On Friday, September 1, the California assembly’s appropriations committee held a hearing in which they voted to move forward with a bill that would strip California’s Constitution of its protections against racial discrimination.
Currently, California’s Constitution asserts:
“The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”
The bill, called ACA-7, seeks to amend this section of the State Constitution by adding:
“The State may use state money to fund research-based, or research-informed, and culturally specific programs in any industry, including, but not limited to, public employment, public education, and public contracting, if those programs are established or otherwise implemented by the State for purposes of increasing the life expectancy of, improving educational outcomes for, or lifting out of poverty specific groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations.”
In short, California Democratic lawmakers don’t like the simple yet unequivocal ban on discrimination in the State’s Constitution. They want to replace it with a system where all the California government has to do is find an academic paper or professor claiming that their race-based programs and affirmative action initiatives do, in fact, “improve educational outcomes” or “lift out of poverty” certain minorities, and they can go on discriminating based on race, forcing Californians’ tax dollars to support race-based preferential treatment in perpetuity.
It is quite ironic and very sad that California Democrats have gotten to a point where they are so convinced that they are the ones fighting for justice and individual rights while openly championing a bill that would destroy the protections that grant every American the same rights and opportunities, the protections that allow every American to be assessed based on their own merit and character, regardless of the color of their skin. Of course, the supporters of ACA-7 believe that certain groups — blacks, for example — have been so marginalized by past discrimination and by current institutional racism, that treating everyone the same and providing everyone with the same opportunities regardless of race is actually a form of injustice. Yes, there are real income and achievement gaps for blacks and Hispanics in this country. But racial discrimination will not solve those problems. Racial discrimination should never be the answer in any context. It will create a country divided into groups constantly fighting over which group gets to be raised up and which group has to be pushed down. ACA-7 is a morally abhorrent bill because it would enshrine that kind of division.
California Democrats likely won’t find my arguments above convincing, but they should still drop ACA-7. Why? Because it’s a losing issue for them. First and foremost, it’s unpopular with voters. According to the Wall Street Journal, ACA-7 is deeply unpopular with Asian Americans, who have been waking up to the fact that race-based preferential treatment that throws merit out the window seriously hurts them and their futures. If Democrats go forward with this bill, they will alienate even more of their Asian American voters, who have already begun to shift away because of Democrat policies on crime.
And it’s not just Asian Americans who dislike affirmative action. The same Wall Street Journal op/ed cites a Pew Research survey conducted back in June which found that the majority of Americans believe that considering race and ethnicity in college admissions makes college admissions less fair than more fair. If ACA-7 manages to pass in the state Senate, it will still have to be voted on by Californians in a referendum. The people of California don’t want state-sponsored racial discrimination. That’s why they enshrined anti-discrimination into California’s Constitution in the first place. In all likelihood, ACA-7 will fail in the referendum, and California Democrats will have wasted millions of dollars campaigning for it and gained nothing except disdain from their constituents.
And if somehow Democrats do convince enough Californians to pass this amendment, all that work will eventually come to nothing anyway, because the Supreme Court, which ruled decisively against affirmative action back in June, will strike it down.
California Democrats should abandon ACA-7 immediately. Not only is it racist and unjust, but it is political poison.
Emmie Lo is a Latin teacher and staff writer for Color Us United.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.