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Ward Connerly is white conservatives’ black champion as head of the American Civil Rights Institute. What a misnomer.
Connerly has led anti-affirmative drives in Michigan, Washington and California. He now wants to kill efforts to correct legacies of discrimination in other states, including in Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado and Arizona.
People in this Show-Me State need to look at the scorched earth Connerly has left in places where affirmative action was abolished. It will give voters an idea of what’s to come if the initiative makes it to the November ballot and passes.
Barbara R. Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, wrote about the effects in the National Urban League’s State of Black America 2007. She noted that after the law passed in California, women and minority-owned businesses found themselves excluded from information on subcontracting opportunities.
The result has been devastating. “Only a third of the certified minority businesses in California’s transportation construction industry at the time of Proposition 209’s passage in 1996 remain in business today,” Arnwine wrote.
Mary Frances Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said at an Urban League of Greater Kansas City forum that conservatives say the data supports their argument: such companies must not be qualified when the exclusion causes their demise.
Contract dollars to women- and minority-owned businesses in California after the affirmative action ban fell by 22 percent.
“It has been shown that minority-owned businesses are more likely to hire minority employees and reinvest in minority communities than nonminority-owned businesses,” Arnwine noted.
Gayle Holliday, president of G&H Consulting LLC, said at the forum “contracts for minorities and women would decline.”
The anti-affirmative action laws also have hurt colleges.
“Several studies have found an alarming decline in the number of African-American, Hispanic and Native American students enrolled in the University of California system’s premier flagship campuses,” Arnwine said. “A recent Harvard study found that from 1995 to 2001, African-American enrollment at UC-Berkeley went from 6.7 percent to 3.9 percent. At UCLA, black enrollment went from 7.4 percent to 3.4 percent during the same time period.”
That could happen in Missouri, too. Ending higher education opportunities would seal minorities in urban blight.
Diversity matters, and affirmative action helps promote diversity in education, contracting, businesses and jobs, making America more competitive. It puts power and intellectual and economic clout in the hands of all the people, building credibility and trust.
The black middle class would feel the effects of a ban, Mathew Forstater, associate professor of economics and black studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said on the Urban League panel.
Now is not the time to close the door on opportunities.
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