‘Societal Guilt’ Led to Hiring Preferences, Wilson Says : Affirmative action: Such policies now threaten the American dream, he writes. Critics say he’s playing politics.

In an “open letter to the people of California,” Gov. Pete Wilson said Wednesday that affirmative action policies--like those he supported as mayor of San Diego more than 20 years ago--were based on misdirected “societal guilt” that now threatens to eliminate “the very foundation of the American dream.”

Wilson, who once crusaded for minority hiring programs and who campaigned in past elections based on his success, now says in his eight-page letter that those ideas were based on an “unacceptable premise.”

The governor said “misfired good intentions” led to programs that wrongly discriminate against some ethnic groups in order to compensate others for past discrimination.

The result, Wilson argues, has kept some eligible hard workers from realizing the American dream. And, he added, it has sacrificed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a society “where [people] will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

“We must change our laws that are not right and not fair and restore opportunity, fairness and hope for all our people,” Wilson wrote. “This is the change we must make to renew the American dream.”

At the same time, he said, his support for the abolition of affirmative action should not be misinterpreted. Saying he has “zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind,” Wilson said he favors giving the enforcers of anti-discrimination laws more authority and resources to punish bigotry wherever it “rears its insidious head.”

Wilson is scheduled to sign an executive order in Los Angeles today that seeks to dismantle a wide range of affirmative action programs in the executive branch of state government. In February, the governor also endorsed a far more sweeping proposal for the state ballot that seeks to eliminate special preferences for minorities and women in state and local government hiring, contracting and school enrollment.

Unable to speak because he has not fully recovered from throat surgery, the governor chose to detail his views on affirmative action in a letter to the people of the state.

For Wilson, affirmative action promises to be a major component of his budding presidential campaign. Wilson has already made appeals to voters in New Hampshire and New York by complaining about affirmative action programs.

But critics charge that the governor is risking new fissures in California’s delicate race relations in an effort to gain political advantage.

“It’s not just pandering,” said Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica). “It’s using his elected leadership position to foster hatred and division himself, and then to say that a program that was developed in order to make equality more possible is the thing that makes us be divided. He’s the divisive influence.”

Both Kuehl and her state Senate counterpart, Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), accused the governor of intellectual dishonesty, saying he had used such words as preferences and quotas to describe affirmative action when in California preferences and quotas are rarely used.

Moreover, Hayden said, the governor is misreading what is wrong in the country. He said the hostility against affirmative action is really the result of anxiety over the loss of jobs and educational opportunities caused by the downsizing of corporate America and the university system.

“The question is whether you should strike down efforts at pursuing diversity, which Wilson is doing, or whether you should resume efforts to guarantee education and jobs to everyone who needs them,” Hayden said. “That’s the path not taken in the whole discussion.”

Even if Wilson’s campaign against affirmative action is ultimately successful, Hayden said, “the angry white male that he is seeking to mollify will still be without a job . . . and his kids won’t get into the University of California because it’s shrinking.”

But in his letter, Wilson tried to explain that his plan to roll back affirmative action will actually heal the state’s wounded race relations, not harm them.

“Rather than uniting people around our common core, this system of preferential treatment constantly reminds us of our superficial differences,” he wrote. “Instead of treating every American as an individual, it pits group against group, race against race.”

The governor said the nation has already been divided by a system that grants preferences to some groups and not others.

“We cannot endure divided,” he wrote. “We cannot endure by canceling the contest and awarding the prize based on race or gender. That’s not the American way.”

Wilson listed examples to make his point, including a letter from a Vietnamese high school student in San Francisco concerned that she was stigmatized by her special treatment, a mother of three turned away from a college English course that had spots reserved only for African American students, and a Los Angeles County lawsuit in which a Latino employee organization cited unfair quotas for black workers.

In his letter, Wilson did not address directly his own experience in supporting affirmative action programs while he was mayor of San Diego. At the time, in 1972, the city adopted a five-year timetable for hiring minority city workers. Two years later, the program was extended to private industry, requiring major city contractors to adopt similar programs.

But today he would do things differently, Wilson said in a written response separate from his letter. The governor said he did not support hiring preferences while he was mayor, saying instead that he considered his plan limited to outreach and and recruitment. But in hindsight, Wilson aides said, the governor believes his actions at the time were wrong because they fostered reverse discrimination.

Still, they said Wilson will not admit to a mistake because he considered his actions to be right at the time.

“He does not apologize for what he thought was the right thing at the time,” said Leslie Goodman, Wilson’s communications director. “But we now know through experience what we didn’t know then. . . . What he did for the time was not a mistake, what has been created has been a mistake.”