Ward Connerly

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Ward Connerly bigraphy, stories - political activist, businessman

Ward Connerly : biography

15 June 1939 –

Wardell Anthony "Ward" Connerly (born June 15, 1939) is an American political activist, businessman, and former University of California Regent (1993–2005). He is also the founder and the chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, a national non-profit organization in opposition to racial and gender preferences. He is considered to be the man behind California’s Proposition 209 prohibiting race- and gender-based preferences in state hiring, contracting and state university admissions, a program formerly widely known as affirmative action.

Reception

Personal

In 1995, then California State Senator (and current congresswoman) Diane Watson said about Connerly, "He’s married to a white woman. He wants to be white. He wants a colorless society. He has no ethnic pride. He doesn’t want to be black." Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for The Boston Globe, characterized this attack as part of the personal abuse conservative blacks received from liberal blacks who opposed their programs.

After Connerly published his autobiography, Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences in 2000, some relatives claimed his accounts of an impoverished childhood were exaggerated or false. Connerly’s aunt Bertha Louis, whom he had lived with and who was close to his grandmother, confirmed his account and said his detractors "are just lyin’ on him. It’s jealousy and it’s hatred, as low as you can get."

Affirmative action and desegregation

Asked in 2003 if Proposition 54 could derail school integration efforts in California, Connerly said: "I don’t care whether they are segregated or not… kids need to be learning, and I place more value on these kids getting educated than I do on whether we have some racial balancing or not."

Connerly’s opposition to affirmative action has generated both opposition and support. Connerly believes affirmative action is a form of racism and that people can achieve success without preferential treatment in college enrollment or in employment. He thinks that selective affirmative action discriminates against minorities such as Asian Indians and South East Asians, as some of their people have experienced discrimination in the past, but they do not receive the benefits of race-based admissions. Critics contend Connerly fails to recognize the damaging extent of past racism for African Americans and Hispanics, that contemporary institutionalized racism is pervasive and powerful, and that affirmative action can overcome the residual effects of past discrimination on people of color.

The Detroit-based pro-affirmative action group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) said that as CEO of Connerly & Associates, Inc., Connerly benefited financially from state affirmative action programs in contracting. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the same facts.

BAMN opposed Connerly’s efforts to put the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative on the 2006 Michigan Ballot, and disrupted a Michigan Board of Canvassers meeting that year in protest.

In relation to Attacking Affirmative Action, a program on Now on PBS in August 2008, Connerly said, "I think that in some quarters, many parts of the country, a white male is really disadvantaged… Because we have developed this notion of women and minorities being so disadvantaged and we have to help them, that we have, in many cases, twisted the thing so that it’s no longer a case of equal opportunity. It’s a case of putting a fist on the scale."

Campaign against racial preferences

After his appointment to the University of California board of regents in 1993, Connerly began to learn more about the workings of its affirmative action program. In 1994, he heard from Jerry and Ellan Cook, whose son had been rejected at the University of California, San Francisco (UC) Medical School. Connerly became convinced that affirmative action, as practiced by the UC, was another kind of racial discrimination. Cook, a statistician, had presented data showing that white and ethnic Asian students were being denied admission despite having better grades and test scores than other students who were being admitted. Connerly proposed abolishing the controversial racially based programs, while allowing the university to consider social or economic factors. The regents passed the proposal in January 1996 despite protests from activist Jesse Jackson and other supporters of affirmative action. The year after affirmative action was abolished, the number of Asian students admitted to UC increased markedly.