Archive for Ward Connerly
The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly penned an op-ed for the Christian Science Monitor about Ricci v. DeStefano.
“Discrimination in employment on the basis of race, sex, skin color, ethnicity, or national origin is a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” he writes. “Yet that fact seems to either go unnoticed or is considered irrelevant by many public officials.”
Indeed, the Civil Rights Act is clear, and its language plain. So why, after all these decades, do government entities continue to take race into account and discriminate against certain groups? Connerly writes, “The underlying rationale for such discrimination is that women and minorities are, almost by definition, disadvantaged and that white males are privileged in America by reason of their sex and color.”
The days of “reverse discrimination” are on the wane, and the Ricci case is proof. Connerly briefly recounts the facts of the case and the Supreme Court’s ruling. Although the test had been painstakingly developed to avoid accusations of bias, New Haven threw out the results anyway. Why? The city “simply caved to pressure from influential local blacks, such as a very close personal friend and political ally of the mayor, the Rev. Boise Kimber, who objected to the fact that no blacks would be promoted if the test results were to be accepted.”
Connerly notes the problem of the court’s limited ruling. The court didn’t vanquish the “disparate impact” provision; the doctrine is alive and well. But the court may have made it a little bit tougher for those claiming disparate impact to prevail. Whether or not minorities disproportionately fail or perform poorer than whites, the government may not discriminate against whites even when faced with potential disparate impact lawsuits.
“[T]he more important milestone is cultural. The cultural significance of Ricci lies in the fact that it will promote a new era of awareness that the Civil Rights Act applies to white males as much as it applies to black people and women.”
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In April, we blogged about the California Department of Transportation’s (Caltrans) new hiring plan that takes race into account in public contracting. The Federal Highway Administration approved the race-based plan on diversity grounds. Yesterday, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLE) filed suit against Caltrans on behalf of a contractor.
The agency set aside 6.75 percent of federal contracts for women, blacks, people of Asian-Pacific descent, and American Indians. The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly told the Sacramento Bee that the agency is “caving in to minority politics.”
State law bars the government from discriminating against or granting preferences to individuals or groups in hiring, contracting, and admissions based on factors like race and sex, but an exception exists if federal dollars are at stake and if actual discrimination is taking place. PLE’s Sharon Browne said, “We believe there is no evidence that Caltrans will lose federal dollars if they treat all contractors equally.”
Browne said Caltrans’s practice of “coding contractors by color” is “flat-out unconstitutional.” Three years ago, PLE sent Caltrans a letter demanding it stop discriminating against contractors based on race. The agency desisted but found a way around the law, using an exception in the law to claim federal funds would be lost if the agency stopped discriminating against contractors based on race.
It doesn’t make sense to us, either.
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File this in the never-heard-about-it department: In 1996, the City of Austin in Texas passed a race and sex preferences ordinance that required minority-owned businesses seeking government contracts and subcontracts to certify themselves as minority-owned businesses.
John Goode, owner of Mr. Bones BBQ refused, preferring to win contracts based on the same criteria as other contractors. (Source)
A company called Fine Host Corporation canceled its contract with Goode, citing “lack of proof” of his minority certification. In 1998, Goode filed suit against the City of Austin for wrongful and unfair dismissal. A federal judge recently dismissed his suit.
It’s hard to believe such a thing could happen, but it does. A black man wants to compete with others and refuses special treatment, and he’s penalized for it. The government has a way of coercing citizens.
The state of California requires minority business owners with government contracts to certify themselves as such. Like Goode, Ward Connerly, a minority business owner, refused.
On my personal blog, I wrote about Connerly’s campaign to end race preferences in government hiring, contracting, and admissions. A few commenters called him a hypocrite, accusing him of trying to dismantle a system from which he benefited. The accusation was false, and I was very pleased that Connerly e-mailed a response to the accusations, which I posted on my blog. He wrote (emphasis added):
It seems that one of those who posted to your site is fascinated by the issue of whether I registered my firm as a “minority” contractor. To set the record straight, I have NEVER registered or certified my firm as a “minority contractor” with the federal government, the state government or any city or county agency. My firm has NEVER received any preference as a “minority contractor.” The contract reported on by the S.F. Chronicle is one that my firm already had when the law went into effect requiring all contractors to award 15% of their contracts to minority-owned subcontractors. I refused to certify as required by the new law. To settle the matter, the California Energy Commission – the procurement agency – asked if I would sign a form stating that I was “black” and that I owned at least 50.1% of my firm. If I agreed to do so, I would not have to subcontract 15% of the contract, which would have made its implementation financially infeasible, the CEC would be in compliance with the law, and an expensive lawsuit could be avoided. Because I am regarded as “black” and did (do) own at least 50.1% of my firm, I signed the form confirming those facts. That ended the matter. No “certification” or registration ever occurred.
We can ask, “What kind of country are we living in?” all day long, but the solution is action. On this blog, I hope to raise awareness about the unfair and demeaning nature of preferential treatment and provide news and other information about the American Civil Rights Institution’s efforts to dismantle this practice.
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“It is, in effect, inequitable treatment of Americans to give benefits to those who are illegal, over those who are American residents. You know, I don’t know why this is so hard for some to understand,” said the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly about California allowing illegal aliens to receive in-state tuition. (Source)
In 2001, the California legislature passed a law that allowed in-state tuition rates for illegal aliens who attend a California high school for at least three years and graduate. American citizens who live outside the state and wish to attend school here must pay out-of-state tuition. A group has sued, calling the law unconstitutional on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates against out-of-state students. The California Supreme Court will hear the case sometime this year.
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Last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly signed copies of his new book, Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of Our Character. (Source)
Speaking to about 100 people, Connerly spoke of his Uncle James, the man who raised him.
“He would say life is not fair for anyone. It doesn’t matter where you started out in life. It’s where you end up, through hard work…I learned so much about the importance of character from him. I think we’ve done a great job as a nation not judging by one’s skin color. But right now, it’s more important to judge by character.”
As an aside, I was pleased to know that Connerly’s Uncle James detested the term “African-American” just as I do and for the same reasons.
Buy a copy of Lessons from My Uncle James by visiting this page.
Filed under: Ward Connerly | |1 Comment
To anyone who’d listen, I’ve been saying it for years: so-called affirmative action, aka race preferences, is inherently racist and demeaning. But perhaps it takes a high school senior to really drive the message home. Young Ravi Ram displays more intelligence, or maybe just more honesty, than most adult social engineers and “civil rights” crusaders. He writes:
“Affirmative action is based on the belief that members of minority groups are inherently underprivileged and therefore, in order to compensate for their inferior positioning, must be given certain advantages…Thus, while affirmative action appears on the surface to be a mechanism against racism, under further scrutiny it emerges as a system based on racism itself.”
From the mouths of babes!
Although Ram gets his name wrong, he accurately quotes Ward Connerly: “People are competing very well on their own without preferred programs, and (unfortunately) they carry the burden of people saying they got there by preference…It is time that we allow those people to walk with dignity.”
It takes a lot of courage to go against the grain, especially at a young age. Pressure to conform to peers is great. It’s not small feat to stand by what you believe, no matter the consequences. I’m certain Ravi Ram has heard his share of “Racist!” and “Self-hater!” insults. I would advise him, however, to learn to distinguish between affirmative action, which is not discriminatory, and race preferences, which are. The terms are used interchangeably but mean very different things.
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Commenting on the University of California’s (UC) new admissions policy, which is a thinly disguised effort to get around a state law that bars the government from preferring or discriminating against any person based on factors like race and sex, the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly told San Jose Mercury News that UC “has essentially lowered its standards.”
Any reasonable person can attest to this fact, but many are reluctant to talk about it in public. The aim of the less rigorous admissions policy is to expand the pool of applicants to include more minority students who may not have taken two SAT subject tests, a requirement the Board of Regents eliminated. The new policy states that applicants with a 3.0 or higher who’ve completed at least 11 of 15 required college prep courses by their junior year and taken the ACT with Writing or SAT Reasoning exam will be considered for admission.
The article also notes that Asian organizations are angry about the changes, which will negatively affect students of Asian decent applying to UC. “They contend that subject tests are a better indicator of college readiness than the SAT I, which favors American-born students over immigrants because scores are influenced by expensive ‘test prep’ and family upbringing,” according to the article.
UC’s changes come in the wake of concern about the ever-present academic achievement gap between blacks and Hispanics and whites and Asians. The school contends it merely is casting a wider net to include more low-income students. That would be fine if it were that simple. The fact is UC is lowering the standards of admission. And yes, this practice does widen the net. But at what cost?
Earlier this month, I blogged about Stephan Thernstrom’s article on how UC’s new policy changes affect students of Asian descent. People of Asian descent make up 12 percent of California’s population, but accounted for 37 percent of UC admissions last year. Under the new admissions policy, their numbers will be reduced by 10–20 percent.
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Victor Merina, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, has penned an article about the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly, “who can match his multiracial background with the biracial Obama.” (Source)
Merina, like so many others, uses the terms affirmative action and race preferences interchangeably, when they are not synonymous. Affirmative action is casting a “wider net” to include more qualified minorities into a hiring or admissions pool. Race preferences involve lowering standards for minorities in an effort to recruit more of them, inevitably discriminating against Asian and white applicants.
Nevertheless, Mesina correctly notes that to those of us who support Connerly, “he is the champion of equality.” Connerly and others will continue their crusade to dismantle race preferences and keep a close watch on President Barack Obama, whose view on race preferences is indeed “cloudy,” although he appears to support some form of socioeconomic preferences.
In 2010, voters in Missouri, Arizona, Colorado (and perhaps Oklahoma) may get to choose whether their state and local governments are allowed to consider factors like race when hiring, contracting, and admitting. Connerly and others are hopeful Obama chooses to push class-based preferences.
“He may not want to go there as fast as I do,” Connerly said, “but he’s given every indication that’s the direction he wants to go.”
Filed under: Barack Obama, Socioeconomic AA, Ward Connerly | |1 Comment
Kathryn Lopez of National Review interviewed the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly on Inauguration Day.
Connerly notes that when he and his wife were married, interracial marriage was outlawed. He knows what Barack Obama’s parents went through. To see the product of an interracial marriage become president of the United States is indeed historic.
“Being colorblind doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t see color; it means that you discard its influence when you see it,” Connerly said. “I have been roundly criticized by blacks for over a decade as being naive about this, as they assert the inherent racism of Americans. I gloat, in this instance, to say that they were wrong.”
Lopez asks Connerly, “What’s your wildest dream about Barack Obama?”
“That he will say, ‘My fellow Americans, Ward Connerly is right about race preferences being a violation of all that is good about our beloved nation. Therefore, today, I am issuing an Executive Order that will require all federal agencies and all of those who receive federal funds to obey the law of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.’”
I’d pay good money to hear that, Mr. Connerly!
Filed under: Barack Obama, Ward Connerly | |Comments off
Jay Schalin, a senior writer with the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, informs us that in February, the University of California’s (UC) administration and faculty senate plan to discuss changing the admission policy to downplay standardized test scores, and give more weight to high school class rank and subjective factors like “life experiences.” (Source)
In other words, UC is looking for a way to admit students based on race while pretending it isn’t. You may be wondering how that’s possible, considering that race-based admissions are illegal in California. In 1996, the voters chose to bar their government from hiring, contracting, and admitting on the basis of race. But tax-supported schools like UC have been using proxies for race since then.
Regardless of what the system says, the aim is to admit more black and Hispanic students. Period. That’s not the problem. The method used to admit them is the problem. Ward Connerly, former UC regent and director of the American Civil Rights Institute, said, “In this case, the faculty senate is trying to devise a system that will admit more students from low-income and underperforming high schools, which will translate into more black and Latino students.”
What schools like UC really want to do is eliminate evaluating blacks and Hispanics based on grades and scores altogether. If they could, they’d simply arbitrarily admit a certain percentage of “promising” minorities, and be done with it.
But they can’t. They must make some effort to evaluate blacks and Hispanics based on grades and scores, just as they do with whites and Asians.
A sure way to determine if UC intends to apply “holistic” admissions to every student is whether more whites and Asians are admitted, an unintended consequence of de-emphasizing grades and scores.
Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, also wrote an excellent book titled, In Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. He compiled an inventory of 4,002 significant figures over 2,750 years who pursued excellence and accomplished great things in the arts and sciences. His inventory overwhelmingly consists of white European males, as do other authoritative and respected inventories. Murray made the case that no significant non-European figures and events were omitted from the major inventories. What was known about great works of other cultures was included.
In response to charges that European accomplishment in the sciences is exaggerated and that sources used to compile inventories are biased against non-European countries (about 97 percent of significant figures and events in the sciences are Western), Murray encouraged critics to augment the list of “giants” with non-Europeans, with one caveat: You must use the same rules by which European figures and events were included.
This method would not increase the number of non-Europeans on the list, says Murray, but would add more Europeans to the list. Why? Because European countries were so prodigious; dropping standards of evaluation would result in more European countries, not fewer, and certainly not more non-Europeans.
If holistic assessments were applied equally across the board, the enrollment of whites and Asians – not blacks and Hispanics - would increase.
Filed under: UC, Ward Connerly | |Comments off
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