Essay 1120

Affirmative action ban provokes uncivil response

BY GEORGE WILL

DETROIT -- A feisty 29-year-old white woman and a pugnacious 67-year-old black man are performing two services this autumn for Michigan and the nation. Their Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is promoting color-blind government. And they are provoking remnants of the civil rights movement, which now is just a defender of a racial spoils system, to demonstrate its decadence, even thuggishness.

In November, Michiganders will vote on this ballot initiative: “A proposal to amend the state constitution to ban affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.”

At age 19, Jennifer Gratz, denied admission to the University of Michigan, fought the university all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It endorsed her argument that it was an unconstitutional denial of equal protection of the law for the university to add 20 points to the scores of black, Hispanic and Native American applicants. (The maximum score was 150; a perfect 1,600 SAT earned 12 points.)

Ward Connerly is a California businessman and former member of the University of California Board of Regents. He propelled to victory the measures mandating colorblind government in California and Washington.

With Gratz as its executive director, and Connerly lending hard-earned expertise, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative collected 508,000 signatures. In response, some opponents have adopted four tactics, none of which involve arguing the merits of racial preferences, and all of which attempt to prevent Michiganders from being allowed to vote on the initiative. The tactics have included:

•Pressuring signers of petitions to say they did not understand what they were signing. Some talk radio stations have broadcast the names of signers, and opponents of the initiative have gone to signers saying, “Did you know you signed a petition against equal opportunity?” Two who recanted their signatures, saying they had signed without reading the measure, are federal judges.

•Violently intimidating the state Board of Canvassers, which certifies that initiatives have qualified for the ballot. The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary disrupted the board’s deliberations, shouting and overturning a table. Video of this can been seen at www.michigancivilrights.org.

•Asking a court to rule that the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative committed fraud because many who signed the petition supposedly were confused. A federal judge -- Arthur Tarnow, a Clinton appointee -- sadly said he could not rule that way because, although he thinks the initiative is a fraud, whites as well as blacks were confused about it, and even if all signatures gathered in majority black cities were invalidated, there still were enough signatures to qualify it for the ballot. So Tarnow contented himself with an extrajudicial smear of Gratz, charging that her “deception” had confused all Michigan voters, regardless of race.

•Michigan ballots are printed by counties, so the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action says it is asking local officials to assert an extralegal “moral authority” to leave the initiative off the ballot. Because the plain language of initiative is appealing, some opponents argue that it would have terrible “unintended consequences.” It might, they say, eliminate single-sex public schools (Michigan has none; eight schools have a few voluntary single-sex classes) and breast-cancer screening, or might stop a Department of Natural Resources program aimed at helping Michigan women become hunters.

Given the caliber of opposition arguments, it is no wonder a Detroit News poll published Sept. 15 shows the initiative with an 11-point lead.

Anti-initiative demonstrators chant, “They say Jim Crow, we say hell no.” So, the rancid residue of what once was the civil rights movement equates Jim Crow -- the system of enforced legal inferiority for blacks -- with opposition to treating blacks as wards of government, in need of infantilizing preferences, forever. To such Orwellian thinking, Gratz and Connerly -- and soon, perhaps, Michigan say: Hell no.