An anti-bias ballot battle
An anti-bias ballot battle
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By Devona Walker
Published: September 28, 2007
The Affirmative Action Civil Rights Council continued Thursday to provide oversight to state agencies in an effort to increase employment of minorities and women, despite the momentum of a petition campaign seeking to do away with affirmative action in Oklahoma.
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Perceptions cited
Oklahoma supporters would not speak to specifics in terms of the number of signatures, but say the local effort is doing quite well.
Oklahoma state government has nearly 20,000 women employees and more than 7,000 minority employees.
Peter Schmidt, a novelist and deputy editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education, says criticism against affirmative action is mostly about perceptions.
About half of white people over the age of 18 think they have been passed over by a less-qualified black, he said.
"And that means a lot when you want to get someone to sign a petition,” Schmidt said.
But when studying the subject of affirmative action in public education, he found black enrollment was on average at about 6 percent during affirmative action and about 1.6 percent without affirmative action.
"And when you crunch the numbers even more, and allow for grades and performance, there will be about 15 percent of the students there who are white kids who just have no place being on a college campus,” Schmidt said. "But affirmative action — is legally less defensible — it's what is singled out.”
On the other side of the coin, however, is the fact that some colleges have been operating programs solely for minority students.
Those programs have been getting challenged since 2002. And most colleges now realize they can't really defend them, Schmidt said.
"People hire people they feel comfortable with. People they relate to and so on. But with that said, there's not a body of law dealing with it, in terms of racial discrimination,” Schmidt said. "The power of Ward Connerly's claim is that he repeatedly cites the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
‘A nation of laws'
Connerly, who is black, says the basis for his 12-year effort to end "hard” affirmative action or differential treatment in terms of jobs and education is his desire that young black children are better prepared for college.
"After 40 years of giving preferences, you can call it affirmative action or whatever you want, it simply was not working. I don't believe in doing the same thing over and over and over again,” Connerly said.
"I think we are a nation of laws. We're a nation that believes in certain values. And this flies in the face of everything we say we stand for.”
Shelton cautions that Oklahoma only in recent years started prioritizing diversity among state workers.
He says the passage of this initiative would effectively end affirmative action.
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Law, Politics, Social Issues, Education, Business, Elections and Voting, Constitutional Law, Higher Education, Colleges and Universities, Small Business, Civil Rights
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