A current petition drive in Nebraska has people of all political stripes frothing at the mouth. Californian Ward Connerly is pumping tons o' money into the "Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative," which has been collecting signatures to add a ban on virtually all forms of affirmative action to Nebraska's November ballot. Apparently, he and his minions succeeded. They claimed Friday that they have turned in signatures from enough Nebraskans to put his measure to the vote this fall.
It is difficult to discuss this issue without feeling like I've fallen through Alice's looking glass and into Orwell's 1984. The group calling itself the "Civil Rights Initiative" is working to end an important civil rights tool. And the name of the group fighting the "Civil Rights Initiative" doesn't exactly stir up images of crusaders for justice and substantive equality. It's called "Nebraskans United." It has challenged the validity of most of the petition signatures on the twin bases of improper collecting techniques and unclear wording of the petition itself. I doubt it will succeed in keeping the ban off the ballot, however. There's too much money on the other side, even though "Nebraskans United" is on the side of the angels in this fight. Money talks, especially when the group with the money adopts a name that makes it seem as though it's the "good guy," that "black is white," and that it's the group favoring fairness--as the name "Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative" has done in this case.
I am not an uncritical fan of affirmative action, but I cannot think of a better way to provide immediate redress for the centuries of discrimination which various minorities in our society have suffered at the hands of the traditional white-middle-aged-male power structure. I feel about affirmative action the way Winston Churchill felt about democracy--it's the second worst form of government . . . after every other form of government. Affirmative action is the only reasonable means at present to redress effectively that which centuries of poverty and ethnic discrimination have wrought.
Affirmative action does this by eliminating the long ladder minorities have to climb just to get to the level of the playing field, not to mention a level playing field. When you are starting in the sub-sub-basement and everyone else is starting on the 10th floor, you are never going to get out of the sub-sub-basement unless employers are encouraged to make some allowances for the wide disparity between your and everyone else's starting points.
If you grow up in a poor neighborhood with lower property values and thus lesser-quality schools (since property taxes paid into the state determine where and how much the state and its local branches spend on education), and your neighborhood has been that way for decades, you not only have no good educational system to help you escape poverty, you have no family or neighborhood tradition of getting an education to rise above your initial, impoverished circumstances. Nevertheless, many--maybe even most--minorities come close to overcoming all the disadvantages heaped upon their heads from even before they were born. They go to school, they stay in school, they learn, they graduate. [They don't generally make the news, because they don't fit the media's "if it bleeds, it leads" mantra.--Ed.] But they need assistance in getting beyond the dead-end jobs available in their own neighborhoods.
Affirmative action provides the mechanism by which those who are close to climbing out on their own can climb out for good--it's a hand up, not a hand-out. No one has to hire as a librarian someone who, say, can't read--but if a minority member has an 11th-grade reading level and a white has a college-freshman reading level, affirmative action encourages hiring the minority member. Once hired, any employee still has to be a good and sufficient employee to KEEP the job. So affirmative action is just a way to get a fair shake at the starting line. One's own talents and abilities have to carry one from there.
Unfortunately, some of the rich bigots out there won't accept affirmative action. They are masters of pitting groups of the poor against each other, often on the basis of race, because they know that as long as poor whites and poor blacks are fighting each other, the bigots and their riches are safe from both. Hence Ward Connerly's interference in Nebraska politics. His published comments make clear he wanted to get his measure on the ballot in 5 states this year alone, but citizens in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Missouri have all already rejected his attempts. Only Nebraska and Colorado seem likely to vote on Connerly's proposal this fall. [Even that is two too many.--Ed.]
I cannot speak to what's happening in Colorado. When I lived there (in the early 1960s), Coloradans made Attila the Hun look like a flower child. One example: my mother helped with a neighborhood petition drive to get a crosswalk installed so that children could safely cross the 4-lane, 45 mph, road between us and our school. At least two people in the neighborhood wouldn't sign because they didn't have any kids, so it would do them no good and (allegedly) increase their taxes. Nice, huh? I guess civilization was a foreign concept to them, but their attitude was not uncommon. I have no idea whether Coloradans have since evolved beyond such troglodyte thinking.
In Nebraska, I am hoping that people who signed the petition did so because they thought they were encouraging fairness, not taking it away. My experience with most Nebraskans has been that they are more concerned with being fair than with being bigots. Connerly's minions played on this by making the petition's wording fuzzy enough to confuse anyone not paying very, very close attention (one of the things he's counting on, no doubt), and those soliciting petition signatures were told to say that signing the petition would "ensure fairness in Nebraska" for the future. I know this because I and several others got that very spiel when we were asked to sign but said "no" and tried to explain why. We were accused of being unfair for our positions. Yet we are the ones fighting for fairness! Through the looking glass and into 1984, indeed.
Nebraskans United is using the petition's fuzzy wording and alleged misconduct by those soliciting petition signatures to challenge the signatures' validity in court. The case is on an expedited calendar, given that the election is now only about 3 months away. Nebraskans United is also challenging the financing behind the petition drive, as the principal backer, Connerly, has no valid residential or business connections to Nebraska. The problem is this: the petitioners needed a total of 112,000 valid signatures to get the measure on the ballot. The so-called "Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative" group says it passed this number by a "comfortable margin." I interpret that to mean by more than 25% (or a total of at least 140,000), as one can presume from prior petition submissions that about 10% of all signatures collected will be ruled invalid even when everything done to collect them is unquestionably proper--as most assuredly was NOT done in this case.
Keep your fingers crossed that this abomination won't make the November ballot--or if it does, that Nebraskans, fundamentally sensible, will take the care and time to see through Connerly's smokescreen and vote the ugly thing down. Connerly doesn't live here. He shouldn't be allowed to taint elections here.
Film at eleven!
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