Poignant Personal Tales Fuel 6 Voters’ Opposition

As one man tells it, his support for affirmative action goes back to boyhood summer camp, of all places, where he realized that people were different, and better, than their stereotypes.

A woman nods and says affirmative action means this to her: The survival of her eight-year-old business and the jobs of 275 nurses.

Another woman offers a global rationale for affirmative action. My god, she says, tears in her eyes, are Americans forgetting the importance of tolerance and opportunity?

The subject is Proposition 209 on the Nov. 5 ballot. This voter initiative would amend the state Constitution to outlaw affirmative action preferences based on gender and race throughout state and local government--in educational admissions, employment and government contracting.

Recently, The Times invited six Southern California opponents of the proposition, not professional politicians but voters, to a Santa Monica restaurant for an old-style dinner-table discussion of their views and life experiences.

No scientific conclusions can be drawn from such an encounter, which is meant only to round out the official sloganeering and precast arguments of the professional campaigns.

In a racially charged society where affirmative action has been an imprecise and evolving concept for 30 years, some analysts believe that the outcome of Proposition 209 will rest heavily on first-hand, anecdotal experience. This evening’s dinner conversation bears out that supposition, sometimes in surprising ways.

“I guess this seems kind of, well, Mickey Mouse. . . ,” says Stephen B. Fullerton, “I don’t have any great, earth-shaking story here.” A Long Beach health care executive, he is telling of growing up white, in a comfortable household with parents who were often suspicious of those who were different.

Which came to matter for Fullerton only when he went to high school music camp and actually got to know people of different root stock. It pained him when his parents would not open their minds to his new acquaintances. They were not lesser people at all. Many were better musicians.

“The founders did not form a perfect nation,” says Fullerton, bringing his experiences to today. “Over the generations, we’ve seen freedoms expand--for women, for minorities. Opportunities have expanded. But freedoms are fragile.

“Some people say that 30 years of affirmative action is enough. I say, but it’s only been 30 years. A generation and a half is not enough time to accomplish this.”

Today in the campaign for Proposition 209, he hears echoes of this unsettling past. “I hear people talking now just like my parents would, almost word for word.”

He looks across the table at Carolyn Colby.

“I tell you what comes to mind, Carolyn. I see you and I say to myself, god she’s done well for a black woman. It’s awful that I have such a thought. But until people can react to each other without putting those kinds of qualifiers on their thoughts, we need affirmative action.”

Colby understands. She is a nurse and businesswoman in Culver City. In her Wisconsin high school class there were 414 people, of whom 10 were black.

Colby recounts her career as nurse, nursing executive and, now, businesswoman. Her story perhaps illustrates a source of contemporary racial misunderstanding and friction. A white observer might view her success as evidence of opportunities for minorities. But as Colby recounts it, each step she took in life the barriers seemed as large as the opportunities.

On the strength of her resume and a telephone interview, for instance, Colby was flown to Texas by a company that needed a nurse executive. A woman met Colby’s plane. “You should have seen the look on her face when she saw I was black. She came right out and said, they’ll be no job for me.”

In 1988, Colby began her own business. Today, she has 275 nurses, 99% women and 100% minority, who provide home care to the needy under government contract. State and local governments provide contracting incentives and set-asides for minority and women-owned businesses--allowances that would be repealed by Proposition 209.

An outsider might wonder, why is she worried? Hasn’t she already overcome the hardest part of building a business?

*

“The truth is, without affirmative action, businesses like mine wouldn’t exist. There are 1,600 such businesses in Southern California. Many of these are branch operations of national corporations, headed by white males--at least 75% of them. Only 1% to 2% are minority owned. It’s very hard to get contracts. The old-boy network is very much alive. All the people with money to invest are white males. . . .

“And as long as that’s true, our society needs some kind of instrument, or tool. For most people, affirmative action is something that exists on the periphery of their experience. But it’s important, and it’s such a simple thing.”

Public opinion polling now finds a growing number of Californians who concede that racial discrimination remains stubbornly part of the culture, but who also believe affirmative action has simply gone on too long.

“I think even another 30 years is not long enough,” says Colby. “I hope my daughter has it a little easier than I did. But if things keep on like they are, I don’t think so.”

At this evening’s dinner, both Colby and Fullerton are accompanied by their spouses. Both are mixed-race couples--the white male Fullerton is married to an Asian American; Colby to a white man.

“I came to this country from the Philippines in 1973, escaping Marcos’ martial law,” says Victoria Fullerton.

She is an executive, along with her husband, in their health care administration business in Long Beach. “To people born here, it’s hard to explain how America is viewed all around the world as the land of opportunity.”

Even though she was startled to learn about racial strata in America, Fullerton still allows, “The opportunities I received, I cannot measure. It changed my whole life. That’s what freedom is about.”

But with the immigration initiative Proposition 187 two years ago and Proposition 209 now, Fullerton feels a chill wind from America’s changing mood.

“I started carrying my passport,” she says. “I’m afraid someone is going to stop me and say I look different. . . .”

Suddenly, tears fill her eyes. She quickly wipes them with a napkin.

“Why do we have to behave this way as humans. It’s more than politics. We are lowering ourselves. We are heading toward Third World behavior, where we are willing to sacrifice each other. And I’m ashamed to make that comparison with the Third World. We’re supposed to be better.

“If we move backward with this [Proposition 209] we’re never going to move forward.”

Colby’s husband, Michael, is a systems engineer in Los Angeles. “People look at each other and decide what you are,” he begins. Then he reaches into his wallet and produces pictures of the Colby children, a girl, 4, and a boy, 2.

“They look at this and see a little mixed-race girl and boy. I just see my children.

“I believe in diversity, not in a political sense, but matter of fact. I see Proposition 209, and I say it’s not what it’s represented to be. It’s a call to retreat. It is undeniably meant to take apart things established to help people. That’s at the gut of discrimination: When people are subtly discriminatory they can be very reasonable about it.”

Also at the dinner was Gregory L. Picco, a Santa Monica attorney whose practice includes employment discrimination cases. He is white, and about affirmative action he says simply: “It’s the smallest thing one can do to give people an opportunity.”

The final member of the group is Eileen McGruder, a Venice attorney and also white. Living in the suburbs, she recalls never even meeting a black, or a Jew or an Asian until she was 15. Only when she married a Hispanic from a traditional family did she discover what it was like to stand out as different in a group of people.

Still, she says, it was not this experience that shaped her feelings.

“It’s really not an experience thing. It’s a feeling thing. It’s about what’s right,” she says. “We’ve had 300 years of affirmative action for white guys. How can you correct that in just 30 years?”

*

As the evening winds down, the group is asked a final question. Supporters of Proposition 209 say that preferences amount to discrimination, and that government has no business discriminating based on race and gender. How do these opponents reply?

White male attorney Picco: “That is campaign doublespeak. What that argument really says is, ‘let’s allow discrimination to return as it was.’ By disallowing affirmative action, you reestablish the white male dominated society.”

Victoria Fullerton, the Asian American executive: “The concept is right. Government should not be in the business of discriminating. But look around you. Why should it be that in poor areas the schools should be so bad and in rich areas they should should be good? The government has not done what it promised in creating equal opportunities.”

Her white husband, Stephen B. Fullerton: “I also agree that the government should be neutral. But I also believe that where discrimination exists, government cannot take a passive role.”

White attorney Eileen McGruder offers a different argument: “I think that’s exactly the business government should be in. Government is supposed to be in the lead in correcting mistakes of the past, leading us to a more inclusive society.”

Michael Colby, the white engineer: “Laws that force people and society to be inclusionary are part of the reason there is a government.”

Black businesswoman Carolyn Colby: “Government is responsible to all the people, not just some of the people. Government is not just for the white majority. I should be included. Just like you.”