California legislators are currently considering whether they\u2019ll put Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7 to voters, which would narrow the application of Proposition 209.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prop. 209, which was passed by voters in 1996, outlaws discrimination and preferential treatment on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity and similar group identities in public employment, public education, and public contracting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ACA 7 would make a subtle but significant change to Prop. 209 and \u201climit the above prohibition to the operation of public employment, higher education admissions and enrollment, and public contracting.\u201d Note the substitution of \u201chigher education admissions and enrollment\u201d for \u201cpublic education.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
This change would thereby allow for discrimination or preferential treatment in non-admissions related matters with respect to higher education and would remove the state\u2019s constitutional protections against discrimination with respect to Pre-K-12 education.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It sounds like a bad idea but it passed<\/a> the state Assembly in February and is now pending in the state Senate.\u00a0<\/p>\n I recently spoke to the lead author of ACA 7, Assemblymember Corey Jackson of Moreno Valley to learn more about his motivations for proposing it.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst of all, ACA 7 is a California Legislative Black Caucus priority bill to implement part of the reparations task force recommendation to do away with Prop. 209 because it is the number one impediment for implementing the full reparations and solutions that the African-American community has been looking for for decades,\u201d he explained. \u201cAnd so what ACA 7 does is it basically clarifies to state agencies and local governments what Prop 209 does and does not do, while also honoring the Supreme Court decisions over time in terms of constitutionality of race-based policies.\u201d<\/p>\n The sort of discrimination that ACA 7 would allow has been ruled unconstitutional<\/a> many times before given the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, so I asked Jackson why he was pushing for it. He responded, \u201cThis wouldn\u2019t be ruled unconstitutional because this is a constitutional amendment, right? And so taking it out, taking parts of it out of the Constitution wouldn\u2019t make it unconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n The conflating of constitutions aside, the problem is that policies or programs ACA 7 could empower will very likely be ruled unconstitutional if they involve preferential treatment on the basis of race or gender. According to Jackson, the policies that he foresees do not involve higher education, stating that, \u201cit\u2019s not our intention to touch higher education, which is why we don\u2019t touch it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This is strange since the language of the amendment includes \u201chigher education admissions and enrollment\u201d, which seems specifically worded to allow for discriminatory policies in things like financial aid and grant decisions, along with many other non-admissions aspects of higher education. When I questioned Jackson about whether the language of the amendment would allow for discriminatory policies in higher education, he gave a conflicting answer.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t believe it to be the case,\u201d he said, continuing, \u201cWhat\u2019s relevant is whether the U.S. Supreme Court, based upon the United States Constitution, is violated or not. So we believe that there is still room when it comes to financial assistance. Say, for instance, if a historically Black organization wants to continue to provide scholarships \u2026 But once again, our main issues have nothing to do with higher education at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n While Jackson claims that there\u2019s \u201croom\u201d for race considerations in the distribution of financial aid, as Alison Somin of the Pacific Legal Foundation explained<\/a>, \u201cThe bill\u2019s \u2018higher education admissions and enrollment\u2019 exemption would enable significant real-world discrimination.\u201d This sort of discrimination would be similar to the subject of a lawsuit that the Pacific Legal Foundation is currently involved in against a UC internship program<\/a> that is only available to certain racial minorities \u2013 ACA 7 would invite many more lawsuits.<\/p>\n Jackson\u2019s reasoning and intentions continued to baffle me over the course of our discussion. If discriminatory practices are allowed for the benefit of minorities, they are also allowed to their detriment. \u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t the ACA 7 allow for discrimination against Hispanics or Blacks or women?\u201d I asked Jackson.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, absolutely not,\u201d he replied. \u201cWhat it does, because there\u2019s a whole host of California laws who I\u2019m sure you agree have the strongest anti-discrimination, anti-racist, anti-xenophobic laws in the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n But whatever laws he\u2019s referring to that would protect minorities from discrimination would also prevent preferential treatment that benefits those minorities. If the ACA 7 would allow a program to discriminate against white people, they would also allow programs that would discriminate against black people.<\/p>\n If one wants to help people without overcomplicating things, it seems substantially more defensible to propose class-based preferential treatment. Since minorities make up a large percentage of the poor, we can improve their lives while allowing us to avoid the understandable resentment that goes along with paying for past injustices that most taxpayers had nothing to do with \u2013 it\u2019s about helping those in need, whatever their race. It would also avoid unfortunate scenarios where resources may go to a wealthy minority that doesn\u2019t need it over a poor white kid.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Jackson, this won\u2019t do because, \u201cIt does not eliminate the cultural needs of our population. And our culture tells us what it means to be healthy. Our culture helps us to learn how to survive. Our culture tells us our place in the world and our very creation and our responsibility to our community, to our family, and to future generations. Our culture is what anchors us, not our economic wealth \u2026 it may take race-based solutions to solve it because they were race-based problems that were created. And to ignore that is immoral and to ignore that is ignorant.\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what any of that really means or why class-based programs couldn\u2019t address these issues.\u00a0I realized that we may have been talking past each other the entire time. I asked Jackson to give more specific examples of the sorts of programs ACA 7 would enable.\u00a0<\/p>\n He answered, \u201cSo for instance \u2026 we may need to provide assistance to African-Americans, meaning do they need better credit recovery training? Do they need help on actually understanding and learning how to purchase a home?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRight, well, I\u2019m kind of struggling to see \u2013 because if we implement some program, for example, that helps with financial literacy for African-Americans or whatever the program is, right, presumably it would have some condition on being African-American to take part in that, right?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, not necessarily. But if they\u2019re tailored specifically for the African-American community then there should be no problem with it. Now if others want to participate, it would be illegal to deny them participation right.\u201d<\/p>\n Just to clarify, Jackson is proposing an amendment that removes language from our state constitution that forbids discrimination and preferential treatment, despite having no intention for discrimination or preferential treatment to occur.\u00a0<\/p>\n Puzzled, I responded, \u201cRight. I mean, if these programs will be open to everyone, then I\u2019m struggling to see what the point of the ACA 7 is then, because you can just do that now, right?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s not what local governments believe that they can do,\u201d he answered. \u201cSo again, we\u2019re trying to clarify Prop. 209 for people, for local governments and state agencies to make sure that they are under a stronger legal footing and they actually have a stronger assurances that what they\u2019re doing would survive in the courts.\u201d<\/p>\n The question that Jackson should be concerned with is about what sort of message that he would be sending to local governments by removing language from the constitution that forbids race-based preferential treatment. The message is precisely that discriminatory programs are permissible, which will invite lawsuits and liabilities instead of improving circumstances for minorities.\u00a0<\/p>\n If his intended message truly is only about encouraging cities to create beneficial programs without preferential treatment, then perhaps Jackson and his colleagues should have considered that their problem can be solved with a memo from the attorney general assuring local governments that it\u2019s perfectly fine to create helpful programs for their community as long as they don\u2019t discriminate against anyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n Removing a part of our state\u2019s constitution that explicitly forbids certain forms of discrimination seems like the most ridiculous solution possible to local governments allegedly thinking that they can\u2019t help their residents. I find it hard to believe that they even think that.\u00a0<\/p>\n What they probably think is that they can\u2019t create programs that explicitly discriminate against anyone, which is right.\u00a0<\/p>\n If it\u2019s true that Jackson\u2019s proposed programs \u201ctailored\u201d to minorities wouldn\u2019t actually be able to exclude anyone, then his ACA 7 is completely pointless. If those programs do engage in discrimination, California can expect a wave of costly lawsuits. But if the real point is to help people, the government can do that now \u2013 without needlessly discriminating on the basis of immutable characteristics.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California legislators are currently considering whether they\u2019ll put Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7 to voters, which would narrow the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,975,2082],"class_list":["post-355571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}