We should not make too little of the continuing upsurge in black and Latino enrollment at the University of California. We should not make too much of it, either.
State officials happily report that overall admissions of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans in the ten University of California campuses have returned almost to their level of four years ago when the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 went into effect.
Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans make up 18.6 percent of the freshmen admitted to the ten campuses in fall 2001, up from 17.6 percent a year earlier. That’s almost as high as the 18.8 percent who were admitted for the fall of 1997, the last year the university was allowed to use race and gender as factors in selecting students.
That’s good news, despite the continuing racial-ethnic enrollment gap at the system’s two most prestigious campuses, Berkeley and Los Angeles. Black, Latinos and Indian enrollment is growing on those campuses, too, but still lags behind the 1997 level.
That’s a dismaying setback for racial and ethnic diversity on the two campuses. But at least, the overall trends are moving in the right direction. Such encouraging numbers expose the dangerously inflated rhetoric of those who warned that blacks, Latinos and Native Americans would be “locked out” of a quality university education if 209 passed.
Instead, the state reached out in new ways that used class and geography as proxies for race and ethnicity. Under Gov. Gray Davis, the state now offers automatic admission to students who rank in the top 4 percent of California high schools. The state also offers a scholarship for low-income and some middle-income graduates with at least a B average.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on improving public schools in low-income neighborhoods. University officials and students reached out to recruit promising students in neighborhoods that traditionally did not send very many applications to the state system.
All of that is good news. I favor affirmative action, but I also want to put it out of business. Although you would never guess it from what some zealots say, affirmative action was never intended to be permanent. As various equal-opportunity goals are achieved, various forms of affirmative action should be re-evaluated, then changed or eliminated as necessary.
With that in mind, I would like to congratulate the success of Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who has become a national anti-affirmative action crusader after pushing Proposition 209 to victory.
I would like to, but I can’t. Unfortunately, he wants to make too much of his success.
More Top Picks Best Water Softeners
He has proposed a new ballot initiative that would stop the state and other public agencies from collecting any racial data or classifying people into racial categories. It would only make a few exceptions for areas like law enforcement and fair housing.
He calls it the “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which is ironic since, if race were a matter you could keep to yourself, we would not have the problem of racial discrimination. Connerly’s initiative seems to be aimed at fighting “race” without fighting racism.
Connerly offers his own racially mixed ancestry as good examples of how race is more a social construct than a biological relevancy. His ancestors include Americans of African, Irish, American Indian and French Canadian descent.
That’s fine for him and his family. I think everyone should be free to call themselves whatever they want to call themselves. Unfortunately the problem of racial discrimination deals not with what you see in yourself as much as what others see when they see you.
That’s why I find it bemusing that Connerly and others would want to eliminate the very tool that has helped us measure the progress we have made. We can measure, for example, the success of diversity outreach at California’s universities precisely because the state engages in what detractors like Connerly call “racial bean counting.”
“I suppose we will lose that tool,” Connerly conceded in a telephone interview with me. “But that’s one of the tradeoffs we have to make.”
That’s a pretty big trade, Brother Ward. Let’s face it: As long as beans have meaning in our society, we will have good reason to count them.
It is encouraging to see the walls of discrimination and identity politics fading in recent years. But, if we made too much of the progress we Americans have made on the racial front, we will jeopardize the progress we have yet to make.
———-