CREATING EQUAL: My Fight Against Race Preferences. - Review - book review

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.