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Creating Equal. Inscribed By the Author. My Fight Against Race Preferences
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June 15, 2024
A LEADER IN THE FIGHT AGAINST AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EXPLAINS WHY
Wardell (‘Ward’) Anthony Connerly (born 1939) is a businessman, and former University of California Regent (1993–2005). He is best known for his support of California’s Proposition 209, which (after being approved by voters in November 1996) prohibited race- and gender-based preferences in state hiring, contracting and state university admissions.
He wrote in the first chapter of this 2000 book, “In a brief thirty years, programs such as welfare had … [replaced] efforts at self-betterment with a culture of dependency. And affirmative action was the kissing cousin of welfare, a seemingly humane social gesture that was actually quite diabolical in its consequences---not only causing racial conflict because of its inequities, but also validating blacks’ fears of inferiority and reinforcing racial stereotypes… Proposition 209… unmasked affirmative action for what it had become… not a ‘subtle plus’ that imperceptibly affirmed black ambition, but a regime of systematic race preferences that put the government back in the same discrimination business it had been in when Thurgood Marshall [was] lead attorney in ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ in 1954…” (Pg. 3)
He explains, “I have made a commitment not to tote that bag of racial grievances, and I’ve made it more frequently than I’d like to admit because the status of victim is so seductive and so available to anyone with certain facial features or a certain cast to his skin. If we are to lay this burden down for good, it seems to me that we must be committed to letting go of racial classifications---not getting beyond race by taking race more into account… but just getting beyond race period, and realizing how absurd it is to use an outmoded nineteenth century concept, which never had any scientific basis, as a foundation for public policy in the twenty-first century.” (Pg. 19)
He identifies himself racially as ‘black’ (Pg. 1), and notes, “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. So, my own personal experience tells me that the passageway to that place where all racial division ends goes directly through the human heart.” (Pg. 23)
He states, “I know that today the values… [like] hard work, self-respect, independence---are out of vogue with those in the intellectual elite who claim to speak for the ‘black community.’ They prefer to talk instead about victimhood, and powerlessness, recrimination and reparation. I know too that these older values will have to be reasserted if black people are to complete the long march to freedom and bring with them the urban underclass, which nobody these days, liberal or conservative, seems to care very much at all.” (Pg. 46)
He recounts his embarrassment when as a 13-year old, his mother was forced to ask him to apply for welfare benefits: “I kept my head averted from the people getting off and on the bus, fearful that they would be able to look at me and see my ne dependency written all over my face… [The] monthly interviews were degrading torture for me. They made me feel impotent and infantile.” (Pg. 50-51)
He notes, “The sixties were a strange time for me, as, I guess, they were for many people. It was a time of possibility and also of wasted potential… I was excited by the success of the civil rights movement in the early part of the decade… I believed that I was living day by day inside Martin Luther King’s dream. I saw this country as basically generous an enriching. I considered myself more an American than ever before, and a proud American to boot. It disturbed me that such emotions should be considered naïve or even ‘collaborationist’ by the radical blacks… who had increasingly begun to call the social tune during the sixties. I was profoundly alienated by the increasingly militant behavior and ‘heavy’ rhetoric that seemed to call all of the accomplishments of the civil rights movement into question. I couldn’t understand the insults black radicals directed at King, and I was appalled when these same people used King’s murder as an excuse to go on a violent rampage in cities across the country. It seemed that just as black people were finally about to reach the Promised Land, the seductive voices of nihilism were telling them that the last steps of the journey weren’t worth the effort.” (Pg. 84)
After Governor Pete Wilson appointed him to the UC Board of Regents, he comments, “Ironically, in the days following the press release, as the nature of my complicated relationship with Pete was scrutinized by the press, the issue of race took a backseat to the issue of ‘cronyism.’ I was actually relieved to be seen as just another political appointee being given the nod because of longtime personal and financial support for the governor. Why feel less stigmatized by cronyism than ‘diversity’? … Cronyism is at least based on one’s individual qualities; diversity is based on factors that render individuality irrelevant.” (Pg. 106)
He notes, “At this point, affirmative action was a social policy I generally disagreed with, an annoying intrusion of racial bean counting into the business world… [But] I regarded affirmative action as a bureaucratic rather than a moral problem, and it concerned me only when it was in my face… I regarded the idea of ‘diversity’ in the same way.” (Pg. 116-117) He continues, “I know exactly when my attitude toward confronting affirmative action began to change… For all the talk about ‘building diversity’ what had been described … was the scaffolding of injustice… I had heard a good deal about ‘political correctness’ and … considered it something of an exaggeration. But now I saw just what a powerful sanction on behavior it could be… This November 1994 meeting of the regents had let the genie of race preferences out of the bottle previously kept hidden away in the UC chamber of horrors.” (Pg. 117, 126-127)
He explains, “The crucial document that came to me that spring… was something called the Karabel Matrix… The Matrix proposed a sliding scale for assigning points for admissions. There were 8,000 points possible. Whites and Asians had to be over 7,100 to be admitted. ‘People of color’ could be below 6,000 and still get admitted. This was one of the smoking guns that showed race was not one among many factors, but THE factor. After reading it, I decided that I would introduce a motion calling for the US system to end all race preferences.” (Pg. 134)
When Assembly Speaker Willie Brown praised affirmative action in a speech, Connerly thought, “when Brown’s colleagues in the legislature made him speaker for fifteen years, they were not filling a quota for blacks… Willie Brown had risen because of his individual talent and drive, not because of a handout, and as I listened to him give affirmative action the credit for his rise I had to work hard to keep a straight face.” (Pg. 149)
He states, “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 creative pool of minority students. The program stretched out not only into high schools around California, but 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 UC there was also a mandate to begin an outreach task force… and the results have been amazing.” (Pg. 268)
This book will be of great interest to those concerned about affirmative action and ‘diversity’ programs.
Wardell (‘Ward’) Anthony Connerly (born 1939) is a businessman, and former University of California Regent (1993–2005). He is best known for his support of California’s Proposition 209, which (after being approved by voters in November 1996) prohibited race- and gender-based preferences in state hiring, contracting and state university admissions.
He wrote in the first chapter of this 2000 book, “In a brief thirty years, programs such as welfare had … [replaced] efforts at self-betterment with a culture of dependency. And affirmative action was the kissing cousin of welfare, a seemingly humane social gesture that was actually quite diabolical in its consequences---not only causing racial conflict because of its inequities, but also validating blacks’ fears of inferiority and reinforcing racial stereotypes… Proposition 209… unmasked affirmative action for what it had become… not a ‘subtle plus’ that imperceptibly affirmed black ambition, but a regime of systematic race preferences that put the government back in the same discrimination business it had been in when Thurgood Marshall [was] lead attorney in ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ in 1954…” (Pg. 3)
He explains, “I have made a commitment not to tote that bag of racial grievances, and I’ve made it more frequently than I’d like to admit because the status of victim is so seductive and so available to anyone with certain facial features or a certain cast to his skin. If we are to lay this burden down for good, it seems to me that we must be committed to letting go of racial classifications---not getting beyond race by taking race more into account… but just getting beyond race period, and realizing how absurd it is to use an outmoded nineteenth century concept, which never had any scientific basis, as a foundation for public policy in the twenty-first century.” (Pg. 19)
He identifies himself racially as ‘black’ (Pg. 1), and notes, “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. So, my own personal experience tells me that the passageway to that place where all racial division ends goes directly through the human heart.” (Pg. 23)
He states, “I know that today the values… [like] hard work, self-respect, independence---are out of vogue with those in the intellectual elite who claim to speak for the ‘black community.’ They prefer to talk instead about victimhood, and powerlessness, recrimination and reparation. I know too that these older values will have to be reasserted if black people are to complete the long march to freedom and bring with them the urban underclass, which nobody these days, liberal or conservative, seems to care very much at all.” (Pg. 46)
He recounts his embarrassment when as a 13-year old, his mother was forced to ask him to apply for welfare benefits: “I kept my head averted from the people getting off and on the bus, fearful that they would be able to look at me and see my ne dependency written all over my face… [The] monthly interviews were degrading torture for me. They made me feel impotent and infantile.” (Pg. 50-51)
He notes, “The sixties were a strange time for me, as, I guess, they were for many people. It was a time of possibility and also of wasted potential… I was excited by the success of the civil rights movement in the early part of the decade… I believed that I was living day by day inside Martin Luther King’s dream. I saw this country as basically generous an enriching. I considered myself more an American than ever before, and a proud American to boot. It disturbed me that such emotions should be considered naïve or even ‘collaborationist’ by the radical blacks… who had increasingly begun to call the social tune during the sixties. I was profoundly alienated by the increasingly militant behavior and ‘heavy’ rhetoric that seemed to call all of the accomplishments of the civil rights movement into question. I couldn’t understand the insults black radicals directed at King, and I was appalled when these same people used King’s murder as an excuse to go on a violent rampage in cities across the country. It seemed that just as black people were finally about to reach the Promised Land, the seductive voices of nihilism were telling them that the last steps of the journey weren’t worth the effort.” (Pg. 84)
After Governor Pete Wilson appointed him to the UC Board of Regents, he comments, “Ironically, in the days following the press release, as the nature of my complicated relationship with Pete was scrutinized by the press, the issue of race took a backseat to the issue of ‘cronyism.’ I was actually relieved to be seen as just another political appointee being given the nod because of longtime personal and financial support for the governor. Why feel less stigmatized by cronyism than ‘diversity’? … Cronyism is at least based on one’s individual qualities; diversity is based on factors that render individuality irrelevant.” (Pg. 106)
He notes, “At this point, affirmative action was a social policy I generally disagreed with, an annoying intrusion of racial bean counting into the business world… [But] I regarded affirmative action as a bureaucratic rather than a moral problem, and it concerned me only when it was in my face… I regarded the idea of ‘diversity’ in the same way.” (Pg. 116-117) He continues, “I know exactly when my attitude toward confronting affirmative action began to change… For all the talk about ‘building diversity’ what had been described … was the scaffolding of injustice… I had heard a good deal about ‘political correctness’ and … considered it something of an exaggeration. But now I saw just what a powerful sanction on behavior it could be… This November 1994 meeting of the regents had let the genie of race preferences out of the bottle previously kept hidden away in the UC chamber of horrors.” (Pg. 117, 126-127)
He explains, “The crucial document that came to me that spring… was something called the Karabel Matrix… The Matrix proposed a sliding scale for assigning points for admissions. There were 8,000 points possible. Whites and Asians had to be over 7,100 to be admitted. ‘People of color’ could be below 6,000 and still get admitted. This was one of the smoking guns that showed race was not one among many factors, but THE factor. After reading it, I decided that I would introduce a motion calling for the US system to end all race preferences.” (Pg. 134)
When Assembly Speaker Willie Brown praised affirmative action in a speech, Connerly thought, “when Brown’s colleagues in the legislature made him speaker for fifteen years, they were not filling a quota for blacks… Willie Brown had risen because of his individual talent and drive, not because of a handout, and as I listened to him give affirmative action the credit for his rise I had to work hard to keep a straight face.” (Pg. 149)
He states, “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 creative pool of minority students. The program stretched out not only into high schools around California, but 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 UC there was also a mandate to begin an outreach task force… and the results have been amazing.” (Pg. 268)
This book will be of great interest to those concerned about affirmative action and ‘diversity’ programs.
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