicians, nonprofits, newspapers and other corporations. When I ask Mr. Connerly how his side managed to prevail, there’s no false modesty in his answer: “First of all, you could say that we just ran a masterful campaign. That would be one explanation.”
Another would be that in 1996 preferences had long been the rule, so that “we had to convince the people of the state that equality was the right way to go, and that it would not produce adverse consequences.” And today “there’s no systemic racism in the state of California,” Mr. Connerly says. “There were still remnants of that back in 1996.” By now, “it may very well be that the question of equality—of equal citizenship—is accorded the same kind of stature in our culture as that of liberty,” an ideal Americans recognize as “self-evident.”
“Equal citizenship is not negotiable any more,” Mr. Connerly says. “You get the same rights, same responsibilities. You own just as much cultural stock in the country as anyone else.” Black people “have not always been accorded equal citizenship, I can tell you, because I know a little bit about that,” having been born in the South in 1939. But America has overcorrected for past wrongs. “Black people have been accorded a certain stature in American life” because of their history, Mr. Connerly says. “In the race sweepstakes right now, being black means that you get preferred stock.” Unless you’re a “race advocate,” he adds, “that is not a good thing.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 of 1965 required government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” That, Mr. Connerly says, “began an era of racial bean-counting that has brought us to where we are today, with ‘diversity’ and ‘affirmative action’ on steroids, being used not really for black people, but to remake America.” Proposition 16, he says, was intended to “transform California and usher in the use of race unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our country.”
Yet the racial debate isn’t black and white any longer. Mr. Connerly says Asian-Americans have “had the temerity to rise up and say, ‘Hey, what about us?’ ” Ms. Wu is an example. Regarding affirmative action, she asks: “What should we really affirm? Do we affirm rigid racial lines that are outdated, or do we affirm real-life disadvantages that cut across racial, ethnic and gender lines?”
Ms. Wu came to the U.S. in 2009 from Wuxi, population five million—“a small town by Chinese standards.” She earned a doctorate in international studies from the University of Miami and was “perplexed” when it dawned on her that Asians, “as a group, are being scapegoated in education to fulfill a narrative of very shallow diversity.” It shocked her to discover that America wasn’t living up to its ideals as a “land free for everyone.”
She hears from parents in New York’s Chinatown who fear their children will be squeezed out of the city’s specialized public high schools because of their leftist mayor’s push for “diversity.” They tell her that they worry their kids will be unable to “redeem the American dream.” These are poor parents who don’t speak English and have told their children: “You work hard, you study hard, you’re going to get out this ethnic enclave. You’re going to get out of Chinatown.”
When politicians and school administrators say there are “too many” Asians in elite classrooms, “I feel minimized,” Ms. Wu says. “I feel stigmatized that I was reduced to a racial box—that my hard work is being blamed for the lack of so-called proportionality in these institutions.” Mr. Connerly, listening, can’t contain himself. “I have a more visceral reaction,” he says. “I am repulsed by that kind of language, because I have lived it. That’s what’s wrong with prejudice. You don’t see people as individuals.”
Mr. Connerly describes the Asian-American fight for educational equality as “probably the truest civil-rights movement of our time.” The civil-rights movement in the 1960s, he says, “was about civil rights, yes. But it became about advancing the condition of black people.” That’s why “you have people who have accused me of not really being a civil-rights guy—because civil rights in their mind is Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. But those guys are race advocates.” Mr. Connerly offers a test for whether people are “really pro-civil rights”: “It’s when they will defend the right of a white person—a white male—to be treated equal to everyone else.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the use of racial preferences in college admissions to achieve “diversity” in a series of rulings: University of California v. Bakke (1978), Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Fisher v. University of Texas (2016). On Nov. 12, the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Harvard’s favor in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, rejecting the claim of anti-Asian discrimination.
Mr. Connerly is confident the U.S. Supreme Court, with a newly minted 6-3 Republican-appointed majority, will reverse that decision and overturn its precedents. “With Prop. 16 having been rejected as decisively as it was—strike ‘decisively,’ make that overwhelmingly—and with the court having been reconfigured by President Trump, we might get the decision that we need sooner than one would have thought.”
Stressing that he’s “only reading the tea-leaves,” Mr. Connerly says the Supreme Court could “go back to the Bakke case and say the Constitution is colorblind. They would look at the 14th Amendment. They would also say: We’re not legislators, and the Congress has already ruled in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that there should not be discrimination on the basis of race. Why have we been ignoring this command for all these years?”
In a final flight of imagination, Mr. Connerly adds, “They’ll ask Justice [Clarence] Thomas to write the majority decision here, to end racial preferences. And Justice Thomas will write, ‘Free at last. Free at last.’ ”
Mr. Varadarajan is a Journal contributor and a fellow at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
