Ward Connerly Throws Stones
By La Shawn Barber (04/16/03)
With a sling and five stones, young David, future King of Israel, killed a 9 feet tall man from Philistine named Goliath with one blow. In 1995, a black man named Ward Connerly rose from obscurity to take on a modern-day giant--the professional civil rights establishment. But it’ll take a lot more to wield a death blow against this deep-rooted anachronism. At a time when most opponents of race preferences were still cowering under the intimidation of black liberal politicians, Connerly led the charge against the evils of race-based discrimination.
Affirmative action’s original intent was to cast a wide net to include qualified blacks who’d been historically excluded from jobs and college admissions. It’s now become a labyrinthine system of quotas, set-asides and preferences, benefiting the grievance-shopping, professional civil rights class.
As a University of California Regent, Ward Connerly’s eyes were opened to insidious discrimination prevalent in the university system. Realizing how fundamentally unfair to whites and Asians and how demeaning and self-defeating to blacks race-based admissions were, Connerly began slinging stones at an entrenched liberal institution in a war that’s still being fought. Slowing but surely, the giant is going down. America will never be the same.
Ward Connerly’s book, Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences, is part autobiography, part political memoir. Connerly gives the reader a glimpse of the man behind the controversial public figure. To clear up any misconception that he had a privileged childhood, Connerly spends the first few chapters on his impoverished background. Abandoned by his father, his mother died when he was four. When he was nearly 15, he and his grandmother--the woman who raised him--went on welfare for a year and a half. One day, Connerly had enough of the caseworker’s probing, personal questions. “As I listened to the bureaucratic drone and saw the submissive look on Mom’s [his grandmother] face, I suddenly stood up and announced that I would not accept another check.” The young teenager stormed out of the house and went directly to a prominent man in the community to ask for work. The next day, Connerly had a job. He’s been working tirelessly ever since.
Connerly learned the value of personal responsibility from his uncle James, with whom he’d lived for a brief period of his childhood. James taught him what it was to be a man. “The only thing James wanted was for this world to respect him and regard him as a man, a word he pronounced with his down home accent as mane,” he writes. Being a man meant taking care of your family and not accepting handouts. Honest work--no matter how menial--meant empowerment and independence.
Carrying these values with him throughout his life, Connerly worked as a civil servant in the early 1960s. He describes his optimism for the future while working with powerful, white businessmen--decision makers--in the community “I didn’t see the world in which they moved as being their world. I saw it as potentially my world, too…”
Excited by the success of the civil rights movement, Connerly was alienated by the caustic rhetoric of black militants of the late 1960s. He writes of the Black Panthers: “The historical moment felt bizarre, almost hallucinatory: black people were being asked to agree that America was a ‘concentration camp’ just at the moment that they were completing their great stride toward freedom.” Where black radicals saw oppression, Connerly saw opportunity. He seized that opportunity by quitting his government job and starting his own consulting business in 1973, which he still runs today.
In 1993, Governor Pete Wilson changed Connerly’s life by appointing him to the University of California Board of Regents. The turning point came in 1995 after he met with the parents of a student who’d been rejected by the UC medical schools. Armed with statistical evidence that UC was using racial quotas in admissions, they made their case. After reviewing the report, Connerly said, “This is wrong.” Those three words resulted in a campaign to dismantle race preferences in the UC system. Connerly not only forced the university to admit it had been discriminating against students of certain races, but he shamed its leadership into abolishing the practice altogether.
Since championing Proposition 209 and I-200, which eliminated state-sponsored discrimination in college admissions and hiring in California and Washington State, respectively, Connerly wants to remove from black students the badge of inferiority such preferences have placed on them.
Race preferences are an obstacle to the equality the Founding Fathers wanted to create, an “audacious theory that ultimately inflamed the rest of the world,” Connerly writes. All Americans are witnesses to how this theory of equality continues to inflame the world as millions of immigrants seek to enter our borders to embrace life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Armed with the weapon of truth, Connerly is a warrior intent on slaying the formidable civil rights establishment. For the reader who desires to know who such a man is, Creating Equal is an excellent place to begin.
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