Ward Connerly's Super Tuesday for Segregation

Cartoon: Emerge Magazine, March 1998


By David A. Love
Published by The Black Commentator
January 31, 2008

“Supporting segregation need not be racist. One can believe in segregation and believe in equality of the races.”

- Ward Connerly, on CNN’s “Wolf Blitzer Reports,” Dec. 13, 2002

Ward Connerly, that high profile opponent for affirmative action and Black water carrier for the new Jim Crow, has returned. He wants to eliminate affirmative action everywhere, and make a buck at the same time. And with the help of corporate philanthropy and hate groups, he wants to take us back to the future we know too well.

Connerly is plotting and planning for what he calls a Super Tuesday for Equal Rights. The purpose of his campaign is to promote ballot initiatives throughout the country that would eliminate tax dollars to affirmative action programs based on race and gender. Following similar initiatives in California, Michigan and Washington, he has targeted five states for this year’s November ballot - Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Targeting states with relatively low numbers of people of color - and undoubtedly relying on the longstanding effectiveness of racial scapegoating, particularly in hard economic times, Connerly might very well succeed in the absence of a determined and coordinated campaign to quash his efforts.

Although the anti-affirmative action forces seek to eliminate public funding of diversity based on gender as well as race, thereby harming White women as well, it is the so-called “racial preferences” that stick in the minds of people. Part of the time-tested Southern Strategy, anti-diversity campaigns is to appeal to disaffected Whites, who will act against their own interests, if it means the elimination of programs they believe are unfairly benefiting Black and Brown folks.

Destroying the King Legacy is Profitable

So, what’s in it for Connerly? The dollars, of course. Apparently, there is much money to be made in dismantling the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, and Connerly is first in line to get paid.

In 1993, he was given a platform by California Gov. Pete Wilson with a seat on the California Board of Regents. Soon, he became a crusader against all that is important to Black people. That crusade was made possible through the support of extreme right-wing corporate philanthropy and alliances with White supremacist hate groups. Certainly, behind every puppet there is a puppet master who controls the strings, and Ward Connerly is no exception.

In 1996, Connerly, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action through a California set-aside program for minority contractors, was responsible for the passage of Proposition 209, which eliminated the use of affirmative action by the state government in hiring and university admissions. On the eve of Dr. King’s birthday in 1997, thanks to the generosity of the ultra-conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and others, he formed the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI). (The Bradley Foundation has funded organizations that seek to destroy civil rights, such as the Center for Individual Rights. Charles Murray, author of the infamous book The Bell Curve, is a Bradley fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.) That same year, Connerly also formed the American Civil Rights Coalition (ACRC), the lobbying arm of ACRI. In true Orwellian fashion, these organizations embrace the antithesis of what their names suggest.

The Equal Justice Society reports that in 2003, based on IRS records, Connerly received $1 million in compensation for his anti-civil rights efforts at ACRI and ACRC. This does not include compensation he received as CEO of Connerly & Associates, his Sacramento-based real estate business.

The group Media Transparency has detailed the bankrolling of Ward Connerly’s segregationist operations by the Bradley, Olin and Scaife Foundations. When he was unwilling to disclose the funding sources of his failed Proposition 54 - which would have prevented California from collecting important racial data, thereby crippling any efforts to address racial disparities in healthcare and education - a coalition of civil rights organizations sued him. Connerly, who raised $1.6 million for the 2003 Prop 54 effort, was fined $95,000 for breaking campaign financing disclosure laws. According to the Equal Justice Society, some of his largest contributors included John Moores, Sr., University of California Regents board member and owner of the San Diego Padres ($400,000); Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News ($300,000); Joseph Coors, the late Colorado beer baron and founding partner of the Heritage Foundation ($250,000), and William J. Hume, head of the anti-labor San Francisco-based company Basic American Foods ($200,000).

White Supremacist Support for Anti-Affirmative Action Efforts

If people are judged by the company they keep, then history will not show kindness to Connerly and the foes of civil rights. In his successful campaign to eliminate affirmative action in Michigan, he allied himself with Rev. John Raternik, head of the Michigan chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).

The CCC, a White supremacist organization, descended from the White Citizens’ Councils of the Jim Crow era and is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The CCC, which has made the issue of non-White immigration a top priority, has declared America “a European country,” opposes “all efforts to mix the races” and refers to Black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.” Well-known figures with ties to the CCC include Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (R-AR), ex-Senator Trent Lott (R-MI), Governor Haley Barbor (R-MI), the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, former Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice, and former Alabama Governor Guy Hunt.

Connerly, who supports segregation, welcomed the support of White racist groups in his fight against affirmative action. “If the Ku Klux Klan thinks that equality is right, God bless them,” said Connerly. “Thank them for finally reaching the point where logic and reason are being applied, instead of hate.”

Dishonoring the movement

Conservatives will point to individuals such as Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly and others who are viewed as “brave” and “courageous” for bucking the Black establishment and taking unpopular views. But there is no bravery in what Connerly does, which is to cynically misappropriate Dr. King’s vision for a colorblind society, in order to strike a blow against the nation’s civil rights protections.

There is no honor in desecrating the graves of the truly courageous martyrs, those such as Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit who was gunned down like a dog by the KKK in Alabama in 1965, all for fighting for civil rights. There is no honor in spitting on the memory of voting rights crusader Fannie Lou Hamer, who was jailed and beaten nearly to death by police in Mississippi, and never recovered from her wounds. Nor is there any glory in dishonoring and mocking the name of Vernon Dahmer, who was killed in a terrorist bombing, not in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in his home in Hattiesbug, Mississippi, after volunteering to pay for Black voters’ poll taxes.

A Return to Jim Crow

Years later, what we are witnessing is a concerted effort to bring the country back to the old times, at a time when the nation is becoming increasingly diverse, increasingly Black and Brown. In the absence of mandated diversity programs, the country will revert to de facto segregation.

Some people yearn for the days of exclusion and privilege, when universities maintained a quota of zero for Blacks, a rigid quota for nonwhites, Jews and others, and a place for women - in the home.

The sentiment against diversity is best characterized by President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, who, in not allowing a Black student to live in the freshman dorms in 1922, told him, “I am sure you will understand why, from the beginning, we have not thought it possible to compel men of different races to reside together.” Lowell, in enforcing a 15 percent quota for Jewish students, stated that “anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews... when... the number of Jews was small, the race antagonism was small also.” In his racist view, “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate…because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”

Lowell’s ideological heirs are found in the form of Ward Connerly and the members of today’s neo-segregationist movement. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the most prominent jockey of that movement, recently voted with the court’s majority to outlaw voluntary integration plans in the public schools. In a concurring opinion, Thomas seemed to channel Lowell when he said that “Simply putting students together under the same roof does not necessarily mean that the students will learn together or even interact. Furthermore, it is unclear whether increased interracial contact improves racial attitudes and relations… Some studies have even found that a deterioration in racial attitudes seems to result from racial mixing in schools.”

Voices of the new segregation, like the old voices of Jim Crow, are having a chilling effect on democratic tendencies in America. It is no accident that, according to Columbia University and the Society of American Law Teachers, enrollment for African-American and Mexican-American students in law schools has continuously declined over the past 15 years, despite high scores and grades from applicants of color. And while the legal profession is disproportionately White, the prisons are disproportionately Black and Latino. What can we do to stop this trend?

One group, The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary, or BAMN, is a leader in the struggle to save civil rights and diversity programs in higher education. But groups such as BAMN cannot do it alone. People of goodwill must join together in creating a country that embraces diversity. The alternative is to allow a victory for Ward Connerly, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation and the Klan.

People of Color Sacrificed on the Altar of Predatory Capitalism

By David A. Love
Published By The Black Commentator
January 24, 2008

It should come as no surprise that free-market capitalism — predatory, unchecked, unregulated, and like any other hustle, dependent upon winners and losers for its bread and butter — chooses to prey on the most vulnerable members of society. We were aware that homeowners of color, steered into unconscionable subprime mortgages and targeted for economic exploitation, are bearing the brunt of America’s foreclosure crisis.

But a new report now tells us exactly how much damage has been done to these families.

According to a report by United for a Fair Economy entitled, “Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008,” the subprime lending debacle is causing the greatest loss of wealth to people of color, primarily African-Americans and Latinos, in modern U.S. history. In dollars, the loss amounts to somewhere between $164 billion and $213 billion over the past eight years.

To be sure, White Americans are also being devastated by subprime mortgages, an inherently flawed, expensive and predatory product with exploding adjustable rates, balloon payments, and penalties for early repayment that cripple their victims and make it unlikely that they will repay. And in some cities, foreclosures have increased as much as 300 percent since 2000. Over half a million borrowers in the U.S. have lost their homes since 2006, and up to 1 million could lose their homes by the end of 2008.

There is clear evidence that there is racial discrimination (and gender discrimination) on the part of mortgage lenders, those who steer their victims into these horrible loans. People of color are more than three times as likely to have subprime loans. These loans account for only 17 percent of loans to Whites, but 55 percent of loans to Blacks. Given people of similar financial circumstances, Whites are steered into safer, less expensive loans. If subprime loans were distributed equally, losses for Whites would increase 44.5 percent, while losses for people of color would decrease 24 percent. Before this economic crisis, Blacks were 594 years behind Whites in terms of Median Household Net Worth. The subprime crisis will only worsen this gap. And at current rates, parity in home ownership between people of color and Whites will not be reached for another 5,434 years.

Institutional racism is costly, and the home foreclosure mania is destroying families and communities, eroding the tax bases and revenue streams of American cities, leading to an increase in crime, and causing cuts in government services. A number of cities, including Cleveland, Baltimore and Buffalo, are suing mortgage lenders for the damage caused by their predatory and discriminatory practices.

Meanwhile, as hundreds of thousands of families lose their homes, and millions more are affected by a chronic financial crisis in which their wages are dropping, the five largest Wall Street banks awarded themselves a record $39 billion in bonuses in 2007. This, despite the fact that 2007 was the financial industry’s worst year since 2002, and a year in which shareholders lost more than $80 billion. These corporations have caused great destruction, and yet have not been held accountable for their actions.

The answer to this problem lies with public policy decisions. American history is rife with the promulgation of bad public policy in the name of the unbridled free market: slavery, genocide, land stealing, wage exploitation, sweatshops, union busting, child labor, health and environmental hazards, etc. Then, as now, predatory capitalism has benefited a chosen few at the expense of the many. If the federal government can promote policies that benefit the rich and the corporate conglomerates, then certainly we can adopt policies which eradicate systemic economic inequality and racial discrimination, mandate corporate responsibility, encourage low-income home ownership, and repair the victims of subprime lending.

America, resist your antidemocratic tendencies. The subprime crisis is the tip of the iceberg in a nation which touts equality and fairness, and yet hustles its people with a game of loaded dice.

Clintons, Your Black Pass is Hereby Revoked

By David A. Love
Published By Black Commentator
January 17, 2008

Hillary and Bill Clinton have a lot of explaining to do. In her quest for the presidency, the U.S. Senator from New York and her husband — known by some as “the first Black president” — have used the race card against rival presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama (D, Ill.). Although Obama was supposedly the intended target, in the end, all African Americans were attacked. The Clintons have attacked blackness as a disqualifying attribute for the office of president, and have managed to insult Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement in the process.

It should be said at the outset that candidates for office should be thoroughly scrutinized. No one should be immune, and all of the presidential candidates should be required to justify their stance on the issues before the voters and explain any contradictions that might arise.

But the contest should go to the best person, someone who will heal a nation broken by injustice, hatred, neglect, greed and corruption. When a candidate exploits the race of another candidate, and insults an entire community for political gain, she is taking that community for granted and does not deserve their support.

The record is replete with evidence of what is going on here. Senator Clinton’s surrogates have raised issues about Obama’s Muslim middle name Hussein, and the unelectability of a Black man. Hillary aides and supporters — including BET founder Bob Johnson, who has already done enough harm to the psyche of Black America as a purveyor of garbage media — have made references to Obama’s youthful drug use. Meanwhile, Hillary surrogate and New York state attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, stated that presidential candidates cannot “shuck and jive” during the primaries. President Clinton had to defend himself against angry Black voters who charged that he dismissed Obama’s presidential bid as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

But most importantly, Senator Clinton — perhaps believing she is a qualified expert on the civil rights movement — suggested that President Lyndon Johnson’s role overshadowed that of Dr. King in the passage of civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were enacted as a result of agitation and pressure applied to power by a movement, many of whose members were imprisoned, discredited, maimed and murdered. Let us not forget the police dogs, the water hoses, the lynchings, and COINTELPRO. In her revision of history, Clinton would suggest that King and the movement were idle, passive dreamers, but it took the great father in the White House to do the heavy lifting, make the big decisions, and do the thinking required to get things done. The more she and her water carriers try to spin her misguided statement, the angrier Black people will become.

When viewed in totality, the comments from the Clinton camp speak to a pattern of racial insensitivity, disrespect for Black people, and a willingness to use the race card for political gain. Senator Clinton, an establishment Democrat, is employing the tactics associated with race-baiting, Swift-Boating, Southern-strategy Republicans. She and her handlers, faced with a bland product people were not buying, needed to conjure up a Black boogeyman, a Willie Horton, if you will. Perhaps the differences between the two parties are not as great as we were led to believe, after all.

And typical of the center-Right, DLC Democratic establishment, the Clinton campaign treats the African American community as the lover it embraces at night, yet refuses to acknowledge in the daytime. Meanwhile, Clinton attempts to buy off Black leaders and preachers and figures such as Magic Johnson, to the tune of $750 million, and shamelessly attempts to buy our votes in the process.

This is bigger than Obama. Obama, who is enjoying increased support in the Black community and whose candidacy is viewed as a source of hope for many, should not receive a free ride because he is of African descent. And he has not received one, given the split in the Black community over whom to support. To that extent, the Black electorate has displayed a political sophistication for which it is rarely given credit.

People of color, who have supported far more candidates from outside their community than have their White counterparts, know that Black faces in high places will not constitute progress without a positive agenda that benefits the people left behind. When Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas climbed the ladder, they did not leave it out for the rest of us. They have meant nothing for Black progress. Obama has a unique opportunity to change the whole game in this nation if he listens to the people, dares to bring discomfort to the powerful, challenges institutional racism and fundamental inequality, and does not succumb to the corruption of the cesspool that is Washington.

Likewise, the senator from New York does not deserve a free ride due to her or her husband’s perceived record of helping Black folks. The first time around, they courted us with saxophone playing on the Arsenio Hall Show. When in office, through a game of bait and switch, they delivered disappointingly conservative policies, welfare reform, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and media consolidation that decimated Black and Brown-owned radio stations and newspapers. One wonders what they really did to deserve the considerable support they have enjoyed among progressives and in many corners of the Black community, support they enjoyed at least until they became desperately unhinged in this campaign.

And let us not forget then-Governor Bill Clinton’s use of the race card in the 1992 campaign. Bill repudiated Black activist Sister Souljah as a David Duke-type racist, a positioning to the Right which insulted the African American community, and allowed him to appeal to conservative Whites by showing he was a good ol’ boy. Then there was the 1992 execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a Black death row inmate in Arkansas, mentally ill, with an IQ of 70. Bill left the campaign trail to witness Rector’s execution, an expedient and opportunistic move to bolster his “tough on crime” image and help him claim the presidency.

Senator Clinton exploits the race card, to be sure, but avails herself of the gender card as well. One of the tougher and more testosterone-infused politicians on Capitol Hill when it comes to policies of military aggression, Hillary, it seems, becomes the fragile, defenseless damsel when it suits her political needs. She sheds a tear only for herself, when her political career is at stake. Senator Clinton touts her alleged record on human rights, the needs of children and the rights of women. But we wonder if she sheds any tears for the thousands of Iraqi women and children who died in a war she wholeheartedly endorsed, all to score political points, beef up her image and show that she is as cold-hearted and cold-blooded as the guys, as macho as any perverse, distorted caricature of a man.

Since when did a woman’s strength come from her willingness to exhibit the worst traits of conservative, warmongering men? There are countless anonymous women and men who live and have lived, whose strength has been judged by their commitment to building their communities, supporting their families, fighting injustice and leaving the world a better place than they found it. A person who will do or say anything to become president, including race bait, and aspires to the presidency for no other reason than a sense of entitlement and dynastic succession, is not a role model to follow.

And anyone can address a Black congregation with a phony Southern accent and clap offbeat to the choir.

Clintons, you became a little too comfortable for your own good. Your dirty tricks are out of pocket, and your Black pass is hereby revoked.

America’s Racism is a Human Rights Violation

By David A. Love
Published in Black Commentator
January 10, 2008

In 1964, Malcolm X called Uncle Sam “the earth's number-one hypocrite” on the issue of human rights. It's nearly four and a half decades later; some things never change.

On December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day, a broad coalition of 200 human rights groups and social justice organizations sounded the alarm on the state of racism and discrimination in America.

According to a report by the US Human Rights Network (USHRN), which includes such groups as Amnesty International, the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, America is failing to comply with its obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (Race Convention).

The Race Convention, a United Nations treaty ratified in 1969, defines racial discrimination (art. 1, paragraph 1) as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.” The convention is enforceable as a part of U.S. law. But you wouldn’t know it, looking at the conduct of the U.S. government.

Pointing to such events as the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, the nooses hanging in Jena, Louisiana, and the epidemic of hate crimes on college campuses across the country – not to mention continuing racism in voting rights, housing, health and education, and a hostile environment to immigrants - USHRN says that the Bush administration’s track record on race has been an abysmal failure. And the group notes that the U.S. government whitewashed its report to the UN on its compliance with the Race Convention (or lack thereof). For example:

• The U.S. government’s report, issued by the State Department, chose to ignore the racially-tinged issue of police brutality.

• Failing to comply with the convention by providing statistics on racism at the state level, the government report only provided full information on Oregon, South Carolina, Illinois and New Mexico, and chose to ignore states with large populations of immigrants and people of color, including New York, California, Texas and Florida.

• The report pointed to programs that encourage sensitivity by law enforcement to Arab and Muslim communities, yet failed to acknowledge the racial profiling and targeting of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians by law enforcement in the post-9/11 era.

• The State Department report failed to address the “school to prison pipeline” that funnels Black and Brown children into prison through discriminatory policies and under-funded public schools. And the government report dared to suggest that the wide disparities in the criminal justice system (African Americans and Latinos are 60 percent of the nation’s prison population) are not due to the effects of racist policies, but are “related to differential involvement in crime.”

Certainly, those who oppose equality and justice for all, including the Bush administration, are inclined to say that people of color should stop complaining and learn to take personal responsibility. They should top whining, stop playing the victim, and learn to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the argument goes.

And certainly, the fox has been known to lecture the residents of the henhouse on the virtues of personal responsibility.

The Bush administration has proven itself unable and unwilling to promote equality in America, to make the land whole. On a regular basis, this column and others provide a detailed account of the crisis of racial injustice in America, and the ways in which this administration, in criminal fashion, has stoked the fires of racial hatred, trampled on the civil rights and voting rights of people of color, and encouraged the widening gap of inequality in the land of the free. This country has failed to come to terms with its devastating legacy of genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, and its present-day incarnations.

Although USHRN calls on the U.S. to address this abysmal track record and to take action to bring the U.S. in compliance with its international obligations, it does not seem likely that much can be expected in the final year of the Bush regime. Perhaps we can begin to heal the land once the “compassionate conservative” crowd in Washington leaves the White House and takes their white sheets and brown shirts with them.

America, your record on racism drips with hypocrisy. As the self-proclaimed beacon of human rights, yet a chronically habitual human rights offender and purveyor of wolf tickets, now is the time to clean up your act and practice what you preach. International standards demand no less.