Ward against racism
In an exclusive January 8th interview with the Patriot at his Sacramento office, UC Regent Ward Connerly shares some of the ideals behind his Racial Privacy Initiative

Interview by Steve Sexton
Photo by Ashley Rudmann
4:11 PM, 1/31/2003

California Patriot: Why are you a Republican?

Ward Connerly: I am a Republican because I believe personally in every individual having responsibility for his own faith. I believe that the Republican Party best lines up with my own sense of values in that regard. We are not members of groups; we are individuals. And given the two major options that are there, namely Democrats and Republicans, Republicans seem to respect property rights, individual rights, individual liberty, smaller government, smaller tax bite. All of those things combine my set of values. And I think the Republican Party, at least it did when I joined it back in 1969, seemed to evidence its support for those values.

CP: What is it like being a black conservative?

WC: Well, I hope the day comes when I am never asked that question. I don’t fault you for asking it, but the amount of my melanin content should be irrelevant. The Party, especially, should be blind to that sort of thing. But it does have its liabilities. Of course, you get asked questions like that, which are obvious questions.

Secondly, there is a presumption that you are somehow betraying a group of people like you because you don’t belong to the same party they do. Somehow you have defected from the race, whatever that is. And that you are insensitive not just to the needs of Black people, but others who are perceived to be “minorities.” You suffer that constantly, and if you are of weak spine, it can get you down. It doesn’t bother me anymore.

CP: Why do you think Blacks vote so overwhelmingly Democratic?

WC: I think the Democratic Party has been more effective over the years at marketing itself as the savior of civil rights and the champion of Black people. They have exploited race quite effectively. Republicans tend to run from race. Therefore it’s no contest. If you’ve got this one party out there exploiting it and the other party running from it instead of taking a position of principle and defending that principle.

There is nothing wrong with the Republican Party’s principle if you talk to the rank and file. But when you get to some of these leaders, they are spineless and they don’t defend their principle. As a result, they give the impression of being like deer in the headlights-they’re afraid of the issue and that fear makes them vulnerable when something comes along like the Trent Lott situation.

If you stake out a position of principle-I am opposed to preferences and I favor equal rights for all people, I want to treat you like an individual, give you respect as an individual and not part of a group-there is nothing to run from. There is nothing to fear. But many Republicans seem to lack the ability to do that, from the President on down.

CP: What is your reaction to Trent Lott’s remarks at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party and his subsequent resignation as senate majority leader, as well as his appearance on BET?

WC: First of all, there is nothing he said-if you take the actual words that he said-there is nothing in them that is harmful, offensive, or angering. There isn’t a candidate who has ever run for office and lost who hasn’t had a supporter say something like, “Boy, if my candidate won back in-whenever-we wouldn’t have all these problems now.” There is nothing harmful in those words. You have to take those words and put them in some context before the words have any meaning. And when you put them in the context of a Strom Thurmond candidacy for president that was based totally on segregation, then those words have some very negative meaning . . .

Trent Lott has never distinguished himself as a great leader. He bungled the impeachment hearings, he bungled the Jim Jeffords defection to the Independent, but really the Democratic Party. He has never been a distinguished leader in my view. So I think that he was a leader waiting to be deposed, because he never distinguished himself. This simply exposed his weaknesses as a leader. His initial comment, which was a poor choice of words. He didn’t appreciate the gravity of what he had said. That was the first problem. The second problem is that he continually then began to apologize . . .

Then when he went on BET, he became a pitiable figure-kind of a tragic figure. He is supposed to be one of the most powerful men in the country by virtue of his position. Here he is arguing his case on a marginal network that doesn’t command an audience of probably more than 800,000 nationwide anyway. But he is going on there negotiating the terms of his remaining a leader. And he negotiated a hell of a bad deal for himself, for his party, for his country.

CP: In Creating Equal, you describe how your fight to end race preferences in the university was also a fight to change the culture of the university. At the time of writing the book you were still fighting to change the culture. Are you still today? And has the culture changed?

WC: At the university, somewhat. I think that I have, by making myself a pain in the ass to my colleagues, to the president and the chancellors, I probably made them stop and think more than once about the legitimacy of what they are doing. There is still that, “We want diversity. We want inclusion.” By themselves, those words are harmless. But when you want them and you try to do things to achieve them, you violate that notion of individual freedom, individual choice, individual respect for every person, equal treatment under the law. You violate that . . .

You don’t create diversity, it just happens . . . I have been trying to change the culture to get people to understand that creating diversity and not discriminating against people are antithetical . . . You can’t say as a university at the bottom of every legal document we have: “The university does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion,”-all those things. If we really mean that, then we cannot use the power of the government, of the university, to influence our student body, our faculty, whatever. The two do not coexist.

So I think I have had some success in convincing even some of the Davis appointees that I am right. They may not have the courage to say that publicly, but they’re there. And chancellors have said to me, “you’re right.” So I think that I have had ten percent success in changing the culture. In the fullness of time that success will accelerate. If the university of Michigan case goes the way that I think it will, then those things will contribute to that culture change as well.

A lot of the ethnic studies programs we have, I think are misguided.

CP: How so?

WC: Well, I think they contribute to that culture that, in order to provide a welcome environment for Black people, for Latino students, you have to give them a curriculum that is focused on them. You then end up ghettoizing them. There are students on your campus who when they first come to Berkeley, there first experience is Black freshman orientation. Then they get involved in multi-cultural activities. They attend the ethnic studies courses. They graduate in a race-based graduation ceremony. They’re whole lives revolve around being black. How is that going to help people in this state, which is so dynamic and so naturally diverse-people marrying against lines of race and ethnicity and having children and race itself becoming kind of blurred? How is it going to help these students to be trapped into that kind of a paradigm. It’s just not helpful. They graduate with degrees that are marginal in terms of their effectiveness.

My view is that you throw everyone in the pot, everybody who goes to Berkeley, their first year, their first day on campus, everyone knows less than fifty people who are at that campus. So everyone has to meet new people. Everyone has to find a network. To say that we have to provide this safe haven for black people-in terms of a multi-culture center, Black studies and people who look like them and make them feel comfortable and welcome, critical mass-all of that stuff is bullshit. All of it. Every student at that campus has to go through the same problems of readjusting to a new environment, finding new friends, finding a new support system, joining a fraternity or sorority, joining a Republican club-all of them have to make those kinds of adjustments. But to create an atmosphere where they have to make it on the basis of race, I think is misguided.

CP: You fought tirelessly to end race preferences in the university-a battle that many termed a David vs. Goliath battle against the big, bureaucratic university. Then in the spring of 2001, you voted to repeal SP-1 and SP-2, the two resolutions you authored ending race preferences. Why?

WC: Okay. Great question. I will tell you the thinking I went through. On July 20, 1995, David did overwhelm Goliath and we passed the resolution that prevented the university from discriminating against any student, faculty, or employee on the basis of race-SP-1 and SP-2. Eighteen months later, we put that principle into the state constitution-Prop 209. The university now is obliged to follow 209. SP-1 and SP-2 are redundant.
From the moment that SP-1 and SP-2 passed, diversity by any means necessary-those racists really-Bill Bagley, who is out to lunch, believe me-and all of those were talking about rescinding SP-1 and 2. Every meeting. Every meeting, I had to go through this stuff.

The university is getting badgered by the Latino caucus to repeal it so they can say to their constituents, “Ah, we’re in control now.” It was only a matter of time until Gray Davis had control of the Board of Regents anyway, just a matter of time. Now, I could either say, “I oppose this,” and then there are several members on that Board who had said, “I will not vote for that rescission out of my respect for you, unless you go along with it.” They felt that I had fought the fight. Even though they weren’t willing to publicly do what I did, they agreed with it on its merits. They said, “I will not put you in the position of being embarrassed,”-these were Davis people mind you-“I will not put you in the position of embarrassing you-even though that’s what Bagley wants and Cruz Bustamante wanted-“I will not vote for that unless you tell me its alright and to do that, you vote for it. . .”

. . . In that resolution there was some very strong language that under no circumstances does this say that we are going to go back to the use of race. That’s in the resolution. This was a tactical decision on my part to say, “If you want the symbolism being removed of SP-1 and 2, if you are really saying that there are black kids who are not enrolling in UC or even applying to UC because of these onerous resolutions, I will cooperate with you and we will remove the symbolism. But on substance, it doesn’t matter because 209 is the law of the land. So it was a tactical decision on my part to remove what had become an annoyance, a distraction from the university, given the fact that we already had the constitution.

CP: So it wasn’t that you agreed SP-1 and 2 and pulled out the welcome mat to minority students?

WC: No, 180 degrees from that. In fact, I said that I think it is a bogus argument. I think it is a phony argument. And I told Bustamante that publicly. This is bogus. No one who is eligible to go to the University of California, in my view, is going to make the calculation that seven years after SP-1 passed, I am not going to go there because I don’t feel welcome. It’s specious.
However, in the world of politics, if you get what you want in substance, why do you want to keep fighting old fights that have no meaning. It has no meaning. Every meeting we are going through this stuff. We are listening to these nonsensical arguments about how we are not sending a message of being welcome. It’s baloney. Why go through that when you have the outcome you want anyway? In substance we won. We had it in a lock box known as the constitution.

CP: Now we have the comprehensive review admissions policy that replaced the two-tiered system. In the fall, you called for an independent audit of comprehensive review, citing concerns that it is being used for back-door affirmative action. Do you think it is being used for back-door affirmative action?

WC: Yeah, I do. I do. I can’t prove it. It’s like the perfect crime. You know the crime took place but you can’t find the body. I have no doubt about it, but I can’t prove it, because it is so subjective. We don’t know what they are looking at when they look at these students’ applications. But I do know that there is a profound academic gap between Asian and white on the one hand and Black and Latino on the other. And if 209 shuts the door on the university’s ability to use race to compensate for that gap, and then the following year, there are more Black and Latino students getting in in relation to white and Asian, something is going on. So, It is just so self-evident.

CP: The university has come out with its study of the first class admitted under Comprehensive Review. It shows only a very modest decline in academic rigor. Despite that study, are you still going to be pushing for an independent audit of Comprehensive Admissions?

WC: No, I got some extractions from the faculty. You need to understand this quality issue in context. The university knows that this academic gap exists. It doesn’t want to do away with the SAT because how else do you distinguish between 41,000 applicants to Berkeley, Santa Barbara, San Diego, UCLA. How else do you make distinctions between 41,000-38,000 students when you have 3,500 seats available? There is so much grade inflation that everyone has a 3.6 to higher. How else are you going to make distinctions.

So the faculty doesn’t want to do away with the SAT. Then you have a president who is being wrapped about the chops by the Latino Caucus to let more of our people in, or we won’t approve your budget. So he has to start making some concessions. He has to start doing some things that are politically acceptable that provide greater access for Latinos. They say, “Well, for minorities.” They don’t give a crap about minorities in general.

It’s about Latinos. That’s what all these reforms are about-Latino politics. Make no mistake about it. So the president is fighting with the political pressures, but he also has the faculty that is very concerned about quality. The faculty knows that if the quality of the University of California not only declines, but is perceived as declining, then it effects their market value in the market place. They know that. Salaries. Follow the money.
So the faculty is putting up similar pressure on the president: “No, we can’t go along with eliminating the SAT, Mr. President. Let us take a look at some things.” They rely on the old model that the university has followed all these years in dealing with preferences. If we let in a handful of under-represented minorities who are not really competitive with the Asians and Whites and the minority students who are competitive-and there are those-these few drops of blood in the water, if you will, are not going to change the quality of the pool, significantly. Underscore significantly. If you have 160,000 students and you’ve got 40,000 freshman and you have 500 who are marginally competitive, that’s not going to affect the overall quality. That is the game that the university has traditionally played.