by Lloyd Billingsley
Latino leftists target African American Ward Connerly, champion of the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative.
Proposition 16 on California’s November 3 ballot would restore the systemic racism California voters rejected in 1996. Prop 16 forces are targeting the African American Ward Connerly, the University of California region who championed the first ballot measure to eliminate racial preferences.
“I just don’t think in terms of black, white, Latino,” Connerly told reporters last week. “And therein probably lies the fact that I’m swimming upstream with a lot of people, especially black people. I just believe that once you start classifying the human race into various subdivisions and you start meting out benefits on the basis of that, you’re going to screw up.”
Before 1996, the University of California rejected highly qualified students and granted admissions based on race and ethnicity. The California Civil Rights Initiative, Proposition 209, barred racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment and contracting. Connerly, then a University of California Regent, championed the measure
Proposition 209 gave the people their first chance to weigh in on the racial preference issue, and California voters approved 54.55 to 44.45. As Democrats seek to repeal the measure, Connerly points out the flaws in the racial spoils system.
“When we say Latino, I can find any number of Latinos who are as white as anyone on the planet,” Connerly explains. “They may have more vowels in their last name than others. If there are a lot of those, do they count as white or Latino?” Mexican American Legal Defense Fund boss Thomas Saenz called Connerly “blatantly racist” and “quite jaded and quite uninformed and uses racial stereotypes.” In reality, the racial stereotypes are all on the other side.
That many so-called “Latinos” are white can be easily be verified by the ruling class of Mexico. Mexican foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard, who in 2016 campaigned openly for Hillary Clinton, is whiter than Frosty the Snowman. Another stereotype is that African Americans can’t succeed academically without special preferences. Consider Thomas Sowell, author of many books, including Intellectuals and Race, and for decades one of the nation’s leading scholars.
Sowell earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard, a master’s at Columbia, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, long before the days of racial preferences. And contrary to what Proposition 16 backers contend, the California Civil Rights Initiative did not eliminate “affirmative action.”
No racial or ethnic group is barred from admission to the University of California. UC officials can take affirmative action by casting the widest possible net and helping qualified students on an economic basis. What they can’t do is give preference to students on the basis of race and ethnicity, the systemic racism that Proposition 16 seeks to restore. Backdropping the effort is the most inclusive brand of racism, which has also been institutionalized.
In The Cosmic Race, Mexican education minister Jose Vasconcelos derides the dullard “Nordic” types of English and Scandinavian descent, those black people all “intoxicated with dances and unbridled lust,” and the slant-eyed “Mongols” of Asia, who lack enterprise and will never amount to anything. In the view of Vasconcelos, these lower races will be replaced by the Ibero-American master race, also destined to displace the awful yankee “anglos.”
The first bilingual edition of The Cosmic Race was published in 1979 by the Chicano Studies department at Cal State Los Angeles. This racist tract is the basis for the non-discipline of Chicano studies, part of the left’s assault on academic standards.
Last May, the University of California regents dumped the SAT and ACT tests because they are supposedly unfair to minorities. Board of Regents chairman John Perez proclaimed, “I am proud UC endorsed giving California voters the chance to erase a stain, support opportunity and equality, and repeal Proposition 209.”
As Assembly Speaker, Perez was hailed by prominent Democrats as a graduate of UC Berkeley. As it turned out, Perez enrolled at Berkeley in 1987 as a Chicano Studies major. He dropped out in 1990 and never returned to finish his degree. In 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown made this dropout chairman of the University of California Board of Regents.
State Democrats and UC bosses now target the California Civil Rights Initiative, which eliminated race and ethnic preferences. Ward Connerly, who championed that measure, says it’s wrong to hand out benefits on the basis of race and finds that many Latinos are “as white as anyone on the planet.” In return for this recognition of reality, the leftist Latinos call Connerly a blatant racist, jaded, and a peddler of stereotypes.
Ward Connerly heard it all back in 1996 and still manages to take it in stride. Even so, those black people swimming upstream against stereotypes might call out those who smear Connerly as a racist. Meanwhile, if any member of the human race decided to oppose Proposition 16 it would be hard to blame them. As President Trump says, we’ll have to see what happens.
Lloyd Billingsley
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/restoring-systemic-racism-california-lloyd-billingsley/
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