"We want a better America and we're convinced that affirmative action, as we know it, is now standing in the way of that objective."
"For those who talk about the poison of racism, who talk about slavery and segregation, I say it's time to get on with life. It's time to more forward. Our nation demands it." Those are the far-sighted, common-sense sentiments of Ward Connerly, the black businessman from Sacramento who led the drive to end state-sponsored discrimination with passage of Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative.
On February 12th, Abraham Lincoln's birthday, the Independent Women's Forum presented Ward Connerly with the Lincoln Leadership Award for Civic Virtue, paying tribute to "his leadership, courage, and integrity as an advocate of equal opportunity for all Americans." Connerly began his acceptance speech with a childhood memory of a cross-country road trip he took with his aunt and uncle in 1945. He recalled his uncle pulling into a gas station and being asked by the white attendant, "What do you want, boy?" He recalled having to stop by the roadside moments later to answer nature's call, because the restrooms at the station they'd just left were not for the use of colored people. He recalled how his aunt was light-skinned enough to be accorded service at some of the truck stops along the way, while he and his uncle waited outside.
Bad memories do beget bitterness, but Connerly has enjoyed "sufficient positive experiences that the scars of those early years have healed." By his reckoning, "for every wrong that I have endured because of skin color, there are several demonstrable examples of fairness, America's passion for fairness, to which I could point." Whether to accentuate the positive or fixate on the negative is a choice everyone must make, black or white.
Connerly argued that "America is caught in the grip of a profound clash of values. There are those of us," he observed, "who believe . . . that 'race has no place in American life or law.' We believe that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of individ-uals, that government derives power and authority from the American people, that there is a moral force from which we can draw our strength and guidance, and that certain principles are inviolate. Then," said Connerly, "there are those who believe that race matters, that we have to use race to get beyond race, that the Fourteenth Amendment is intended to protect the rights of groups, to ensure that groups have equal opportunity and parity. They believe in a more intru-sive government, which defines how long a leash the American people will be allowed, that nothing is inviolate and everything is up for grabs."
Convinced that "the pursuit of happiness cannot occur for every American when we become a society of never-ending power struggles among organized racial, gender, and ethnic groups," Connerly insists that eliminating preferences "is the only way that we can have an America in which its people are one."
