For Immediate Release November 7, 1996

It's Time We Followed California's Example

by Charles King

A few days ago, California voters outlawed race and gender quotas in their state, by adopting the California Civil Rights Initiative. Colorado should promptly follow California's lead, and make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or gender.

Back in 1971, President Richard Nixon imposed "goals and timetables" (quotas) on federal hiring and contracting programs. In the 25 years since, quota programs have proliferated like jackrabbits-160 or more of them, just at the federal level. President Clinton's claim to "mend, not end" affirmative action has resulted in the abolition of just one of the federal government's quota regimens.

But without waiting for President Clinton's actions to match his rhetoric, Colorado citizens can scrap all the quotas in our state which are imposed by state and local governments. Such quotes permeate state government, especially the higher education system.

What would have happened without quotas? When asked that question on the MacNeil-Lehrer TV program (May 4, 1995). Shelby Steele, the noted black social scientist, answered: "I think more of us would be ahead. I think that affirmative action has held us back."

Why?

Because affirmative action in practice degenerated into racial preferences and thus betrayed the principle of equal opportunity for all, repeat, for all, i.e., the very principle that gave the civil rights movement its impetus in the first place. "That principle," black columnist Thomas Sowell recently wrote, "is that our laws and policies should subject every citizen to the same rules and judge them by the same standards."

As affirmative action quickly degenerated from a positive outreach to minorities into rigid quotas, Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind America faded, and threatens, if allowed to continue, to turn into a nightmare.

A new book by Larry Stratton and nationally syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts, The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy. documents "the transformation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act from a statute explicitly forbidding racial preferences into a weapon used to coerce employees to adopt quotas." Stratton and Roberts show what is clear from any reading of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that quotas are outlawed under the Act. The Act's Article VII, Section 703(j) positively--shall we say "affirmatively"?--bans all employment discrimination on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex or national origin" (period, full stop).

Two recent federal court cases offer hope that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 may yet be restored to the American public.

In March the Federal Fifth Circuit Court ruled that race was nota legitimate criterion in the admission policies of the University of Texas Law School. Ask John Buechner, President of the University of Colorado, whether race is a criterion in decisions affecting students and faculty on his institution's four campuses.

This summer, the Federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that when the Board of Education of Piscataway, New Jersey discharged a Jewish female school- teacher to make room for a black woman, the Board violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Board's "reasoning": Jewish women were "overrepresented" in the school system. What the Court said in effect was that a school in the 3rd Circuit cannot justify its racial discrimination by invoking the "sacred" name of diversity.

The University of Colorado practices racial discrimination very similar to the discriminatory practices held illegal by the federal courts. But unfortunately, Colorado is within the territory of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, so the two anti-discrimination decisions are not directly enforceable as law in Colorado.

California, in the Ninth Circuit, was also not legally bound by the federal court decisions. But a few days ago, California voters decided not to wait for the courts. By adopting the California Civil Rights Initiative, California voters made it illegal for their state government to use quotas. The California state government must now operate on a purely colorblind basis.

As columnist William F. Buckley points out, the new California law does, "literally nothing more than affirm the meaning" of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. During debate on that law, the great civil rights leader Senator Hubert H. Humphrey said he would eat every page of the bill if anyone could show him that that law required quotas, or any other kind of discrimination on account of race or sex.

Ward Connerly, the black regent of the University of California, explains why California has become the first state to dismantle affirmative action. "First," he says, "because California is a window of the future" Second, it is precisely because of our diversity that we know how destructive Affirmative Action can be of fundamental democratic values of self-reliance, individualism and equal opportunity for all."

It's high time that universities in Colorado, following those in California, started observing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act-started obeying the law for a change. If the University of Colorado bureaucracy won't voluntarily obey the Civil Rights Act, then voters should consider enacting a constitutional amendment to make sure that it does.

Charles King is a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a Senior Fellow at the Independence Institute, a free-market think-tank in Golden Colorado.

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