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Ward
Connerly and his rich white benefactors want to erase Black people
from the official American map. Hispanics are also targeted to
disappear from the public record before they even have a chance
to properly celebrate their “Largest Minority” status. Asians,
Pacific Islanders and Native Americans would lose the tools to
measure how society is treating them, and the ability to do much
of anything about it.
It
is fitting that the Connerly-led attempt at ethnic cleansing,
the purest  product
to date of racist American illogic, will be staged in California,
the first state to achieve a non-white majority – 53 percent,
according to the 2000
census. On October 7, California voters will have the opportunity
to engage in two acts of mass self-delusion: first, they can
elect Arnold Schwarzenegger
governor, which requires that they pretend he is an actual person,
rather than an Aryan-modeled hologram with an accent; second,
they can vote “Yes” on Connerly’s Racial Privacy Act (RPI):
The
state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity,
color or national origin in the operation of education, public
contracting or public employment… Classification in other state
operations are prohibited unless they serve a compelling state
interest and are approved by two-thirds majority of the legislature
and approved by the governor.
The
intended effect of RPI is to make it nearly impossible to compile
evidence of the existence of racism, or to create public policy
that would counter the effects of racism, or to identify the
victims of racism. A “color blind” society would be achieved
by blinding citizens and government to the facts of bias. It
is the equivalent of vanquishing crime by making it impossible
to introduce evidence of lawbreaking, or conquering disease
by eliminating the practice of medicine. Racial peace will reign
in the land, the theory goes, since there will be no official
racial facts available to argue about.
Minority
rule
Only
an insane citizenry would vote to deprive itself of information
vital to the workings of society, which is why Ward Connerly
has every reason to believe he will win in October. Although
whites are a minority in California (and will soon be, in
Texas), they still make up a majority of adults in the state,
and 70 percent of the
voters. Connerly and his insanely named American
Civil Rights Institute won passage of Proposition 209 in
1996, ending affirmative action at state institutions and agencies.
He duplicated the victory in the State of Washington, in 1998,
failed in Michigan in 2000, but is scheduled for a comeback
bid on that state ballot’s in November 2004.
Although
the 64 year-old Connerly likes to think of himself as a dragon-slayer
(“This is almost like a war out there”), he’s actually more
like an Energizer Bunny in service of his creators, the Bradley,
Scaife and Olin Foundations. NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, speaking at
the organization’s national conference in Miami this
summer, placed Connerly and the Racial Privacy Initiative
in their proper, mercenary context:
If it
passes, it will hide racial differences in health care, education,
and disease, making it harder to file discrimination complaints
and to hold discriminatory organizations and institutions responsible
for their deeds.
It
will keep the state from collecting much-needed demographic
information by race, but as long as race counts in America,
we've got to count race.
If it
passes, California will keep track of every kind of discrimination
except discrimination by race and ethnicity. Studies on racial
profiling, disparate medical treatment for people of color,
black and white rates of incarceration, racial composition of
juries, pass/fail rates for students of different races, loan
approval rates for blacks – knowing all this and more will be
forbidden.
The
only color Connerly recognizes is the color of money. After
years of loudly complaining about the so-called "civil
rights industry," he's created a lucrative multi-million
dollar career fighting fairness. He says he's non-profit but
not if you look at his paycheck.
He
made four times the salary of the governor of California last
year – $700,000. In the four years ending in June 2002, he made
$2.1 million dollars.
Connerly
is probably the Hard Right’s highest paid Black front man –
and lies shamelessly about it. “If I'm doing this as a puppet
for somebody, I'm one of the dumbest puppets in the world. At
least I should get paid for it, you know,” the University of
California Regent told the Interracial
Voice magazine in April 1999. In fact, from January 1, 1997
to January 1, 1999, Connerly’s one-man-band American Civil Rights
Institute collected $1,750,000 from the three evil sisters Bradley,
Scaife and Olin, who contributed $1,425,000 more to their
Black front over the next two years and continue to sustain
Connerly’s frenetic activities. So popular is Connerly among
the racist rich, he opened up an additional “non-profit” pocket,
the American Civil Rights Coalition, from which he also draws
a salary. Julian Bond’s figures on Connerly’s income were documented
by the Sacramento Bee, in a June
28 article.
The
best Internet source on the paymasters of the Hard Right is
MediaTransparency.org,
which offers a veritable “all you ever wanted to know” about
Ward Connerly, the political hustler who masquerades as a concerned,
color-blind citizen:
“Every
day that I speak out as an ordinary citizen,” he said in remarks
March 23, 2000 at the Reagan Library, “ I do so as a product,
a disciple, of that Reagan revolution – a revolution that produced
a band of citizens at Americans for Tax Reform, American Enterprise
Institute, Empower America, Claremont Institute, CATO Institute,
Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, Hoover Institute,
the Young America’s Foundation, and a host of other think tanks,
talk show hosts, and activist organizations dedicated to making
America better by completing the Reagan Revolution.”
Each
of the organizations named by Connerly is funded through some
combination of Bradley, Scaife and Olin. Connerly’s book, Creating
Equal, was published by Bradley’s Encounter Books, positioning
Connerly among such literary lights as Charles Murray, author
of the infamously racist The Bell Curve, who received
$1 million from Bradley.
Playing
to the mob
Ward
Connerly, the self-described “self-made” businessman, is really
just another ward of the super-wealthy, who are smart enough
to realize that the only way they can remain on top while the
domestic economy crumbles is to constantly incite racial conflict
(“This is almost like a war out there”) – the always reliable,
ever available quick fix for whatever threatens the rule of
Big Capital. Bradley, Scaife and Olin understand that you can
always gather a quorum for a lynch mob in America.
The
Racial Privacy Act is an incitement to scorched earth race warfare,
a declaration of a desire to purge offending populations from
the national record, even as the U.S. moves inexorably to becoming
a majority non-white country. It is also, of course, a farce.
 The
U.S. Census was initiated in 1790 to serve the needs of business.
Commerce required that people and property be counted, to provide
businessmen with better tools to sell more things to more people.
Even slaves had to first be counted before being politically
reduced to three-fifths their personhood. They were then counted
again, their value tallied as property, a vital measurement
of the health of the nation.
The
United States overflows with data, its population constantly
sliced and diced by armies of marketers. Speculators electronically
rush their monies from place to place based on numbers expensively
extracted from the cacophony of market capitalism. Politicians
console unemployed manufacturing workers by reminding them that
the U.S. is the leading player of the Information Age.
Connerly’s
Racial Privacy Act would make it prohibitively expensive to
gather information on how race really works in the public sectors
of society. Black and brown people’s arguments would thus be
reduced to anecdotes, even as prison populations become Blacker,
schools serving minority students visibly deteriorate, and cemeteries
fill up on the Black side of town.
Private
capital will have no problem assembling, cooking and disseminating
its own data. And who is better suited to fund and oversee this
task than – Bradley, Scaife and Olin, with the help of Ward
Connerly and his fellow hirelings among the “think tanks, talk
show hosts, and activist organizations dedicated to making America
better by completing the Reagan Revolution.”
Patricia
J. Williams got it right in a May
30, 2002 article in The Nation:
It
is actually about privatizing racially based behavior. And privatized
racism has been a dream of the far right since the first whites-only
private schools sprang up in the wake of Brown v. Board of
Education. Segregation is "private choice," a
"social" problem, not a legal one, according to this
logic. You can't force people to love you. Suing over discrimination
is victimology. As long as the government doesn't force you
to drink out of a separate water fountain or go to a separate
school, then that is the limit of equal opportunity.
All
roads lead back to the same cabal of rich racists. In Michigan,
Connerly works hand in glove with heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune
and the President of Amway in support of his Michigan
Civil Rights Initiative – Hard Right-speak for the anti-affirmative
action referendum on the November, 2004 ballot. (See WorldNetDaily.com,
July 24.) Organizers for BAMN
(By Any Means Necessary) plan an August 23 march in Washington
to “defeat Ward Connerly and his segregationist billionaires
club.”
The
con man’s complaints
In the
final analysis, Connerly is a high-paid whore for Bradley, Scaife
and Olin. But, like his fellow self-hater, Clarence Thomas,
he’s not a happy hooker. Bile gurgles up from his tortured innards,
a sickness that can be smelled from a distance.
 In
a crude pitch to African Americans, Connerly warns that Californians
of Mexican descent “will soon be a majority” – showing that
he does count racial and ethnic heads when it serves his purposes.
In a July 5 interview with the Washington
Post, Connerly "said he was tired of seeing Mexican
Americans characterize themselves as underprivileged minorities.”
"They
don't want to see those categories go," he said. "They
want to see affirmative action policies remain so they can take
advantage of them. They want to claim minority status when,
in fact, they will soon be a majority in California. They want
to hide behind the term 'Latino' and 'people of color,' but
most of them check the 'white' box [on the census form] anyway."
Connerly
vacillates wildly between assertions of Blackness (“I say as
a black man that black people have to come to terms…”) to spittle-dripping
rejection of African American-ness.
“…African-American
is a term that I don't like. In fact, I hate that term, because
it presumes my ethnic background or my national origin, and
when you say that I'm African-American, especially when my African
ancestry is less than all the rest of me, you're embracing that
one-drop rule mentality. So, I fight the one-drop rule, because
I am of mixed origin. My wife is white, and my grandkids are
all of me, all of my wife. Their mother is half-Vietnamese.
For us, these silly little boxes on these application forms
have got to go. Implicit in all that I do and say is my personal
agenda of getting rid of those friggin' boxes and getting the
nation beyond the point at which you demand that I identify
myself as a black man or an African-American.”
Connerly
made those remarks to the Interracial Voice. He assiduously
cultivates self-styled multi-racial organizations, and has established
a network of Racial Privacy Initiative chapters among such grouplets
across the nation.
While
preparing an article on Connerly last year, 
ran across a Florida Civil Rights Initiative web site. Hilariously,
when we returned to http://www.fcri.org a few days ago, we discovered
the address now belongs to a site offering – Interracial sex!
In a
1997 interview with the New York Times, Connerly carefully delineated
his ancestry as “one-quarter black, three-eighths Irish, one-quarter
French and one-eighth Choctaw.” Clearly, however, the Leesville,
Louisiana native would sell all of his ancestors for a dollar.
The
Race to nowhere
Some
Republicans in California and Michigan fear that Connerly’s
Racial Privacy and anti-affirmative action initiatives will
draw large numbers of Blacks and Latinos to the polls, threatening
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial chances October 7 and George
Bush among Michigan voters in 2004. People of color and sane
whites will find themselves performing the counterintuitive,
unnatural acts of voting “No” to Racial Privacy (Proposition
54, CA) and Civil Rights (MI). A recent poll
shows only about a quarter of Californian’s are familiar with
RPI – although Connerly’s allies will provide plenty of money
to ensure that their voters punch the right hole.
Whatever
the outcome, the troglodytes at the Bradley, Scaife and Olin
Foundations will have achieved their larger objective: to impose
yet another layer of unreality on the American body politic
in order to obscure the true state of the nation. Only two generations
have passed since the Civil Rights and Black Power movements
hammered the first cracks in the edifice of America, White Man’s
Country – an assault on the core assumptions of native and immigrant
whites of every previous era. Connerly’s racist referendums
are designed to push the buttons of those whites who long deeply
for a return to “normalcy” – a society in which whites monopolize
the national conversation, like in the good old days. By voting
to censure reality, in the form of racial data, these whites
imagine they are shouting a collective “Shut up” at the colored
intruders on their domain.
It
will no doubt cause a dizzying feeling, this rush of victory,
heightened by the swirling motions of a society going down the
drain.
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