Commentary - La Shawn Barber: The ‘other Super Tuesday’ will focus on stopping official bias

Officials in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Oklahoma kicked off campaigns recently to add anti-preferences referendums to the November 2008 ballot. Collectively dubbed the “Super Tuesday of Equality,” the campaigns seek to fulfill the civil rights movement’s promise of judging people as individuals and not as members of a racial group.

The campaigns are led by Ward Connerly, chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute and a former member of the Board of Regents of the University of California. He started the campaign to end racial bias in government hiring and admissions in his home state in 1996.

That year, Californians passed the Connerly-backed measure barring race and gender preferences in government hiring and admissions with a 54 percent majority. In 1998, 58 percent of voters in Washington state barred such preferences, as did 58 percent of Michigan voters in 2006.

As someone who grew up during a time when racial segregation was legal, Connerly understands the importance of getting the government out of the racial classification game:

“Getting our nation to the point of applying a single standard to all Americans is one of the most crucial issues of our time,” Connerly said. “If events of the past couple of weeks have taught us anything at all, it is that race will continue to divide our nation as long as we insist on treating people differently.”

Connerly notes that bias comes from all points on the political spectrum.

“Both Don Imus, in his despicable comments about the young women of the Rutgers basketball team, and those who rushed to judgment in the Duke lacrosse case made the same mistake: They looked at individuals and saw only skin color. We have to get past that kind of thinking — and we must start by getting our government out of the business of privileging some Americans for the color of their skin and penalizing others. By now it should be clear that that leads only to bitterness and discord.”

Although liberals are still fighting to maintain a system of officially sanctioned entitlements for racial minorities, it was a Republican who set the racial spoils system in motion. Affirmative action began in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure that applicants were treated equally “without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

But it was Republican President Richard M. Nixon who, in 1971, authorized the Department of Labor to go beyond affirmative action to set specific goals and timetables to correct the “underutilization” of blacks by federal contractors. To meet arbitrary quotas, the government lowered its hiring and contracting standards.

Nixon’s approach institiutonalized racial preferences that are illegal and demeaning, and that foster an entitlement mentality. Shelby Steele, black author and preferences opponent, saw this mentality in a black college student at an affirmative action debate.

With a note of sadness, Steele wrote, “All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions.”

Instead of being trained to compete with people of all races, the next generation of blacks is being taught to embrace a system that holds them to a lesser standard. That’s nothing to be proud of and certainly nothing to fight for.

If voters in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Oklahoma agree, there may be no stopping Connerly’s campaign to restore equality and win the rest of America.

La Shawn Barber is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at www.lashawnbarber.com.