Winning race: Rinku Sen dissects the language and strategies of the campaign that defeated another racist California proposition.

In the movie Head of State, Chris Rock plays Mays Gilliam, a Washington, D.C. alderman who unwittingly becomes the Democratic candidate for President. Party leaders choose him to replace the recently-deceased white candidate because he is guaranteed to lose, while his candidacy helps the party expand its race credentials. Gilliam's campaign starts out slowly, until he throws off the canned feel-good speeches to talk up his own ideas of justice, which begins to win over the working class and people of color.

On election day, the Republicans finally see the threat, and they know exactly what to do. During the last hours of elections, Republicans leak to the press that Gilliam appears to be winning. TV reporters announce that the United States appeared to have elected its first black President. The next scene shows a pristine suburban neighborhood erupting as hundreds of white people stream out of their homes and sprint to the polls.

Both sides of the Proposition 54 campaign accepted this political dynamic leading up to California's Oct. 7 special election. Ward Connerly, the black businessman and leader of efforts to outlaw affirmative action, crafted the "Racial Privacy Initiative," which would have banned racial data gathering in California's public institutions. The initiative was designed to appeal to white voters who believe that any racial counting leads to unfair preferences, and mixed race voters who are frustrated with having to check a racial identity box. Connerly used the same argument he did in 1996 for Proposition 209--that any attention paid to race worked against meritocracy and human dignity. Just as Connerly was explicit about attacking racial categorization, the No on 54 campaign took pains to play down the anti-racism angle in a move similar to those during the No on 187 and No on 209 campaigns. In those campaigns, liberals abandoned race talk under the theory that messages supporting affirmative action as an anti-discrimination measure or defending the rights of the undocumented would aggravate white conservatives into voting. When both measures passed, many progressives bemoaned the liberal reluctance to expose conservative actions as racist. Had Prop. 54 passed, the No campaign leaders would now be defending their decision not to talk race, as they did during the 1990s.

But Prop. 54 was defeated by a huge margin--64 to 36 percent. Three quarters of blacks and Latinos voted against the proposition, as well as a significant majority of whites. The positive outcome, long-awaited by an initiative-weary progressive movement, may vindicate those who argued against talking race. It could also simply mean that liberal and progressive voters, especially voters of color, are better organized today than they were in the 90s. The weirdness of this particular election, however, defined by Gov. Gray Davis' recall, cautions against firm conclusions.

Despite the immediate victory of defeating Prop. 54, longer-term problems remain. Few people challenged the goal of "colorblindness," leaving Connerly's essential frame--that race-conscious public policies are themselves racist-intact. This seems like a particular problem since Connerly has vowed to revive the initiative in two or three years with fewer flaws.

There are important differences between the fight against 209 and the 54 struggle. By all accounts, the divisive infighting that plagued the No on 209 campaign was absent here--northern and southern Californians worked together, forcing the Democratic party to lend its muscle, and institutions in diverse sectors, from education to business, joined the campaign. Furthermore, Republicans split on 54 in a way that they never did on 209. The state GOP endorsed the initiative, but invested no money in the campaign. Five of the six gubernatorial candidates, including Schwarzenegger, opposed 54.

At its core, 54 is also more abstract than 209. It never tapped any vein of emotion, according to Abdi Soltani, executive director of Californians for Justice. "When you look at peoples' attitudes on affirmative action, there are a lot of white Californians who feel they lost a job because of it," he said. "There is a resentment of racial categories among large numbers of people, but it didn't resonate in the same way because people don't feel wronged by it in the same way."

Given its weaknesses, it might have been possible to defeat 54 without decisions to limit race talk. But those opposed to 54 say that they made key decisions about crafting the media messages for 54 by incorporating lessons from the 209 fight. One such lesson is that whites and Asians think they lose out when policies are racialized. During the 209 struggle, a TV commercial conflating an attack on affirmative action with the KKK may have offended, rather than won over, white conservatives who oppose affirmative action but hardly consider themselves white supremacists. Campaign leaders' informal surveys with reporters affirmed that messages about 54's potential effects on health care resonated most with readers. Activists were instructed to avoid language using discrimination, civil rights, and racism; to focus messages on health care, but without explicit racial references and to use race only as part of the message in targeted communities of color.

These principles shaped the campaign's major TV commercial, featuring former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declaring that 54 was "bad medicine," with no racially explicit examples. The health care messages focused on the idea that diseases aren't colorblind, even if people are, avoiding the issue of white culpability in race discrimination. Soltani thinks that these were smart, pragmatic decisions that reflected a more mature movement than the one that fought 209. "We learned the fundamental lesson that it's a big state and there are millions and millions of voters," he said. "People who are focused on racial justice as the core of what we do have to get out more and see how people of all backgrounds approach these issues, not just white voters, but also communities of color, new ethnic communities." He affirms that the health care messages held overwhelming appeal and could be easily tailored to appeal to particular racial groups, including whites who suffer from certain diseases more than others.

These decisions were partly driven by the need to separate 54 from affirmative action, hoping not to piss off and thereby activate the white-male, NASCAR-dad vote. Avoiding the race issue was so central to the No campaign strategy that Maya Harris, director of the ACLU's Racial Justice Project, lost no time in reframing a question about affirmative action on a Bay Area radio talk show. "Affirmative action in California is against the law," she said, "therefore not an issue in the debate around Prop. 54."

This decision helped Tom Wood, a sociologist who co-authored Proposition 209, to join the No campaign. Wood always opposed 54, but was initially reluctant to come out publicly against Connerly. When he realized that 209 supporters were poised to vote yes on 54, Wood decided to speak out. "How can you enforce 209 if you don't have the racial data?"

Wood felt able to join the No campaign partly because it was so disciplined about not using the 54 fight to argue against 209. "My concern when I reached out to the No on 54 people was that they would use this as a way of striking back at 209," he said. Wood hoped for 54 to be defeated by a wide margin, enough to discourage Connerly from pursuing this route, so that "the conservative movement can get back to the business of fighting racial preferences."

Despite decisions to deracinate the No message, race remained the focus of most public discussion about Prop. 54. Virtually every newspaper editorial raised its negative effect on anti-discrimination efforts. Law enforcement groups said it would retard their ability to punish racial profiling, and educational equity groups said it would hide systemic racial inequity in schools. Many community organizations, even in traditionally conservative Asian communities, also talked race. The Coalition of Desi Groups built their website around a race discrimination message, emphasizing the need to fight hate crimes against Asians. Serena Lin, coordinator of the Asian Pacific Americans for an informed California, said "we found no need to hide race, but we did have to tailor the message to the concerns of each specific community."

Some observers project that the defeat of Prop. 54 indicates a racial shift in California. Mary Ann Mitchell of the National Black Business Council and John C. Gamboa, of the Greenlining Institute hoped in an Oct. 9 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed that "many elected state leaders and the Legislature will consider a new initiative that will modify the increasingly discredited Proposition 209."

California progressives dearly want to revive a civil rights movement, but may continue to find that difficult even with this victory. For one thing, sympathy remains high for Connerly's stated goal of colorblindness. While it seems harmless to agree that society should be colorblind, that agreement may feed Connerly's assertion that the society already is colorblind, waiting only for its government to come along. Certainly, he doesn't appear discouraged. "You don't have to win (in order) to win," Connerly told the SF Chronicle, "if you frame the issue the right way, you put out the issue for discussion. We are waging a campaign of ideas and the proof of the pudding is not what happens on one day in October but what comes after that."

Rinku Sen is the publisher of ColorLines.