Put to Rest the 'Spirit of Proposition 209'

Racism: Whites like to think they instantly voided their history of prejudice.

By LEONCE GAITER

Dressed in a white shirt and tie and toting a briefcase, I walked into an executive's office. He glanced at me for a microsecond, pointed to a stack of boxes and said, "They're over there." I had arrived for a job interview. I knew I would never get that job. In that microsecond, that white man did not see my button-down shirt or my tie, the jacket flung over my arm on this hot L.A. summer day, or my wingtips. He saw my skin color. He then made a set of instantaneous assumptions about me. Those assumptions did not include "executive material."

The goal of Proposition 209 was the ever-elusive level playing field. Polls taken during the heated 209 debate said that quotas were the aspect of affirmative action that many Californians saw as unfair. Thus, 209 eliminated quotas and racial and gender preferences. Fine.

Those same polls suggested that Californians preferred a system of outreach and training to help ameliorate the disadvantages that minority status still can prompt in hiring and contracting. Let's not forget that we live in a society that only ended its official apartheid policies 35 years ago, well within the lifetimes of most of you reading this. A mere 25 years ago, the idea that women should remain "barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen" was still openly stated.

Government. Gray Davis considered a bill allowing outreach for qualified minorities. The goal was to make women and minorities more aware of opportunities. No preferences. No quotas.

The rabid 209ists reacted with fury. They insisted the bill violated "the spirit of Proposition 209." Thus, placing an outreach ad in Newsweek is fine. But placing an ad in Black Enterprise or Latina violates the "spirit of Proposition 209."

I believe I'm beginning to understand: L.A. Times good; La Opinion, bad. Sacramento Bee, good; the L.A. Sentinel, bad.

Cal State University can hold recruitment drives at 4H club meetings, I suppose, but not at AME Baptist Church youth groups. As long as most of the individuals to whom the venue caters are white and male, recruitment drives do not violate Proposition 209. If the recruitment venue reaches too many females or ethnics, forget it. That's illegal.

So go ahead and put that outreach ad in Guns and Ammo; but that ad in Vibe violates "the spirit of Proposition 209."

Ward Connerly, the UC regent who led the 209 campaign, and other rabid 209ists insist that race must disappear. They insist we cannot acknowledge the existence of black people. It's as if they're holding their collective breaths and willing us to just...disappear.

In his book, "Two Nations," sociologist Andrew Hacker relayed a parable he'd used with his college students. Imagine, they were told, that an organization comes to you and tells you that you were supposed to have been born of black parents. Being born to wrong parents is in no way your fault, you're assured, but things have to be made right. The organization is prepared to offer you reasonable recompense. The students were asked to name a sum of money to represent adequate recompense. They were also told they would live another 50 years as a black person.

"When this parable had been put to white students," Hacker wrote, "most seemed to feel that it would not be out of place to ask for $50 million, $1 million for each coming black year." The students would have remained the same—the same face, background, education—the only difference would have been that everyone would consider them black.

The students believed their white skin gave them an advantage over a black man or woman worth potentially millions over a lifetime. Black skin, they believed, could cost them a fortune in lost opportunities. Yet, Connerly, and now Davis, tell us that race can disappear. More specifically, they tell us white Americans do not hold the tiniest residue of those centuries of contempt toward blacks. They say that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was like a light switch. It was flicked, and white Americans did what no people has ever done before: They instantly overcame a history of prejudice and denigration toward a reviled minority.

When we gouge out our own eyes is when race will disappear. Only the blind man, the liar or the fool says he doesn't see color.

Perhaps we should follow the flaxen-haired "spirit of Proposition 209" with the same precision with which we follow the laws forbidding discrimination. After all, that executive who instantly assumed I was a messenger didn't break any laws. Fair is fair.

Leonce Gaiter is a Northern California-based writer.