Here are the first few paragraphs of a scholarly paper presented at “Race and Gender Preferences at the Crossroads,” a conference organized by the California Association of Scholars and cosponsored by the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) and the Center for Equal Opportunity, held January 19, 2008, at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. The title of the paper is The Effects of Proposition 209 on California: Higher Education, Public Employment, and Contracting 09/25/2008 Charles L. Geshekter
In 1996, Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 209 that prohibited all state agencies from using anyone’s race, ethnicity, or gender to discriminate against them or give them preference in university admissions, public employment, or competition for a state contract.
Those who opposed Proposition 209 predicted that ending racial or gender favoritism would result in sharp declines in black and Hispanic college enrollments, setbacks for women in public employment, reduced funds for cancer detection centers and domestic violence shelters, or other alarmingly negative effects.
This article compares such dire predictions with documentary evidence provided by the State Personnel Board, the Department of Finance, the University of California (UC), and California State University (CSU). It relies on data concerning admissions, retention, and graduation of undergraduates from the CSU system and the UC and reviews faculty hiring patterns within both systems. Other tables compare the numbers of white, black, Hispanic, males and females employed in a variety of California state agencies in 1997, after Proposition 209 was approved, and then in 2006, nine years later.
These statistics document the progress made towards social justice under Proposition 209 and may encourage voters in other states who want to assure that preferential treatment (regardless of whatever else it may euphemistically be called) becomes a thing of the past in the operation of their respective state governments.
These data offer many uncomfortable truths to defenders of racial preferences and gender double standards whose unscrupulous attacks on voter initiatives are likely to persist, regardless of the facts from California. Defenders of double standards and group preferences insinuate that American voters in 2008 cannot understand the simple, straightforward language of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. So immersed in the doubletalk of diversity and obsessed with achieving proportional representation in all walks of life, diversity crusaders ignore or dismiss any good news, repeating their tiresome mantra that without racial preferences or gender double standards a chilly climate for diversity will envelope the workplace and campuses.
This article demonstrates the dishonesty of such claims.
Read the whole thing. Don’t expect to read about this work in the LATimes, or hear about it on the evening news, but the “old guard” civil rights activists are going to have to get used to changing times, and the growing understanding in the general public and academia that “affirmative action” and “diversity” are themselves discriminatory and hurtful in very many of their common appearances, and the riddance of them is often followed by progress in “social justice” goals.
