California's war on affirmative action.

As backers of the California Civil Rights Initiative gather signatures to put the controversial measure on the state's 1996 ballot, the stage is being set for a heated and divisive battle over affirmative action--one that's likely to take center stage in the upcoming presidential campaign.

"We are calling it 'Willie Horton goes to college,'" says Eva Paterson, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco. "The Republicans are going straight to the racial fears and antipathies of the white middle class, when the real problem is the shaky economy," Paterson says. "When times get tough, people look for scapegoats. People of color and women have always been wonderful scapegoats."

The ballot measure seeks to ban the use of race, national origin or gender "as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group." The proposed ban targets public employment, contracting and education, but the "removal of affirmative action measures in the public sector would make similar measures in the private sector immediately suspect," says Constance L. Rice, western region counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

While public attention is drawn to the proposed ballot initiative, affirmative-action programs are also being taken to task at the University of California and in that state's legislature. The efforts in California are just the latest in a series of attacks on affirmative action. (See "The War on Equal Opportunity," February 1995.) Ironically, several black people, including Ward Connerly, have moved into the forefront of the movement to ban affirmative-action programs in california. One of two blacks on UC's Board of Regents, Connerly wants to scrap all affirmative-action programs in that system.

On the legislative front, Assemblyman Bernie Richter, a northern California Republican, has introduced a constitutional amendment with the same intent and language as the proposed ballot initiative. Richter is the author of four separate bills aimed at eliminating racial preferences in public employment and education.

Supporters of the proposed ban on affirmative action argue that the original intent of the civil rights movement has been derailed. "Racial bean counting has become the order of the day," says Errol Smith, an African-American who co-owns and operates Building Maintenance of America in Los Angeles. "We have created a society where preference and discrimination on the basis of race have become institutionalized."

Smith acknowledges that a ban on affirmative action will hurt minority businesses that depend on set-asides, but contends such businesses will be better off in the long run. "If we don't encourage competitiveness, we are saying we can't make it without subsidies," Smith says.

Opponents of a ban on race-based preferences say the job of ensuring equal opportunity for minorities and women is far from complete. "The color-blind system yielded an all-white, all-male picture," says Rice. She says the elimination of measures designed to ensure equal opportunities for minorities and women would "turn the clock back 30 years."

Frederick E. Jordan, a black businessman from San Francisco, helped organize the California Business Council of Organizations for Equal Opportunity, a grass-roots coalition that opposes the ban. "To call this a civil rights initiative is blatantly deceptive," Jordan says. "Half the people who will end up voting for it won't know what they are voting for."

The coalition has to define the issue as something other than reverse discrimination, he says. "What we are really fighting is greed," Jordan says. "For someone to get economic opportunity, someone else has to give it up. Some people don't want to give up anything."

Democrats in the California Legislature--who generally oppose the proposed ban--say the legislative measures don't propose a substantial threat, but warn that the real battle will be at the polls.

California may not wage this battle alone. "The whole issue of affirmative action and racial preferences is going to be a major [one] in the 1996 campaign," says California Assemblyman Robert Matsui (D-Sacramento). "I don't think there's any way around it."

Most political observers agree that the Republicans must win California's 54 electoral votes if they hope to recapture the White House in 1996. To win, they'll need an issue that will galvanize conservative voters and divide Democrats. That issue may be affirmative action.