9-2003

Defeat Proposition 54!

• No Racist Ballot Initiatives!
• Defeat the Right-Wing Attempt to Take Over California!
• Ward Connerly Must Resign!

RALLY and MARCH
Thursday, September 25
Noon, Sproul Plaza, UC-Berkeley

On October 7, California will be faced with the alarming prospect of the passage of Proposition 54, the 'Racial Privacy Initiative.'' This initiative, if passed, would outlaw any attempt to track discrimination and inequality using racial statistics, and would make desegregation impossible. All who stand for integration and equality must organize and march and rally in force to defeat this racist initiative! The strategy of mass, organized protest has been vindicated: the march of more than 50,000 people in Washington, DC on April 1st this year is what cinched the historic victory at the US Supreme Court in defense of affirmative action and signaled to the nation the birth of a new civil rights movement.

Distorting Martin Luther King's dream of an equal, integrated society, Proposition 54 author Ward Connerly would impose a nightmare of 'colorblind' racism on California. He falsifies the aims of the Civil Rights Movement and the ideas of its most noted leader in the interest of resegregating the nation and creating a vast roadblock in the way of progress toward equality. Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Our young movement must fight for the long-deferred promise of the Brown ruling--the promise of integration and equality--to be realized in our lifetime!

Black Republican UC Regent Ward Connerly began his crusade to return this nation to its shameful segregationist past when he pushed the elimination of affirmative action first in the UC system and then statewide with Prop 209. That measure dishonestly labeled affirmative action and other race-conscious equal opportunity programs "racial preferences." It fraudulently quoted the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the service of aims counter to the Act. Its implementation has led to a vast increase in separate and unequal conditions of education and employment. Now comes Proposition 54--a wrecking ball for race relations in California. Promoted by a disingenuous, misty-eyed Connerly as a means to eliminate racism, Proposition 54 would suppress discussion of race in order to cover up a growing reality of racist inequality in a majority-minority state. By forbidding the state from collecting racial data, Proposition 54 would render K-12 school integration illegal, ban any efforts to measure the effects of racist policies, make it impossible to utilize hard statistics to expose discrimination, and hamper medical research into diseases that affect racial and ethnic groups to differing degrees.

Far from leading to a bright dawn of California unity, this proposition would deepen the state's racial divide. Made into law, its illusion of unanimity will mean an official denial of the existence of inequality, in the face of growing bitterness and resentment amongst black and Latino youth who are disproportionately shut out--by racism--from many of the best opportunities in the state.

Connerly's campaigns are part of a rightwing attempt to take over the state of California and make it the political backwater of the nation. He is financed by a handful of wealthy racists who realize that the best way to resegregate the society and impose a regime of political conservatism is for a black spokesperson to publicly lead the effort. Ward Connerly is this appalling voice. He must be denied use of the regent title and the UC name to advance his anti-civil rights agenda. Sign and circulate the petition demanding that the Board of Regents vote for his resignation. We can defeat Proposition 54, sound the death knell for anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, defeat the right-wing's attempt to take over the state, and get Ward Connerly off the UC Board of Regents. If we organize and act now, we can put California in the lead of the fight for civil rights!

Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration
And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)
www.bamn.com * california@bamn.com