Like many Americans on election night in November 2020, I nervously awaited the results of the presidential contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But I had an additional reason to be anxious.
In my home state of California, voters were given the opportunity to reauthorise the use of affirmative action in state governmental institutions through a ballot measure known as Proposition 16.
Affirmative action is a set of policies aimed at increasing the representation of racial minorities and women in areas of education and employment from which they have been historically excluded.
Proposition 209: A law against affirmative action
Twenty-four years ago, in 1996, voters in California passed Proposition 209, a law that prohibited the consideration of race, ethnicity or sex in public education, employment, and contracting. Proposition 209 was one of the most significant legal challenges to affirmative action since the 1978 Supreme Court decision in Bakke v California which outlawed racial quotas but allowed for race to be considered as a factor in university admissions and employment. Proposition 209 went even further to eliminate race from consideration altogether.
This new law wreaked havoc on African Americans’ access to higher education, local and state government jobs, and business contracts within the state. In fact, according to Mike Davis, Commissioner and President Pro Tempore of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works data shows that while African American business owners received 15 percent of all city government contracts in 1996, today they receive only 0.23 percent – less than a quarter of 1 percent.
In our state’s public higher education system, African American student enrolment has dropped precipitously as well. Take, for instance, the California State University system, where African American student enrolment dropped from 8 percent in 1997 to 4 percent in 2018, despite an overall increase in the number of African American students graduating from high school.
After the ban on affirmative action took effect in 1996, targeted mentoring, tutoring and scholarship programmes for racial minority students experienced budget cuts or programme elimination. With the attainment of a university degree being one of the greatest predictors of economic and social mobility in the United States, Proposition 209 represented a setback to the African American “dream” of equal access and racial equality.
All of this brings me back to election night 2020 as I waited for the results for Proposition 16. With protests across the country following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor earlier in the year, affirmative action advocates and supporters across the state were hopeful that there would be enough public support to bring back the single most important legal tool in promoting racial equity.
I even joined the fight to restore…
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