CREATING EQUAL: My Fight Against Race Preferences.

CREATING EQUAL: My Fight Against Race Preferences By Ward Connerly Encounter Books, $24.00

CRITICS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FALL INTO two major camps: those who focus almost exclusively on what they're against (racial preferences), and those who know not only what they oppose, but also what they support. The annihilators are so firmly against the use of race--and see so little merit in the other side--that they are not particularly concerned about what replaces affirmative action. The Manhattan Institute's Abigail Thernstrom, for example, says so long as is not part of the equation, she does not care how universities decide admission. "They can throw applications down the stairs," she told the U.S. Civil Rights Commissions. "They can have a dart board as far as I'm concerned" The builders, by contrast, see strong competing arguments over affirmative action, and although they come down against the use of race, they spend a good deal of time figuring out alternative ways to achieve important objectives of affirmative action--fairness, equal opportunity, and integration.

Before reading California businessman Ward Connerly's new book, Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences, I had a hunch he was a builder. As a member of the California Board of Regents, he not only fought racial preferences, he also criticized the practice of giving extra points to students who take Advanced Placement courses because those classes are not even available in many low-income high schools. And as a Regent, he supported providing employee benefits to the partners of gay university workers.

My hunch was further confirmed in much of the early part of the book, which recounts Connerly's days growing up as a disadvantaged black child in Louisiana and California in the 1940s and 1950s. Connerly describes how he was abandoned by his father at age two, then lost his mother to a brain tumor at age four. Raised by relatives, he was so poor he had to slide cardboard in his shoes when holes developed. He encountered racism again and again--when his grown uncle was called "boy" by a gas station attendant; when his gym teacher told him blacks couldn't be good swimmers; and when he moved to a white neighborhood and was greeted by a spray-painted sign, "No Niggers Wanted." In college, Connerly worked against discrimination in housing, and he began his career working for a government redevelopment agency. When he helped a young legislator named Pete Wilson draft legislation to encourage housing loans in red-lined neighborhoods, Connerly was told in a meeting with then-Gov. Ronald Reagan that the bill would be vetoed. During Connerly's first months on the university's governing body, he was the only non-student Regent to oppose raising student fees. And in the recent debates over affirmative action, Connerly writes that although he appreciated applause from the conservatives for his rhetoric in favor of colorblindness, "I was also aware that if I had been saying the same things before the same audiences thirty-five years earlier, I would have gotten a far different reception."

As the leader of Proposition 209 to end racial preferences in California in 1996, and Initiative 200 to do the same in Washington state in 1998, Connerly didn't articulate much of an alternative vision, but that presumably reflected the context of a heated sound bite debate. Surely in a full-length book, he would spend some time explaining what he's for.

Well, he spends 12 chapters on his childhood, his early career, and the battles in California, Washington, and now Florida. Finally, on page 268, Connerly endorses the way in which a few universities have formed partnerships with K-12 educators to help prepare more minority students. But the discussion ends two and a half pages later.

No, Connerly is not a builder, and reading Creating Equal makes clear why he's not. When you believe you are battling evil, stamping it out is sufficient. Connerly doesn't see any real downside to ending affirmative action and shows little appreciation for how hard this issue is. He sees a strict moral equivalence between racial preferences to help an economically disadvantaged group and Jim Crow laws to perpetuate white supremacy. He calls the consequences of affirmative action "diabolical." He compares the structure of affirmative action to the Berlin Wall. He says he'd abolish all racial data gathering, which puts him to the right of almost everyone since these data are used to enforce anti-discrimination laws as well as preference policies. He uses wildly inappropriate rhetoric to describe defenders of affirmative action. Anti-Prop. 209 consultant Bob Shrum, for example, is likened to Saddam Hussein. Rep. Maxine Waters is accused of having "eaten from the public trough all her life, from her early days on welfare until now as a member of Congress." And the proponents of preferences are called "the heirs of George Wallace and all others who stood in those doorways of the past protecting a corrupt and outmoded way of life." Adding to the inflammatory analogy, Connerly says their cry is "Preferences today! Preferences tomorrow! Preferences forever!" Meanwhile, Connerly compares himself to Martin Luther King Jr.

On a human level, this heated rhetoric may be understandable. Many on the left have been unconscionable in their treatment of Connerly, as Creating Equal makes clear. Florida Congresswoman Corinne Brown called Connerly "a freak of nature," while Jesse Jackson called him "strange fruit." The fact that Connerly is in an interracial marriage, a relationship that used to be a sign of a more tolerant future, is used as proof that he's self-hating. California State Sen. Diane Watson, a leader of the Anti-Prop. 209 forces, told the Los Angeles Times, "Connerly wants to be white. He doesn't like being black. That's why he married a white woman." He was called an Uncle Tom and an "angry Oreo," was pictured in a KKK hood as an "Ethnic Cleanser" in the Oakland Tribune, and was called "a lawn jockey for the ruling class" by a prominent, white male supporter of affirmative action. Many in the press simply couldn't understand what would possibly make a black person oppose racial preferences, and The New York Times, in an outrageous profile, aired scurrilous rumors put forth by feuding family members that Connerly had been raised to be an anti-black bigot by his grandmother. In the heat of the debate over Initiative 200 in Washington state, opponents of affirmative action were labeled "Nazis" and Vice President Al Gore opined, "The winds of hate are blowing in Washington."

Ward Connerly withstood all this insult and injury and was instrumental in helping expose the mendacity of university officials who said race was a small factor, "a bump," in admissions, when in fact Asians and whites needed to score 7,100 or more out of 8,000 possible points to be admitted to Berkeley while blacks and Hispanics were often admitted with scores of 6,000 or less. Connerly exposed a system under which the University of California at San Diego Medical School made race such a significant factor that the average affirmative action admittee had scores on the Medical College Admissions Test in the lowest one percent when compared with admitted Asian and white students.

Solutions

For a person so influential in dismantling preferences, there must be some obligation, especially in a post-affirmative action world, to participate in dialogue about the future. Three major alternatives have emerged. Some conservatives say we should try to fix K-12 education so that minority and poor children can compete without preference of any kind. Skeptical that such efforts will bear fruit any time soon, a number of states--including Florida, California, and Texas--have moved to a form of geographic affirmative action, where every student who ranks in the top 20 percent (Florida), 10 percent (Texas), or 4 percent (California) of each high school is admitted to a state university--regardless of SAT scores or skin color. A third approach is economic-based affirmative action, where preferences are provided in admissions to low-income children of all races, a disproportionate number of whom are children of color. Obviously, one can favor elements of each of these plans, but in the end there are clear tensions between priorities. Where does Connerly come down in the new debate?

From much of Connerly's rhetoric, one would assume he'd favor an aggressive program of preference for low-income people of all races. In arguing against race preferences he complains that they do nothing to help poor whites, who need "a boost too," and often help less deserving affluent minorities. He writes to Colin Powell, "Under the current system at the University of California, the son of a black four-star general would receive a preference over the daughter of an Asian dishwasher." Connerly says the most effective advertisement in California was one featuring Janice Ingram, a white widow and mother of two young children who was ejected from a vocational re-training class at a California junior college on the basis of race.

But Connerly never endorses class-based affirmative action; in fact, he barely discusses it. When George W. Bush says to him, "Did you see I'm talking about need-based affirmative action now rather than race-based?" Connerly does not tell us what he thinks of Bush's stand. Connerly mentions in passing that voters in Washington state (including 54 percent of union households) supported I-200 while also supporting a large increase in the minimum wage. But he misses the political significance of framing issues in terms of class and not race.

Connerly does not appear particularly enamored of the Florida 20 percent plan. He's concerned that Gov. Jeb Bush was promoting the idea in order to "disarm our effort" to abolish racial preferences through a ballot initiative. But Connerly doesn't take the opportunity to comment more fully on the plan, which has been receiving rave reviews from prominent editorial boards, but is in fact seriously flawed. The geographic plans appear to provide an easy way to promote racial diversity without using race, since black students in all-black high schools may qualify in larger numbers than they would if test scores counted. But Connerly never asks whether it really makes more sense for universities to use admissions standards than to take account of high school grades and indirectly give a leg up to students attending bad schools while ignoring the other 50 percent of what's important: standardized test scores and family environment.

Connerly's silence on this issue is significant because the recent salience of geographic affirmative action plans is taking the wind out of the sails of the much more far-reaching class-based affirmative action alternative. For a brief period, it appeared that the end of affirmative action might give rise to something better--individualized, economic affirmative action. Instead, three leading states have emphasized a class rank approach that takes the radical promise out of the post-affirmative action discussion.

The Story

Though disappointing in its truncated discussion of alternatives, Connerly's book does tell some interesting insider stories about the fight over Prop. 209 (and Washingtons Initiative 200) and complements Nicholas Lemann's superb chronicle of the 209 fight in The Big Test, which is told primarily from the perspective of opponents of the proposition. Connerly outlines how very close Prop. 209 came to not getting on the ballot at all, had media tycoon Rupert Murdoch not pitched in $1 million to hire signature gatherers. He confirms that there was a "tacit understanding" (outlined in Lemann's book) that "the Clintonites would not try to overwhelm us by pouring huge sums into our opponents' war chest and, in return, we would not use their man's flabby support of preferences to campaign against him." And he also helps shed light on the role of big business in supporting affirmative action in initiative battles in California, Washington, and Houston. Businesses not only plowed millions into the opposition coffers (helping opponents in Washington to spend three times the amount of proponents), they also fired employees who favored antipreference efforts.

Although the initiatives in California and Washington both ended up passing by comfortable margins, Connerly notes how close those races were. Prop. 209 opponents in California made major inroads until they ran an ad linking the initiative to David Duke, a ploy which backfired and, says Connerly, "halted our slide in the polls." Likewise, in Washington state, a 20-point lead shrank to just one point by late October 1998 until initiative proponents began airing ads featuring Katuria Smith, a white woman raised in a low-income single-parent home who'd been hurt by the University of Washington Law School's racial preference system. All sides agree, says Connerly, that this ad was "the coup de grace of the campaign."

Connerly's book raises a central unplumbed curiosity: Why do so many leading Republicans--presidential candidates, members of Congress, and governors--recoil from his anti-preference crusade, despite its success in the polls? The conventional wisdom is that the Republicans are worried about alienating Hispanics and white women--a view that is not supported by polling which finds that values play as important a role as interests in the affirmative action debate. Jeb Bush gives another answer. He tells Connerly he won't support a California-style initiative in Florida because, pointing to a picture of himself surrounded by black children, "I'm committed to helping them." Whether or not Bush is genuine in his sentiment, Republicans surely know that Americans do want to give a leg up to disadvantaged black kids--along with disadvantaged whites like Janice Ingram and Katuria Smith.

Connerly says he was offended by Bush's insinuation that he was the only one committed to poor black kids. "So am I, Governor," the author responds. In writing this book, Ward Connerly had an opportunity to demonstrate precisely what he would do for disadvantaged children. Unfortunately, he missed the chance.

RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is the author of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action