NAACP Acknowledges Racial Preferences Defeat
Addressing an audience at the NAACP National Convention, president Benjamin Jealous acknowledged that racial preferences are unpopular and face future defeat (with a shout-out to Ward Connerly):
“And we will need all those friends and many more because I’ll tell you this: The days of Ward Connerly beating us at the ballot box are nigh. We are going. You know, the only question about affirmative action isn’t whether or not we need the hammer. The only question is whether or not the hammer is big enough.”
Indeed, racial preferences are unpopular, as voters in California, Washington state, Michigan, and Nebraska have shown. A measure to bar government racial preferences in Arizona will appear on that state’s ballot in November 2010.
Jealous invokes Martin Luther King, Jr., and his view that poor whites and poor blacks have more in common than perceived. He concedes that blacks aren’t the only Americans facing problems related to poverty and shouldn’t be the only ones to benefit from preferences (although he uses the term affirmative action):
“And the only conversation about affirmative action should be in addition to there being a gender ‑‑ no replacement here ‑‑ in addition to there being gender‑ conscious affirmative action, in addition to there being race‑conscious affirmative action, if we should do as a country what so many college campuses have done with first‑ time college admissions and say there should be class‑ conscious affirmative action too. It should be class‑ conscious.”
The American Civil Rights Institute supports class-based affirmative action, which would benefit a much wider range of people. This type of affirmative action doesn’t generate the kind of opposition racial preferences do. After a long history of fighting racial discrimination, it’s backward and hypocritical to allow “reverse” discrimination in order to make up for past discrimination. Such a practice is unsustainable, as even Jealous recognizes.
