Resist the Call of the Privileged Class

Voices from many quarters have assured me that I don’t have to worry if Proposition 209 passes. The so-called civil rights initiative would end affirmative action in state programs and government. It won’t have much effect on us at the Claremont Graduate School; as a private institution, we can freely continue our affirmative action activities--aggressively seeking out able minority graduate students and using broader criteria than mere test scores and grades when we’re making admissions decisions. We have no intention of abandoning our long-standing, passionate commitment to forming an inclusive and richly diverse campus.

What concerns me, both as an educator and as a citizen, is the insidious effect of Proposition 209. And that effect is divisiveness. It pits Americans against one another. At its root is fear, and fear inflicts harm.

Our country has a long history of fear and divisiveness. Americans were scared first about the native inhabitants of this land, then of blacks and their having full and equal citizenship rights, and of women voting and being legally emancipated, afraid of Japanese Americans, of the agents of the communist menace, of European immigrants, of any immigration, legal or illegal.

We’ve gotten so afraid that we’ve been willing to curb our own freedoms and those of others to deal with our fear, so afraid that we eagerly and scandalously designate scapegoats, so afraid that we act as if justice will be secured if we have enough walls and gates and guns and ballot propositions.

What are the backers of Proposition 209 afraid of? They claim they’re afraid that women and minorities will continue to be undervalued because they are perceived as owing their achievements to “preferential treatment,” not to personal strengths. Proposition 209 supporters claim they’re afraid that affirmative action has deprived certain people, implicitly understood to be white males, of their “civil rights” in employment and education. We all lose, they assert, when anyone gets preference because of race or gender.

If this were 1896 instead of 1996, I’d add my assent to that last item. When the best colleges in the country were open to white males only, we all lost because of that preferential treatment. When children of the famous or wealthy or friends of the powerful were given preference in college admissions or the professions, we all lost because of that preferential treatment.

Thirty-five years ago, I joined the first Freedom Rides in Alabama. It is blindly optimistic, to say the least, to suggest that the effort we began in defiance of a 300-year legacy has been achieved in just three decades by the modest tool called affirmative action.

Proposition 209 is pure and simple backlash. In the face of dynamic change, its proponents are desperate to restore the old order.

Early in this century, Count Antonio Gramsci, a great Italian politician and theoretician, said: “The old is dying; the new cannot be born: In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” We are in an interregnum of change, formed by some unprecedented revolutions in race and gender equity. The attempts now to curtail the gains that women and minorities have only recently experienced are certainly “morbid symptoms,” the death throes of an era of unjust and in many cases unearned privilege.

As originally intended, affirmative action was and is a very conservative, artificial remedy that attempts to change gradually our contrived policies--legal and illegal--of discrimination and racism. Mended where necessary but certainly not ended, it is one of the few remedies we have. Who wouldn’t be delighted if someone would show us another way to overcome the inequities still rampant in America? At least then it would be clear that we’re sincere about righting these wrongs rather than restoring a system that favored one segment of the population over all the others.

Proposition 209 is not an improvement, not a remedy; it is a prescription for making the disease of discrimination worse, much worse.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. urged women and men of all races to reject divisive politics. Together, he said, we can exert massive pressure on the government to ensure justice for all. Together we can form a grand alliance. Together we can merge all people for the good of all. None of us is finally healthy until all are healthy. None is safe until all are safe.

It’s a new grand alliance that we so desperately need--not exclusion but inclusion; not division but togetherness; not fear and contempt for each other, but courage and respect.

For if Proposition 209 passes, it will unleash a toxic seep of division and fear deep into the landscape, eventually touching all of us. Even those of us who think today that we’re not affected.