Putting Racism Back in the Classroom
By Garin K. Hovannisian, Daily Bruin | June 7, 2004
Frontpagemag.com
June 4 2004
Last week, a group of lawless vigilantes trampled over state law and
betrayed public opinion at the same time.
For me and you, this might be a hard act to pull off. But for the
well-trained assemblymen of the state of California, it was business
as usual. Last Wednesday, in a 45-30 vote, the state Assembly passed
a bill to reinstate race as a consideration for university admissions.
Assembly Bill 2387 allows “the University of California and the
California State University … to consider culture, race, gender,
ethnicity” and a number of other factors in their admissions processes.
As I read it, the bill is illegal. Proposition 209, a constitutional
amendment ratified by California’s public in 1996, explicitly states:
“The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential
treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color,
ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment,
public education, or public contracting.”
But the officials in Sacramento are not dumb. Their deliberations were
extensive and their methodology was efficient. It is for this reason
that AB 2387 includes the phrase, “so long as no preference is given.”
In short, the legislators want to consider race but not make
preferences based on race. Convenient? Yes. Confusing? Surely.
Impressively manipulative? Perhaps.
But all the elitist rationalizations for this bill are left defenseless
when faced with the revealing and important question: How?
How is it possible to consider an applicant’s race but not make
a preference based on it? One cannot expect a human to remain
uninfluenced when he considers an influential factor. For example, if
one applicant is Armenian and the other is French, I, the subjective
reviewer, will give preferential treatment to the Armenian.
Say, however, that admissions officers are superhuman. What then? If
they were hypothetically able to consider race but not make racial
preferences, then what’s the point of considering race in the first
place? There is no point. For example, if one applicant is Armenian
and the other is French, I, the objective reviewer, will not care.
So why is the bill so important?
To put it simply, the bill is a devious and deliberate attempt to
break the law and reinstate affirmative action in California.
To make this all the more obvious for the political detective, the
assemblymen have exposed their motivations for passing the bill in
the first place. Those who pretend the measure is about equality or
justice ignore the fact that when the bill was first introduced in
April, it did not contain the word gender. It dealt exclusively with
the reintegration of racial issues into admission boards. From the
beginning, the bill was about affirmative action.
Again, the mob at our Capitol is not foolish.
Preempting their inevitable exposure, many assemblymen have sought
to form a legal defense, in spite of Prop. 209.
As the Daily Bruin reports: “Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh, D-South
Gate, was the primary author of the bill. Ricardo Lara, communications
director for Firebaugh, said the bill stems from a decision by the
U.S. Supreme Court last June that upheld the right of the University
of Michigan Law School to employ ‘a narrowly tailored use of race in
admissions decisions.'”
The court did not, nor should address whether affirmative action
should be mandatory. The court’s ruling was one of the state’s
rights. Within the confines of the Constitutional Equal Protection
Clause, the individual states can choose whether to adopt or ignore
affirmative action.
Michigan chose to adopt it; California chose to reject it (via
Proposition 209). And precisely for the same reasons affirmative
action exists in Michigan, it should not exist in California. The
state has the right to choose. That is what the Michigan case found.
In her ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice O’Connor writes,
“As the experience in Texas, Florida and California demonstrates,
public universities have ample race-neutral means available to
achieve objectives such as educational diversity, openness and broad
participation. … (States like California) cannot follow Michigan’s
model of adopting race-based admission policies when ample race-neutral
alternatives remain available to respondents.”
So the Supreme Court, far from endorsing race as a factor of
admissions, actually rejected it in the case of California.
Diane Schachterle, the Director of Public Affairs for the American
Civil Rights Coalition, agrees. In an e-mail, she told me, “Grutter
v. Bollinger specifies that if race-neutral means are working, then
race-based policies may NOT be used. Since Justice O’Connor singled
out California as a shining example of the success of race-neutral
policies one can conclude that California meets this legal test and
is forbidden to consider race.”
Much can be said about the righteousness of affirmative action. But
the issue at hand is far different and far more important. It is an
issue of law and public opinion.
Last week, our representatives gathered in their elite room where
they overrode our desires, breached their sacred contract with the
law, and misled and deceived California citizens. In the process,
they insulted the opponents of affirmative action and crushed the
legitimacy of its advocates.
The assemblymen who voted for this bill are, in the most literal
sense, vigilantes.
Does anybody care?