chronicle.com
From the issue dated March 10, 2000
My Fight Against Race Preferences: a Quest Toward 'Creating Equal'
By WARD CONNERLY
Race is a scar in America. I first saw that scar at the beginning of my life, in the segregated South. And now, more than 50 years later, as we enter a new millennium, I know that it is still here -- prominent, disfiguring, often inflamed -- evidence of the terrible injuries of the past. Black people should not deny that the mark exists; it is part of our connection to America.
But we should also resist anyone, black or white, who wants to rip open the scar and make race a raw and angry wound that continues to define and divide us. Left to their own devices, Americans will merge and melt into each other.
My wife, Ilene, is white. I have two racially mixed children and three grandchildren, two of whose bloodlines are even more mixed, as a result of my son's marriage to a woman of half-Asian descent. Since the moment they came into this world, we have made sure that the central question for our children, and their children, has always been "Who are you?" -- not "What are you?"
My life experiences tell me that the question "Who are you?" is the most important one we can ask. And when we focus less on group identity and more on individuals and their individual humanity, we are creating equal.
Most people call me a black man. My enemies deny that I am, of course. For them, I'm an "Oreo" -- black on the outside and white within. In fact, I'm black in the same way that Tiger Woods and so many other Americans are black -- by the "one-drop" rule used by yesterday's segregationists and today's racial ideologues. In my case, the formula has more or less equal elements of French Canadian, Choctaw, African, and Irish American.
But just enumerating racial and ethnic lineages doesn't tell who I am, or who you are. Such a recitation doesn't predict the fears that you have had to face, the obstacles that you have had to overcome, and the strengths that you have discovered along your journey. Nor does it remind you that your "race," whatever it may be, is the least interesting thing about you.
When I was 14 years old, I made a decision: I refused to take the welfare checks that my mother and I had previously depended upon to survive. I was sick and tired of living that way. I went to see Mr. Lester Brown, the father of one of my friends, who had considerable stature in our neighborhood in Sacramento. "I've got to have a job," I told him.
That same day, I later discovered, he called one of his contacts, a man who owned Kaufman's IXL Men's Store, and asked if he knew of anyone who might need a hard-working teenager. The reply was that Manny Schwartz, over at the Fabric Center, needed a kid to do cleanup. I caught the bus after school and went downtown for an interview. Manny Schwartz hired me on the spot, and I went to work as a stock boy at 65 cents an hour.
I made about $80 a month. This was $20 more than we'd gotten from welfare, but it felt like thousands. From that time onward, I was the provider in our family, and Mom and I never took another handout.
Manny and I agreed on a schedule that was designed to give me as many hours of work as possible without losing any school time. Classes were out at 2:30 p.m., and I had to catch the 2:40 bus to be downtown by 3:00. But I had to go home first to pick up my dinner, and it took 10 minutes, running full speed, to get there.
Mom designed a protocol. I'd take off running from school the moment that class was over. She'd be waiting on the lawn with my dinner in a paper sack. I'd take it from her like a Pony Express rider grabbing the mailbag and keep going, just barely making it to the bus stop before the bus pulled away.
The bus driver was a white man. After a week of seeing me climb into the bus sweating and out of breath, he struck up a conversation with me. I thought he was just making small talk and told him about how, if I didn't make the 2:40 bus, I couldn't get to my job on time. He didn't say much in return. But I soon noticed that he began arriving at the bus stop about five minutes late.
Soon, I came to count on the extra minutes and took time to dash inside our house and use the bathroom and, perhaps, change my shirt before running to the bus stop. After I boarded, the driver would speed through the rest of his stops to get back on schedule. It finally dawned on me that he had been purposely slowing down on my part of the route.
That experience occurred in the early 1950's, when the relationship between blacks and whites was distant, to say the least. But what I learned from it reinforced what I'd already begun to understand: Simple human decency doesn't have a color.
In 1993, California Governor Pete Wilson appointed me to the University of California Board of Regents. I felt that I had been called up to the big leagues of public service. A regent's term is 12 years, but it feels like a lifetime sinecure. You receive no salary, but the perks are world-class.
From the outset, you are made to feel like minor royalty, cosseted by university administrators who look after you in the ritualized way of workers tending a queen bee. The board is steeped in tradition, and your colleagues initiate you into a ceremonial world that seems almost like a secret society. Its plush world of power is second only to the State Supreme Court among such appointed entities in California.
Yet signals are clearly given from the moment you're sworn in that this power is contingent on being a team player. You will suppress potentially embarrassing questions; you will regard the smooth functioning of the university as the highest good; you will avoid comments or controversies that open the board to the prying eye of the media.
The table you sit at may be oval, but it is top-heavy with senior regents at one end. The U.C. Board of Regents is one of those bodies on which you're supposed to serve a season or two being seen and not heard. At least, that was the structure that existed upon my arrival.
I saw all that clearly on the day of my very first meeting. It was at U.C.L.A., and I arrived late because of delays at the Sacramento airport. When I walked in, all of the other regents were already conducting business.
I was introduced as a new member of the board, and they politely applauded. I sat down and tried to keep an intelligent and alert look on my face.
Because one of the agenda items was a possible increase in student fees, a large number of students were in the audience, and the atmosphere was tense. During a discussion of the issue, a couple of hecklers shouted out remarks. Roy Brophy -- who had made his money as a home builder and bragged that he was the only person ever to have served on all three governing boards of higher education in California -- was chairing the meeting. He suddenly stood and ordered us to adjourn: "OK, we are leaving now."
As everyone else withdrew, the student regent, a young man named Alex Wong, and I hung back to talk to the angry students. After chatting with them for a while about fee increases and other issues, I walked back to the lounge where the other regents had gathered. When I got there, Brophy was waiting with a choleric look on his face.
"When I say we're leaving the room," he said to me, "we leave the room! We all act together!"
"Look, you don't tell me what to do," I interrupted him, "and you don't tell me whom to talk to."
The other regents who were nearby watched us with looks of shocked disbelief. As Brophy stood there glaring at me, I realized that he was someone who wouldn't forget the confrontation.
If the context had been more civil, I would have explained to him that, although I hadn't become a regent to cause controversy, I didn't intend to meekly follow orders. I didn't want to break ranks with the rest of the board, but I wasn't going to be a rubber stamp, either.
And, during my first few months as a regent, when the contentious issue of raising student fees finally came to a vote, I was the only other person on the board who stood against it with the student regent. It seemed to me that the university administration was not serious about cutting costs and wanted students' families to subsidize the self-indulgent status quo.
Despite such static -- or perhaps because some of the other regents actually agreed with the issues that I raised -- I was elected head of the Finance Committee. Ironically, given what was to come, I had first been asked to serve on the Affirmative Action Committee. I said no -- not because I had a strong position on the issue, but because I didn't want to be seen as the "black" regent who was automatically given the "black" portfolio.
At that point, affirmative action was a social policy that I generally disagreed with, an annoying intrusion of racial bean-counting into the business world. Based on my limited experience, I believed that it corrupted both the white businesses that called in minority firms to help get contracts and the minority firms that participated in the farce.
But, to the small degree that I thought about it, I regarded affirmative action as a bureaucratic rather than a moral problem, and it concerned me only when it was in my face. I accepted affirmative action as a part of the world in which I lived, a more or less invisible and certainly unchallengeable policy with a life of its own, the white noise of our everyday social transactions.
I know exactly when my attitude toward affirmative action began to change. One morning in 1994, after I'd been on the board for a little over a year, I received a call from a fellow regent, Clair Burgener, asking for a favor. He had just met with a couple of his "constituents," Ellen and Jerry Cook from La Jolla, who had assembled a "report" on how the university was discriminating against Asian and white applicants to our medical schools. Because he feared that they might try to sue us, Clair asked me, as chairman of the Finance Committee, to meet with the Cooks and try to understand what had gotten them so worked up.
At that juncture, the same university administrators who would later defend preference policies as vitally necessary to build a just society were not even willing to acknowledge the existence of such practices. I believed them when they said that race played a fairly insignificant role in the admissions process, and saw myself as the good soldier whose duty was to defend the institution. I agreed, therefore, to have a reassuring talk with the Cooks. I expected to give them a sympathetic hearing and then to send them on their way.
Jerry and Ellen flew to Sacramento and met me in my office. The story they told me concerned their son, James. I knew from my own experience that parents tend to exaggerate their children's accomplishments. But if even half of what Jerry and Ellen told me was true, James Cook was an exceptional student and person.
While still in high school, he completed 16 university courses at U.C. San Diego, was on the National Science Olympiad team, and was a National Merit Scholar. He graduated from high school at 16 with nothing lower than an A on his transcript. He then enrolled at U.C. San Diego, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1992 as a computer-science major. He co-authored three articles in medical journals, and volunteered on medical relief missions to Mexico.
James wanted to be a doctor, and he had outstanding scores on his Medical College Admission Test. But all five U.C. medical schools in California had rejected him.
Although he was disappointed, James attributed his rejection to the luck of the draw. As his father told me, "He just shrugged and said, 'The people that got in must just be better than me.'" He decided to attend Caltech for a year and consider his options for realizing his dream of a medical education.
While doing his first graduate year at Caltech, James reapplied to the five U.C. medical schools and to several out-of-state schools as well. He was immediately admitted to the prestigious Johns Hopkins medical school -- one of only two California residents offered admission that year.
By June 1993, however, when James was completing his master's thesis at Caltech -- the first student in the computer-science department ever to get a graduate degree in one year -- he was once again getting rejection slips from the U.C. system, with one exception: U.C. Davis, alone among the five medical schools, offered him admission.
Jerry went to the U.C. San Diego campus and got copies of the records of all the students there who had applied to medical school over a period of several years. The records contained no names, but included racial data, test scores, grades, and information about where the students had applied and where they had been accepted. Jerry brought the materials home, sorted out the U.C.S.D. grads that the U.C.S.D. medical school had accepted (to reduce the variables and get an "apple-to-apple" comparison), and then entered the numbers into a computer.
He put the results into a scatterplot -- a square field with high grades on the right side and low grades on the left, and high test scores on the top and low ones on the bottom. The accepted students, represented according to race by black circles (for black and Hispanic students) and white circles (for white and Asian students), were placed in the field according to their marks.
When Jerry handed me the scatterplot, the results needed little interpretation. A few black circles appeared in the upper-right part of the square, but most of the circles there were white. The circles in the lower-left part were almost all black.
I asked Jerry what he thought the figure meant, and he gave me a statistician's response: "If you look at grades in required premed courses and at the scores in the Medical College Admission Test, the average affirmative-action admit ranked in the lowest 1 percent relative to the Asian students and white students admitted."
As I studied the scatterplot, Jerry told me that the preponderance of black circles in the lower-left part of the figure bothered him far more than the white ones clustered in the upper-right corner. He explained that his father had been a sharecropper in Missouri, and that Ellen's father had been a laborer in Kentucky before he went into the Army during World War II. The fact that no white circles appeared in the lower-left part of the square meant that "their people," poor whites who also needed a boost, were never given a break under affirmative action.
Jerry Cook told me later that his heart had fallen when he walked into my office the first time. He hadn't known that I was black, and when he saw me he thought that Burgener had sent him to me as a part of a skin game. As for me, I was dumbfounded by the time our meeting ended -- unable to believe that something like this had happened to someone like James Cook, and that it had been so hushed up.
The last thing I wanted was to become embroiled in racial politics on the Board of Regents. But once I heard the Cooks' story and read the material they gave me, I said to them what I couldn't deny in my heart: "This is wrong."
I told them I would pursue the matter, and that simple decision changed my life.
After I became a public critic of affirmative action, I wanted to challenge the people who reflexively hated me and what I believed. I made a point of accepting invitations to speak at several universities, and this, as Monty Python used to say, was something completely different.
Having spoken at campuses in California, I thought I knew the worst that I would find: sullen and inattentive audiences, including a few members who would grudgingly admit that, perhaps, I had a point, but mostly full of people who would give me the evil eye the whole time I spoke.
But I learned that at home, I had been protected somewhat by my status as a U.C. regent. Now, as I traveled to a variety of campuses, I often didn't get a hearing at all as protesters drowned me out before I could get out a single sentence.
Perhaps the worst experience I had was at Emory University, in Atlanta. I guess I still believed in the myth of Southern gentility, because I was taken aback, upon entering the auditorium there, to be confronted by a mob.
A handful of black kids, with the belligerent looks and stabbing hand motions of gangsta rappers, led the audience. As they incited the crowd, I could hardly hear myself being introduced. When I tried to speak, the crowd stood and screamed.
I stood there as if in a wind tunnel, focusing on a seventysomething white guy in a back row. Looking like an antique hippie, he kept yelling insults at me -- the kindest was "Go back to California, you Oreo, we don't need your kind here!" -- and then immediately turning around to get affirmation from the brothers seated nearby.
As I silently faced the crowd, I wondered what I had done to warrant this. Speaking out for equality under the law in language that had been perfected by the civil-rights movement? Proposing that we are far more, each of us, than our skin color, another idea that had grown up right here in Atlanta four decades earlier?
A few security guards were present, but they stood lackadaisically in the back of the auditorium, where they couldn't have done anything if a physical confrontation had occurred -- which seemed a real possibility. I saw two Emory administrators in the front row with their arms folded, smirking at me as I tried to be heard.
After a few minutes, I finally walked off the stage. I stood in the wings for a moment, shaking with rage as I gathered my things and got ready to leave. But then I decided that I wouldn't let them run me off, and went back out.
I yelled into the microphone that I would dispense with the speech that I had prepared and answer whatever questions they wanted to ask. That seemed to mollify them somewhat. Anxious for a piece of me, the radicals quickly lined up at the microphone.
"Why does a Negro like you do the bidding of white people?" one yelled above the din of hoots. Another said, "Why does an Uncle Tom like you come to Atlanta, home of Dr. Martin Luther King, and spit on his grave?"
And so it went. They gave it to me and I gave it back.
Finally, in an almost comic denouement, the two administrators who had sat silently while the crowd prevented me from speaking rose to speak, too. The questions that they asked were couched in the aggressive decorousness of the faculty lounge, but they were meant to show the student radicals that they were on their side, and were rewarded by predictable applause. I had to restrain myself from calling those two what they were: intellectual degenerates. To cap everything off, I later heard that those administrators had gone to the president of Emory the next day to explain that the mob scene in the auditorium had occurred because I had "provoked" the students. The president apparently believed the lie until others intervened and convinced him to write me an apology.
I have learned a lot from speaking at such college campuses, much of it disheartening. However, I still feel hopeful. Invariably, after the radicals have their little drama at those events and people are filing out, a handful of black students will stall until they're almost alone and then come up to talk.
One of the things they always say, although in different ways, is that they are sick of the stereotyping that comes along with preferences, and sick, too, of their elders' coercing them into supporting affirmative action with messages like, "Our generation fought for you to have this," or "Our racist society owes this to you." After those conversations, I always find myself wondering if all the seemingly fanatical support for affirmative action on college campuses is really only skin deep.
Looking back on my initial conversation in 1994 with Jerry and Ellen Cook, I realize that it set me off on a journey that, in the course of a few years, has covered a lot of territory. When my journey began, the systematic and bureaucratized inequality erroneously referred to as affirmative action was entrenched not only in the University of California, but in institutions at every level of state government. To question it was to be dismissed as quixotic, and to actually challenge it was to risk being stigmatized as a racist.
The stronghold of affirmative action, which we have succeeded in renaming for what it is -- a system of race preferences -- seemed impregnable those few short years ago. We didn't know then that it was actually a house of cards waiting for a gust of wind to blow it down. That wind, which I know is the wind of freedom, is blowing strongly now -- in the electoral and legal arenas, and most of all in the court of public opinion.
A huge added dividend comes with that development. For the first time in 25 years, those minority students now entering the University of California in increasing numbers can hold their heads high and say, We are here not because of your "help," but because we belong here; we were admitted on our merits.
What caused this turnaround at the university? It's simple. Administrators who had spent decades trying to get "diversity" on the cheap did what they should have done years earlier. They undertook a massive program of "outreach" initiatives, aimed at creating a competitive pool of minority students. The program stretched not only into high schools, but also into junior highs and even elementary schools, to create a competitive pool of minority students.
And they did this for one reason: Written into my resolution to end preferences at U.C. was also a mandate to begin an outreach task force. After a period of stalling while waiting to see if the protests against the regents' decision would cause us to rescind it, all aspects of the university community have joined to form partnerships with K-12 schools in California to help underperforming kids -- and the results have been amazing.
I still hear every day that the debate over preferences has been divisive for America. But that debate has swept away the intimidating silence that previously shrouded the issue, a silence that was far worse than the present robust and occasionally rowdy dialogue. That debate has broken down the dangerous symbiosis between white guilt and black shame that the author Shelby Steele has described so well -- a symbiosis in which white liberals get to feel moral by "saving" blacks, and blacks are affirmed in their righteous victimhood and given the sense that they are actually "owed" the handouts that they receive from white liberalism.
Now, the subject of preferences -- and of that corrupt bargain between white liberals and their black allies -- is no longer a taboo subject. And once we can discuss such issues freely, the end is near. Discrimination is one of those pathologies -- whatever its source or rationale -- that can thrive only in the dark.
We still have much ground to cover before the scar of race fades from the face of America. But it seems to me that in the last few years we have finally reached a clearing after struggling through the tangled undergrowth of racial hostility for three centuries. At last, we can hope to one day see each other as individuals rather than categories.
Ward Connerly is a regent of the University of California. This article is adapted from his Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences, being published this month by Encounter Books in San Francisco. Copyright ¸ 2000 by Encounter Books.
|
