The Man behind the Plan: Ward Connerly of the American Civil Rights Institute Part 2 of a 3-part series on the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative By Christopher Fischer The Pointe Staff October 24th, 2007 He is arguably the most controversial person in American politics that most Americans can’t name. Outside of California, Washington and Michigan, that is. Those states were successful battlegrounds for Ward Connerly, who has become the voice of opposition to major aspects of affirmative action. Even if you don’t recognize him by name, you’ve probably heard of the political dust-ups Connerly and his organization have been involved in involving affirmative action. He has been on the cover of Parade Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, and has been featured in many other news periodicals. He has been on CNN, C-SPAN, Hannity & Colmes, NBC’s Dateline, as well as appearing in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and most major American newspapers. He was also profiled by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. Citizens of five more states will likely become familiar with Connerly and his organization, the American Civil Rights Institute, next year as those states consider how to vote on measures seeking to remove race and gender preferences from the higher education and public employment and contracting fields. Connerly was in town last week for the first of many planned visits to the state as the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative plans to move forward with its campaign. He spoke at Federalist Society luncheons in both St. Louis and Kansas City and at the University of Missouri- Kansas City School of Law as part of a lecture series. He was also on several local news radio programs. At UMKC as with most of his college campus appearances, he was met with protests, both silent and some not-so-silent. The director of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative, Tim Asher, accompanied Connerly to UMKC Thursday evening. “Frankly, it was brutal,” said Asher of the criticisms of Connerly at the event. He added that although Connerly is used to having “verbal assaults” hurled at him, that doesn’t mean anybody enjoys going through it again and again. Connerly, who is multiracial, didn’t get involved with the issue of race and gender preferences until the early to mid 1990’s, after he was made a regent at the University of California. “I was always against the concept of being singled out based on skin color or any single physical trait,” said Connerly, adding that he never intended to get involved with the issue politically. That was, until he became aware of a race-based preference policy at the college. He convinced the Board of Regents to vote the policy down in 1995, and within a year, he and the ACRI had Proposition 209 on the November 1996 ballot in California. The proposition amended the state constitution to prohibit public institutions from discriminating on the basis of gender, race or ethnicity. The measure passed by a 55 percent to 45 percent margin. “You see the words at the bottom of a job application that read, ‘we are an Equal Opportunity employer and we are an Affirmative Action employer. ‘ Those two terms always struck me as redundant,” said Connerly. “But as time went on, I realized that these were two different things,” he added. Does Connerly think that Affirmative Action is itself racist? “If you define racism as the herding of people into groups based on a single physical trait, then Affirmative Action is the ultimate expression of racism,” he said, adding that “the paradigm of those who are in support of Affirmative Action would say that it is crazy for us to call Affirmative Action racist because they believe it is the prescription for racism. The old cliché is that it is a remedy for years of injustice.” “I subscribe to the view that whenever you treat people differently, you are doing more harm than good,” Connerly said, adding, “most scientists have come to the conclusion that we are all one race, the human race, and if you believe that it seems silly to divide us into what I call ‘separate food groups.’” Connerly, who calls himself a Republican with a Libertarian philosophy, supports his view by pointing out that “it is unconstitutional for a corporation to use race as a factor in hiring or awarding contracts.” “I think it’s a matter of time before (Affirmative Action) is struck down by the courts,” he added. He says the courts will come to the conclusion that you can’t presume that all people of a certain color or sex will make it to the same point given the same advantages or disadvantages. “Take me for example. I lead a good life, probably better than ninety percent of white people out there. Why is that? Conversely, there are many low income whites and Asian Americans out there, and that has nothing to do with skin color,” he said. Connerly said he would have given up his activism regarding race had Proposition 209 failed. “I would have thought this country had gone too far into the swath of race- and gender-preferential treatment, that it couldn’t be done. I mean, why beat your head against a wall?” he said. Instead, he was energized to pursue a similar amendment in Washington, and another in California called Propostion 54. The purpose of Prop 54, also known as the Racial Privacy Act, was to prevent census takers from classifying people by race. Voters did not approve it, but Connerly explains why he felt the measure was important. “My real fight is in getting the government to keep from asking us ‘what’s your race?’ Why in the hell is it anybody’s but my business what my race is? Where do you draw the line? What if you are a light-skinned black person or dark-skinned or medium-skinned? If you are white that could mean that you’re Italian or Irish or anything. A person’s race is a private matter. The purpose of the Racial Privacy Act was to prohibit the government from eliciting information that is illegal for private employers to use.” Ward Connerly says his goal is not a colorblind society or a colorblind world. His goal is a colorblind government. “We are the government, we have no choice. On April 15, we all pay our dues whether we want to or not. The government has a duty to treat me equal to you and the government should not be using these physical traits to decide how to treat me as to you,” he said. “As much as I would like for private employers to treat everyone equally, I can’t tell any private citizen what to do. All these initiatives are intended to do is deal with discrimination in the government. With public employment, public contracting, and public education.” Connerly’s critics question the motives of his financial backers, who rank among the rich and, occasionally, famous. One local businessman who has donated hundreds of thousands to Connerly’s initiatives is John Uhlmann, whose Kansas City-based Uhlmann Company manufactures wheat and flour products. Connerly says that 95 percent of his backers have nothing to gain personally from his initiatives, citing Uhlmann as an example. “If you’ve ever met John, he believes very strongly in this ‘brotherhood of man,’ that we’re all brothers and sisters under God,” he said, adding that all political movements rely on large donations, and that philanthropy is very much alive on all sides of the political spectrum. His donors, he says, “believe the government can use better principles based on merit.” “Look at the other side. Why do people give the NAACP or Jesse Jackson money? Because they believe in what they want for the country,” he said. The bottom line for Connerly is that he doesn’t think Affirmative Action is what it was intended to be, and it has failed as a policy. “I say that as long as we divide this country along the lines of race and sex we’re poisoning the body politic, and we’re creating a dependency for those who get special treatment,” he said, adding, “here we are forty years after Executive Order 10925 (the original order by John F. Kennedy from which Affirmative Action grew) and people are worse off now than they were then. We have to end this dependency. “That’s why someone like Bill Cosby goes around the country speaking about African Americans taking responsibility. I agree with him, I just approach it a little differently,” said Connerly. “I say, ‘take away the crutch.’” Back to home page...