cawacko
Well-known member
"Californians reject affirmative action. Maybe they’re not progressive after all"
Rather proactive heading for this local (black) columnist writing about Prop 16 which was to bring back affirmative action in school admissions and government hiring in California and did not pass (in a state that Biden won by over 30%.)
If this were on the ballot in a non Presidential election year it probably would have gotten more attention. The author doesn't reference it but there was a big pushback by some in the Asian community as they would be most affected in school admissions. I've read black intellectuals, among others, argue why AA does not actually benefit the black community despite the positive intentions.
Based on the the elections results there were clearly people who voted for Biden and not the proposition. Curious if there are any Democrats/progressives here who would argue against AA? (Or even must one support AA to be consider progressive?)
Californians reject affirmative action. Maybe they’re not progressive after all
Almost a quarter century after it was banned in California, affirmative action was on the ballot in a year when a social justice movement rippled across the country.
Proposition 16 would have reinstated the ability to consider race and sex in government hiring and contracting and in public university admissions. But the measure intended to address racial and gender disparities in California was resoundingly rejected. Nearly the entire state voted no except for a handful of Bay Area counties and Los Angeles County.
“I think there’s a narrative that California is way more progressive than it actually is,” said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit that seeks to increase the accessibility of a college education, and a proponent of Prop. 16. “When it comes to racial justice issues, certainly we’ve not been as progressive as we should be. I think (Prop. 16) is a good example of that.”
The passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 made California the first state in the nation to ban affirmative action. After 250 years of slavery and 100 years of segregative Jim Crow policies, the racial disparities in housing, health care and generational wealth can be traced back to slavery. A few decades of affirmative action weren’t enough to erase the gaps.
Prop. 16 was overshadowed by one of the most consequential presidential elections in this country’s history. There were also ballot initiatives to close property tax loopholes, to restore voting rights to people on parole and to reform the discriminatory bail system. And there was the monstrous gig-work ballot measure that Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart and Postmates pumped $200 million into just so the companies could keep their drivers as independent contractors rather than being forced to reclassify them as employees under AB5.
In almost any other year, Prop. 16 would’ve been one of the most important issues, but I doubt that would’ve changed the outcome. In November 2019, an effort to restore affirmative action in Washington State failed by less than half a percent. There will always be opposition to racial and gender equity because it means taking away some historical privileges.
Since Prop. 209 became law, the race- and gender-neutral approach hasn’t achieved equality in the state. In January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2018, women who were full-time wage and salary workers earned 88.3% of what their male counterparts earned. It was the highest ratio since 2014, but still lower than the high of 90.2% in 2005. In a 2019 study, the Campaign for College Opportunity found that while more Black students are graduating from high school, only about a third — 35% — are actually prepared for college.
I think most of us can see the racial disparities in the economic and health strains caused by the coronavirus. But, collectively, we don’t have the capacity to have a sophisticated conversation about race. Every time I write about race, invariably my inbox is filled with messages from people who have no intimate knowledge of the Black experience in America, lecturing me on what Black people — “the blacks” as they like to say — need to do to catch up. The emails reek of entitlement, ignorance and racism.
I wish more people craved the knowledge I gleaned by reading “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book that connects systemic racism to the inequality that persists in neighborhoods and schools today. You can’t understand our country without understanding race, john a. powell, the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, recently told me.
“You can’t understand our economy. You can’t understand what’s happened with our environment. You can’t understand our past or future without understanding the role of race, the role of Native Americans, the role of immigration,” said powell, who uses lowercase letters to alter the name imposed on his enslaved ancestors. “So why is it that people don’t know that? What are we teaching people in school?”
In September, a bill that would have mandated that students take one semester of ethnic studies before graduating from high school was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom because Jewish groups were angered by their exclusion.
“Racism in the United States is not rocket science. It’s much harder,” powell said. “It’s much more complicated. And unlike rocket science, which no one really cares about, we all have skin in the game when it comes to race. Race is how we distribute opportunity, meaning life chances, to people. We’re talking about someone’s life circumstances, but I don’t think that that’s clear to most people.”
In 1996, Prop. 209 passed with 54.5% of the vote, less than the opposition — 56% — to repeal it. California is a racially-segregated state where white people make up only 41% of the state’s adult population, but represent 55% of the state’s likely voters, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Only 21% of likely voters are Latino, and 6% are Black.
According to Section 31 of Article 1 of the California Constitution, amended because of Prop. 209, the state “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Stephen Menendian, the assistant director and director of research at the Othering & Belonging Institute, said that Prop. 209 isn’t as strong as people believe.
“It’s far less important than people think in terms of providing policy pathways to promoting racial equity,” said Menendian, who published fascinating analyses of racial residential segregation in the Bay Area in 2018. “If the state wants to consider race explicitly in terms of housing, and allocating, let’s say, housing vouchers on a racial basis, Proposition 209 has nothing to do with that. The reason it has an outsize significance is because it’s so symbolically important that people think it means you can’t do anything about race.”
Still, Siqueiros said the defeat of Prop. 16 means California has a long way to go.
“We can’t march in the streets and just say that we want justice, and that we care about racial equity and then not do that in our schools, not practice that in our universities, not demand that from our governor and our Legislature,” she said. “That was part of what we were hoping to do — to have affirmative action as a tool to move us in that direction.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea...eject-affirmative-action-despite-15711308.php
Rather proactive heading for this local (black) columnist writing about Prop 16 which was to bring back affirmative action in school admissions and government hiring in California and did not pass (in a state that Biden won by over 30%.)
If this were on the ballot in a non Presidential election year it probably would have gotten more attention. The author doesn't reference it but there was a big pushback by some in the Asian community as they would be most affected in school admissions. I've read black intellectuals, among others, argue why AA does not actually benefit the black community despite the positive intentions.
Based on the the elections results there were clearly people who voted for Biden and not the proposition. Curious if there are any Democrats/progressives here who would argue against AA? (Or even must one support AA to be consider progressive?)
Californians reject affirmative action. Maybe they’re not progressive after all
Almost a quarter century after it was banned in California, affirmative action was on the ballot in a year when a social justice movement rippled across the country.
Proposition 16 would have reinstated the ability to consider race and sex in government hiring and contracting and in public university admissions. But the measure intended to address racial and gender disparities in California was resoundingly rejected. Nearly the entire state voted no except for a handful of Bay Area counties and Los Angeles County.
“I think there’s a narrative that California is way more progressive than it actually is,” said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit that seeks to increase the accessibility of a college education, and a proponent of Prop. 16. “When it comes to racial justice issues, certainly we’ve not been as progressive as we should be. I think (Prop. 16) is a good example of that.”
The passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 made California the first state in the nation to ban affirmative action. After 250 years of slavery and 100 years of segregative Jim Crow policies, the racial disparities in housing, health care and generational wealth can be traced back to slavery. A few decades of affirmative action weren’t enough to erase the gaps.
Prop. 16 was overshadowed by one of the most consequential presidential elections in this country’s history. There were also ballot initiatives to close property tax loopholes, to restore voting rights to people on parole and to reform the discriminatory bail system. And there was the monstrous gig-work ballot measure that Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart and Postmates pumped $200 million into just so the companies could keep their drivers as independent contractors rather than being forced to reclassify them as employees under AB5.
In almost any other year, Prop. 16 would’ve been one of the most important issues, but I doubt that would’ve changed the outcome. In November 2019, an effort to restore affirmative action in Washington State failed by less than half a percent. There will always be opposition to racial and gender equity because it means taking away some historical privileges.
Since Prop. 209 became law, the race- and gender-neutral approach hasn’t achieved equality in the state. In January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2018, women who were full-time wage and salary workers earned 88.3% of what their male counterparts earned. It was the highest ratio since 2014, but still lower than the high of 90.2% in 2005. In a 2019 study, the Campaign for College Opportunity found that while more Black students are graduating from high school, only about a third — 35% — are actually prepared for college.
I think most of us can see the racial disparities in the economic and health strains caused by the coronavirus. But, collectively, we don’t have the capacity to have a sophisticated conversation about race. Every time I write about race, invariably my inbox is filled with messages from people who have no intimate knowledge of the Black experience in America, lecturing me on what Black people — “the blacks” as they like to say — need to do to catch up. The emails reek of entitlement, ignorance and racism.
I wish more people craved the knowledge I gleaned by reading “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book that connects systemic racism to the inequality that persists in neighborhoods and schools today. You can’t understand our country without understanding race, john a. powell, the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, recently told me.
“You can’t understand our economy. You can’t understand what’s happened with our environment. You can’t understand our past or future without understanding the role of race, the role of Native Americans, the role of immigration,” said powell, who uses lowercase letters to alter the name imposed on his enslaved ancestors. “So why is it that people don’t know that? What are we teaching people in school?”
In September, a bill that would have mandated that students take one semester of ethnic studies before graduating from high school was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom because Jewish groups were angered by their exclusion.
“Racism in the United States is not rocket science. It’s much harder,” powell said. “It’s much more complicated. And unlike rocket science, which no one really cares about, we all have skin in the game when it comes to race. Race is how we distribute opportunity, meaning life chances, to people. We’re talking about someone’s life circumstances, but I don’t think that that’s clear to most people.”
In 1996, Prop. 209 passed with 54.5% of the vote, less than the opposition — 56% — to repeal it. California is a racially-segregated state where white people make up only 41% of the state’s adult population, but represent 55% of the state’s likely voters, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Only 21% of likely voters are Latino, and 6% are Black.
According to Section 31 of Article 1 of the California Constitution, amended because of Prop. 209, the state “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Stephen Menendian, the assistant director and director of research at the Othering & Belonging Institute, said that Prop. 209 isn’t as strong as people believe.
“It’s far less important than people think in terms of providing policy pathways to promoting racial equity,” said Menendian, who published fascinating analyses of racial residential segregation in the Bay Area in 2018. “If the state wants to consider race explicitly in terms of housing, and allocating, let’s say, housing vouchers on a racial basis, Proposition 209 has nothing to do with that. The reason it has an outsize significance is because it’s so symbolically important that people think it means you can’t do anything about race.”
Still, Siqueiros said the defeat of Prop. 16 means California has a long way to go.
“We can’t march in the streets and just say that we want justice, and that we care about racial equity and then not do that in our schools, not practice that in our universities, not demand that from our governor and our Legislature,” she said. “That was part of what we were hoping to do — to have affirmative action as a tool to move us in that direction.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea...eject-affirmative-action-despite-15711308.php