Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
affirmativeaction
Ward Connerly Joins UC Berkeley’s Republican ‘Diversity Bake Sale’
04 months ago
Ward Connerly, former UC Regent and one of the architects of California’s Propoition 209, the bill that ended affirmative action in the state, joined the Berkeley College Republicans’ “Diversity Bake Sale” this morning.
The College Republicans started selling baked goods at 10am PT this morning. Their first customer was UC Berkeley Professor of Political Science Wendy Brown, who tried to buy all the baked goods but wasn’t allowed.
“I thought the Republicans were free enterprise, but they won’t let me buy all the cupcakes,” Brown told the Daily Californian.
Several counter protests were organized by students, including a phone bank in support of SB 185 — the senate bill that triggered the Republicans’ bake sale. If passed, SB185 would allow University of California and Cal State schools to
consider race, gender and economic background when making admission
decisions.
Members of the group known as By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) chanted directly in front of the bake sale at one point: “Affirmative action is a must. We won’t go to the back of the bus” and “Hey hey, ho ho, this racist bake sale’s got to go.”
An estimated 300 demonstrators also dressed in black had a “die in” and laid across Sproul Plaza, according to the University’s newspaper. (Photo by Bryan Gerhart.)
UC Berkeley College Republicans Hold ‘Diversity Bake Sale’, Mock Race
04 months ago
UC Berkeley College Republicans are hosting a co-called “Diversity Bake Sale” that’s set to include baked goods priced according to the buyer’s race. A Facebook event page created by the College Republican explains the bake sale is in response to California Senate Bill 185, which would allow University of California and Cal State schools to consider race, gender and economic background when making admission decisions.
“The pricing structure of the baked goods is meant to be satirical, while urging students to think more critically about the implications of this policy,” the Facebook event page that was modified after complaints now reads.
From the original post:
Most students feel that their voices aren’t heard in the baked goods distribution process controversy. They also believe that our UCs and CSUs need to be more diverse. YOU have the OPPORTUNITY to increase DIVERSITY and student VOICES by buying some PASTRIES and helping redistribute wealth for SOCIAL JUSTICE through BAKED GOODS on Sproul Plaza (9/27/11).
Berkeley College Republicans will be SELLING BAKED GOODS from 10 AM – 2PM across from the Affirmative Action Phonebank on Upper Sproul, and just like the CA Senate Bills 185 and 387 the phonebank supports, we will be considering RACE, GENDER, ETHNICITY, NATIONAL/GEOGRAPHIC ORIGIN and other relevant factors to ensure the EQUITABLE distribution of BAKED GOODS to our DIVERSE! student body.
To ensure the fairest distribution, and make sure that there are a DIVERSE population of RACES of students getting BCR’s delicious baked goods, the pricing structure will be as follows:
White/Caucasian: $2.00 Asian/Asian American: $1.50 Latino/Hispanic: $1.00 Black/ African American: $0.75 Native American: $0.25 $0.25 OFF FOR ALL WOMEN!Hope to see you all there! If you don’t come, you’re a racist!
The Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) unanimously passed a bill at an emergency meeting held Sunday to promote “respectful ASUC student organization conduct,” according to The Daily Californian. The bill “condemns the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or in seriousness by any student group.”
The bakesale is scheduled to take place Tuesday, September 27 from 10am to 2pm at UC Berkeley’ Sproul Plaza. It’s an unclear whether the College Republican group — which received $3,791.11 from the ASUC this fiscal year — will face any punitive measures in the coming ASUC Senate meetings.
In 1996, 54 percent of California voters approved Proposition 209, a ballot measure that effectively ended affirmative action in the state. In the years that followed, many of California’s state and UC schools saw a drop in the enrollment of blacks and Latinos. In 2006, UCLA saw its African-American enrollment drop to its lowest level in more than 30 years–UCLA’s 10,000+ incoming freshman class only included 96 black students.
The diversity bakesales are nothing new. They’ve been held across the United States and at other UC campuses before. Slate.com even has a timeline of the history of these stunts. In 2003, UCLA held its own diversity bakesale that sparked outcry from state and national leaders.
Mike Tomlin’s Super Bowl Return Is Proof Affirmative Action Works
01 year ago
Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin is out to claim his second Super Bowl title in three years as his team prepares to square off against the Green Bay Packers on Sunday. If the Steelers win, Tomlin will be the first African American to lead his team to two Super Bowls. Not bad for the 38-year-old coach nobody wanted to hire.
But Tomlin wouldn’t likely be roaming the sidelines if not for the Rooney Rule, which requires an NFL team with a head coaching vacancy to interview a candidate of color. Before the rule, few African Americans were granted interviews, let alone given head coaching jobs.
In 2002, the late Johnnie Cochran and fellow attorney Cyrus Mehri felt people of color, particularly African Americans, deserved more opportunities to lead teams. So Cochran and Mehri threatened to sue the NFL if it didn’t change its ways. “Our motives are driven not by personal desire or financial gain, but to correct what we see as a great inequity in America’s game,” Cochran said at the time. “Now is the time for the NFL to step up and make a change.”
The threat of a lawsuit was enough to get the NFL’s attention. In 2003, the league emerged with the Rooney Rule. The rule is named after Steelers owner Dan Rooney, who is also the leader of the NFL’s Diversity Committee.
When longtime Steelers coach Bill Cowher resigned in 2007, the organization began its search for someone to replace one of the league’s most celebrated figures to lead one of the most storied franchises in professional sports. When Tomlin emerged with the job, many around the NFL were surprised.
Some suggested that, at 34 years old, he was too young. Others pointed to his paltry six years of NFL experience as an assistant and coordinator. Thankfully, the Steelers went with what they saw and not with what they heard.
Rooney suggested Tomlin’s interview was so impressive that it left no alternative but to hire him. Along with his excellent football IQ, Rooney felt Tomlin was simply a good man. “Mike Tomlin is first and foremost a good person,” Rooney remarked. “That is the first test you have to pass.”
For his part, Tomlin said of the Rooney Rule and race: “It gives people an opportunity to present themselves, their ideas and their vision. Maybe the rule itself opened the door for me…. We’ll make true advances in the process when [race is] no longer an issue.”
We’re a long way from that point. In 1989, Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis hired Art Shell, making him the first African-American head coach in the modern-day NFL. By 2002, just prior to the Rooney Rule being instituted, there were still only two African American head coaches in the NFL: Herman Edwards of the New York Jets and Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts.
But when the Oakland Raiders promoted Hue Jackson from offensive coordinator to head coach two weeks ago, it brought the total number of African American head coaches in the NFL today to seven, out of 32. The league now has one Latino coach, the Carolina Panthers’ newly hired Ron Rivera.
Moreover, when Tomlin leads his team on the field Sunday, he’ll be the fifth African-American head coach to take a team to the Super Bowl in the last five years. Clearly, the Rooney Rule has made a difference, providing African Americans, at least, big opportunities in a short time.
Which begs the question: Why are critics proclaiming the Rooney Rule should be shelved?
As we head toward this weekend’s big game, the question of whether the rule has outlived its purpose has emerged. Sports columnist Drew Sharp of the Detroit Free Press says it has. “The true measure of fairness is when diverse talent becomes an unconsciously accepted standard,” Sharp wrote in his most recent critique of the rule. “This country’s most influential sports entertainment entity has reached that touchstone. And that’s why the NFL should retire the Rooney Rule.”
John Ridley, the editor of That Minority Thing, suggested on NPR last week that the rule instead by phased out. “What I’d do with the Rooney Rule is I would put a clock on it,” Ridley advised. “I would say in the next three years–three seasons would be about a decade–we’re going to end the Rooney Rule.”
I find both Sharp’s and Ridley’s assessments ludicrous.
From Shell’s hiring in 1989 to the present, just 18 African Americans have been head coaches in the NFL; of that number, four were interim head coaches. The league’s players are 68 percent black. The Rooney Rule was plainly responsible for creating what opportunities now exist. But just as it’s starting to succeed, critics like Sharp seek to scrap it?
Sounds familiar. As soon as civil rights laws attempting to level political and economic playing fields began to work, the right eagerly declared victory on behalf of people of color and began assailing efforts like affirmative action in education as unnecessary.
American sport has a long history of moving the goal posts for athletes of color to succeed as well.
In 1875, for instance, African-American jockeys dominated the Kentucky Derby. In the first 28 Derbies, African-American riders claimed 15 championships. Angry at such progress, whites organized the Jockey Club in 1894, which mandated that all riders be tested and licensed to ride in the Derby. Since many of the black riders were former slaves and illiterate, whites strategically thwarted African-American participation.
In the early days of boxing, white heavyweight champions like John L. Sullivan, “Gentleman” Jim Corbett and Jack Dempsey refused to fight African-Americans, thus creating an unofficial color line. Still, Jack Johnson became the first heavyweight champion of the world in 1908. Because of Johnson’s persistence, Joe Louis was able to take the sport to another level in the 1930′s and 1940′s, thereby opening doors to the likes of Muhammad Ali. A similar “gentlemen’s agreement” kept Major League Baseball a whites-only club until Jackie Robinson cracked it open.
With this history as backdrop, for Sharp to suggest the Rooney Rule is no longer needed because an “unconsciously accepted standard” has been achieved after just eight years is ridiculous. Institutions have never changed “unconsciously.” The Major Leagues’ owners didn’t let black players on the field voluntarily or out of a desire to right a wrong. Rather, it took years of steady pressure to rewrite the accepted rules.
“It’s an uphill battle [in] every hiring cycle,” says Mehri of the NFL’s progress. “We’re still trying to open people’s minds. We’re in the process of changing the hearts and minds of NFL owners and, in turn, trying to open the hearts and minds of America.”
The Mike Tomlins of the NFL are making a noted impact in the league, but it is unlikely we would bear witness to his stellar coaching had it not been for the Rooney Rule. Which means he and the other black coaches wouldn’t have been the only people to lose in the deal–the Steelers would be down two championships, fans would be down one heck of a strategist and the Super Bowl’s millions of young viewers would miss a chance to see a black man as a leader.
If we ever reach a level playing field in society, it will find its way into American sport, too. Until then, leave the Rooney Rule alone.
Dexter Roger blogs about sports at Dexter’s Vantage Point! and Examiner.com. Email Dexter directly. Follow him on Twitter.
Prop 107: The Latest Chapter in Arizona’s Right Wing Takeover
01 year ago
When Arizona voters passed Prop 107 and outlawed the use of affirmative action in state hiring and admissions processes by a 60-40 margin last week, few were surprised.
It is Arizona, after all, home to SB 1070, the harshest anti-immigrant piece of legislation to come down in recent memory, and HB 2281, the state’s new ethnic studies ban. And, where would any of those policies be without politicians like state Rep. Russell Pearce, who authored SB 1070, or Governor Jan Brewer, whose winning campaign rested on her repeating border violence lies of phantom headless bodies found in the Arizona deserts.
But what happened last week has roots that go back much further than Brewer alone. Prop 107, misleadingly titled the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, was a Ward Connerly-backed production. Connerly is a California-based black anti-affirmative action crusader who has successfully spearheaded campaigns to get California, Michigan, Nebraska and Washington to pass similar bans in the last decade. According to Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Connerly has spent $1.7 million in Arizona to get an affirmative action ban passed in recent years. The new law amended the Arizona Constitution to ban affirmative action programs in state hiring, admissions and contracting processes.
According to Rev. Oscar Tillman, president of the Maricopa County NAACP, Gov. Brewer’s power was cemented by a phalanx of Republicans in the state legislature, and SB 1070′s passage paved the way for other bills to get rammed through. “The same people who put 1070 in there are the same people who supported 107,” Tillman said, whose group opposed Prop 107. “They go hand in hand.”
Tillman said that for years groups had been challenging Connerly’s concerted but often failed efforts to get an affirmative action ban passed in Arizona. But this year Connerly had a different scheme. Instead of going through the traditional route of garnering public signatures to get it on the ballot again–groups had successfully challenged that tactic before–Connerly circumvented the public altogether and went straight to the sympathetic state legislature, who put Prop 107 on the ballot.
Tillman said Connerly’s campaign was also aided by a few high-profile conservative politicians of color like young Arizona Republican Rep. Steve Montenegro, whose main argument was that the state didn’t need policies to protect and ensure equity anymore.
“We are telling people you are smart enough and work hard enough but because of the color of your skin you can’t get in,” Montenegro told Arizona’s ABC15.
“When you see a Hispanic sitting here, it sends a message to people who don’t fully look at or study the ballot,” Tillman lamented. “He was the face of the Hispanic community to say: we don’t need it anymore. You have a charismatic leader in the Senate saying this? This is what we were up against.”
Prop 107 feeds on a myth Americans are desperate to believe: that the country is a meritocracy where hard work and a bootstraps-mentality are all that are necessary for success, institutionalized inequities be damned. Affirmative action bans rely on this false narrative, which is just as alluring to women and people of color–exactly the parties affirmative action policies are meant to protect–as it is to white people and men.
Prop 107 also got a jolt of support from the Arizona Republic, the state’s largest newspaper:
Affirmative action wasn’t meant to be a perpetual-motion machine. The policy served an important purpose, making up for missing opportunities in education and the workplace. But over time, the drawbacks have come to outweigh the advantages.
“The biggest lie about Prop 107 is that somehow we live in a post-racial society where the playing field is level,” said Isabel Garcia, co-chair of the Coalicion de Derechos Humanos.
Of course, there were many vocal opponents, including Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema and multiple state university presidents, who said Prop 107 would harm the state and their schools’ enrollment.
University of Arizona president Robert Shelton, an outspoken critic of Prop 107, addressed the campus after it was passed: “This proposition was just one example of a great challenge that was on display in almost every race in this year’s election, where we saw campaign after campaign designed to divide people, rather than unite them; to play on their fears, rather than inspire their hope,” the student paper reported.
Arizona is indeed home to some of the country’s most regressive social policies today. The state is a hot bed of anti-immigrant scapegoating and demagoguery, and so even though Connerly’s got a national strategy to push statewide affirmative action bans, Prop 107′s passage is a blip on the screen of harsh bills people are fighting in the state.
“Prop 107 is but one,” Garcia warned, and said that people are already gearing up for the 2011 legislative season, when Arizona lawmakers are expected to try to repeal birthright citizenship, and pass a bill denying public education to undocumented children. “Ward Connerly knew that this was the perfect moment. He had a very right-wing Tea Party legislature all in on it.”
“They are riding this crest of public ignorance,” Garcia said.
As for getting Prop 107 repealed, don’t hold your breath for legal action. Activists are settling in for a fight that may take years. Connerly’s sneaky legislating maneuvers make it hard to bring lawsuits against the new law. “He was wise enough to get the legislators to put it on the ballot,” Tillman said. “Because who are you going to sue?” Tillman said the NAACP is looking at other programs they can get federal support for.
“The resistance is going to have to take many different forms,” Garcia said. “Lobbying is for the birds right now. We need to be lobbying our own public, doing education and base work.”
“I don’t think Arizona truly feels the impact of what they’ve done yet,” Tillman said. “I just think it’s going to have to hurt a little bit more before things get better.”
Jim Webb’s Anti-Immigrant Rant
01 year ago
Sen. Jim Webb’s back with another rant against affirmative action. In case you missed it, the Virgina politician took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal late last week to tackle the “myth of white privilege,” and while it has provoked the usual rage and skepticism in some corners, the general consensus seems to be that folks are over it.
First, Webb’s argument: poor white folks exist, too. And they’re not all the same. But they’re still often overlooked because everyone who’s not white benefits from government entitlement programs, namely immigrants of color:
The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all “people of color”–especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.–moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites. It has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans, who despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.
Charing Ball at The Atlanta Journal Constitution calls Webb’s particular brand of white, citizenship-having angst a perfectly timed throwback to Southern strategy politics. Nothing like touching on the deep-seeded racial anxieties of whites and blacks during a recession to get a few votes. After all, it’s not like immigrants of color are exactly riding the rails of American privilege these days.
Between the Shirley Sherrod scandal and the Tea Party trading jabs with the NAACP over who’s more racist, this summer’s shaping up as a hot house for regressive public debate. All Webb’s op-ed proved is the obvious: that we’re missing out on having productive conversations on race and racism.
Photo: Creative Commons/Rob Shenk
Supreme Court Keeps Firefighters’ Civil Rights Claim Alive
01 year ago
Once again, a city fire department is in the hot seat for employment discrimination and prompting the Supreme Court to set crucial precedents for civil rights law. This time, thousands of Black firefighters in Chicago got the green light from the Supreme Court to broaden the scope of their civil rights claim despite having passed a deadline to do so.
In contrasting the ruling with the Lily Ledbetter gender-discrimination case–in which the court upheld time limits on claims–the New York Times editorial board predicts:
If interpreted properly by the lower courts, the ruling could give a chance at relief to minority groups, women, the elderly the disabled and others claiming to be victims of a discriminatory employment practice long after the practice went into effect.
The case, Lewis v. City of Chicago, centered on a controversial firefighter test that systematically excluded candidates of color over a number of years. The main issue was not the discriminatory “disparate impact,” which a lower court already ruled on, but the time limits attached to the case. The high court ruled that test takers could take legal action against the racially biased test even after a technical deadline for bringing claims had passed.
The immediate impact of the decision will be local, affecting several thousand firefighter candidates, who may be entitled to remedies including the hiring of about 120 Black candidates and millions in damages. But Lewis adds another crease to the bizarre patchwork of legal and political opinions surrounding the Civil Rights Act in the 21st century.
Last year, in Ricci v. DeStefano, a sharply divided bench sided with a group of mostly white firefighters who challenged the city’s decision to invalidate test results that excluded Blacks. Right-wing critics of the city decried the consequences of “political correctness,” while defenders of affirmative action stressed the need to hold government agencies accountable for compensating for racial inequities in the civil service.
The “disparate impact” argument in Chicago turned on arbitrary cut-offs in a written test given to 26,000 aspiring firefighters in 1995. Fran Spielman at the Sun-Times explains that in siphoning the test results:
the city established a cut-off score of 89 and hired randomly from the top 1,800 “well-qualified” candidates…. In 2005, a federal judge ruled that the city’s decision had the effect of perpetuating the predominantly white status quo, since 78 percent of those “well-qualified” candidates were white.
Although there is a standard 300-day window for filing civil rights cases in response to an act of discrimination, Spielman continues, “African-American firefighters maintained — and the Supreme Court agreed — that a new act of discrimination occurred every time the scores were used to hire firefighters between May, 1996 and October, 2001.”
Writing for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia, no friend of affirmative action, stated that while test itself was the initial discriminatory act, “it does not follow that no new violations occurred – and no new claims could arise–when the city implemented that decision down the road.”
While the Court’s decision to uphold time limits in Ledbetter eventually prompted Congress to pass corrective legislation, the Lewis ruling appears to broaden channels for redress in the courts. Either way, it may be worth revisiting the reflections of New York University sociologist Dalton Conley on trying to litigate our way to equal opportunity. After the Ricci decision, he wrote that in the face of entrenched racial divides pervading America’s public institutions—
Expecting a single test to compensate for all that is unrealistic — silly even. This is a symptom of a larger pathology in the American psyche where our deep and abiding belief in meritocracy clashes with our culture of individualism: We expect testing (and schools) to do the work of social policy when it can’t really carry that heavy a load.
But policymakers, for their part, have been less than eager to take on that load. So for now, in Chicago and beyond, the people weighed down by generations of discrimination have no choice but to look to the courts to lessen their burden.
Photo credit: Creative Commons/Brett Gustafson