In November, Michigan may reveal exactly how much disdain voters
have for affirmative action — i.e., race and gender preferences.
While previous ballot initiatives banning preferences in
California and Washington proved successful, the Michigan Civil
Rights Initiative (MCRI) may prove a far greater test case
because its supporters are woefully under-funded.
As was the case in California and Washington, MCRI supporters
face a large, well-funded opposition. Corporations, eager to
demonstrate their inclusiveness, provide a great deal of funding.
Teachers unions, eager to hide their failures at the K-12 levels,
have voiced their support for affirmative action. Politicians,
eager to court the Detroit vote, have declared their opposition
as well. Even state Republicans are heading for the hills.
But MCRI supporters have faced an opposition far more determined
and extreme than the opposition in California and Washington. The
most extreme of the opposition groups is By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). The name
says it all — BAMN has resorted to shout downs and even
advocated breaking of the law the defeat MCRI. But its most
effective tactic has been the lawsuit. It has filed multiple
challenges against MCRI, forcing the MCRI Committee, the main
supporters of MRCI, to spend most of its resources on fighting
court battles.
While BAMN has been diverting the resources of the MRCI
Committee, other opposition groups have been free to run
advertisements that go largely unchallenged. The most notable of
such groups is One
United Michigan (OUM), which has spent millions on TV
commercials
opposing MCRI. To say the least, the commercials are slick,
engaging in subtle distortions that enable OUM to sidestep the
charge of lying.
Not surprisingly, the OUM commercials omit the word
“preferences.” This, despite the fact that the MCRI prohibits
only programs that “grant preferential treatment to, any
individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity,
or national origin in the operation of public employment, public
education, or public contracting.”
SMARTLY, OUM HAS FOCUSED ITS CAMPAIGN on women — a far larger
voting bloc than minorities. In One United’s nine television ads,
there are exactly zero black males, traditionally some of the
most underrepresented individuals on college campuses. Those same
nine commercials contain exactly one man — who is, fittingly,
talking about his daughters.
Of particular note is a commercial featuring two middle-school
girls. The ad suggests that the girls are able to pursue their
dreams of higher education because of Kamp Kettering, a summer
program for girls interested in science, math, and engineering,
and the Beecher Scholarship Incentive Program, which, among other
things, gives college scholarships to disadvantaged youth. Yet
Kamp Kettering is run by Kettering University, a private college,
and the Beecher Scholarship Incentive Program receives its
funding from the Ruth Mott Foundation, a private charity. Since
MCRI only applies to public institutions, it would have no effect
on these private programs. However, the commercial never actually
states that MCRI threatens these programs, making it more
difficult to charge OUM with blatant deception. Nevertheless, it
is a safe bet that is exactly what OMU wants to imply, otherwise
why waste funds on the commercial?
On the rare occasions when MCRI opponents opt to make coherent
claims to support their position, their arguments have been
dubious at best. Recently, the University of Michigan’s Center
for the Education of Women released a report (PDF)
entitled The Potential Impact of the Michigan Civil Rights
Initiative on Employment, Education and Contracting. In the
report, Susan Kaufmann paints a dismal picture of the
post-preference world. She concludes:
Evidence from California indicates that Prop. 209 has eroded or
eliminated previously legal, court-sanctioned efforts by state
and local governments and educational institutions to reach out
to women and minorities in order to reverse historic
discrimination and exclusion by providing fair and equal access
to opportunity.
The notion that the MCRI will eliminate “outreach” programs
designed simply to provide “fair and equal access” to women and
minorities is the most prominent argument among MCRI opponents.
OUM has realized that the most effective way to gain support is
to perpetuate the notion that rich white males are campaigning to
deprive women and minorities of equal opportunity.
But to what extent have these programs suffered in California?
Kaufmann’s report laments the loss of pre-college outreach
programs for minorities, and cites the Early Academic Outreach
Program as evidence. Today, that eliminated program considers itself
“one of the state’s most successful pre-collegiate student
academic programs,” and serves more than 80,000 schools. In fact,
the University of California itself claims to have “dramatically
expanded” outreach efforts since Prop. 209 passed.
The California School Paraprofessional Teacher Training Program
was also listed. Since Proposition 209 was passed, this program
has expanded dramatically, serving over 1,800 members, 70% of
which are ethnic minorities.
Other “outreach” programs to which Kaufmann refers were not
exactly benign. She claims that Proposition 209 eliminated
previously legal efforts to make “good faith efforts to meet
goals for subcontracting women” and “outreach efforts” designed
to increase participation. These “goals,” however, were actually
defined by specific percentages. Businesses that met these
percentages were given preferential treatment, and businesses
that did not were required to take active steps to meet them.
Logically, California courts ruled these “percentage goals” were
actually quotas, and declared them unconstitutional. The
“outreach efforts, ” meanwhile, required contractors to grant
preferential treatment to minority- and women-owned businesses,
which California courts also ruled unconstitutional. These were
not mild outreach programs. They were mandated quotas and
preferences.
WITH SUPPORTERS OF MCRI having to spend most of their time
fighting lawsuits, MCRI opponents have been able to release
largely unanswered propaganda. As a result, the polls on MCRI are
mixed. A recent poll by the Detroit Free Press showed
MCRI losing by two points, while one by the Detroit News
showed it up by nine. Supporters of MCRI can take some solace in
the fact that similar measures in California and Washington were
polling close running up to the election and they ultimately
prevailed by wide margins.
Nevertheless, the MCRI Committee has only recently been able to
run radio ads supporting MCRI and has not yet been able to go on
television. If MCRI prevails in November, it will show that the
public’s opposition to race and gender-based preferences runs
deep.
