Supporters of this amendment, which seeks to restore affirmative action in the November election, say its passage will help remove policies that have fueled racism for more than 20 years in the state.

Ethnic Media Services. Peninsula 360 Press.

24 years after California voters passed Proposition 209, which prohibits considering race and gender in public college admissions, a new initiative on Nov. 3 seeks to reverse that decision. Known as affirmative action, the option will be back on the ballot in California with Proposition 16, in what its proponents say is a tool to "improve racial opportunity gaps for Californians.

The three co-chairs who spearheaded the proposal, all California civil rights veterans, spoke on a panel organized by Ethnic Media Services via Zoom, at a time when protests about systemic racism and injustices against ethnic communities are raging across the country, as the COVID-19 pandemic hits immigrant and black families hard.

"Proposition 16 directly addresses the issue of systemic racism," said Eva Paterson, president and co-founder of The Equal Justice Society, a national legal organization focused on civil rights and anti-discrimination. "We (African Americans) don't have enough political power. We have the numbers, but we don't have the money to contribute to political campaigns or pay lobbyists ? with affirmative action we will have more access to higher education, better jobs, better health insurance and even greater access to public office," she said.

In practice, affirmative action seeks to ensure that groups that have traditionally been discriminated against (women, black, brown, Hispanic, indigenous, Native American, Asian American, and immigrants in general) have greater access to education, employment, and hiring opportunities through the adoption of gender- and race-friendly policies.

This is in contrast to what was approved in Proposition 209 of 1996 with the 56% of the general vote, but with a broad rejection by ethnic community voters (between 60% and 70% voted no). This initiative led by Ward Connerly, a University of California (UC) regent appointed by then-Governor Pete Wilson, made it constitutional to prohibit the state from "discriminating or giving preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, and public contracting. Critics say this confusing language was intended to appeal to white majorities.

"It was misleadingly labeled as a civil rights initiative in California," said Tomás Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). "By using the words 'preferential treatment' instead of 'affirmative action,' I intended to promote an unnecessary ban on discrimination that was already resolved in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education on racial segregation in schools.

But opponents of affirmative action have challenged this tool before the Supreme Court, and last month the Justice Department charged Yale with illegal discrimination in admissions against white and Asian-American students.

According to Saenz, what Proposition 209 did in California instead was affect the access of people from ethnic communities to educational spaces from kindergarten to higher education. Today, although 60% of high school seniors are Black or Latino, only 29% of those races make up the freshman corps on campuses throughout the California university system. One year after its approval, the number of Black students at Berkeley Law School rose from 30 to 1; in other areas, it made it even more difficult to recruit Latino, Asian and Black police in California counties.

"No politician wants to address discrimination if the law prevents him from implementing something to solve it. Under Proposition 209, anyone interested in addressing affirmative action is limited by gender- and race-neutral approaches to addressing those disparities," Saenz added.

The expert cited the example of how funds allocated to the locally controlled funding formula that provides additional resources to schools based on the number of foster youth, those with low incomes and English language learners, were delayed by legislators concerned about violating Prop 209. "Most foster youth are African American, while most English language learners are Asian or Latino... it's not a law that helps combat discrimination.

On the labor front, proponents of Proposition 16, which will be voted on at the polls, argue that many Asian-American businesses were brutally impacted at the start of the pandemic by comments made by President Donald Trump himself when he baptized COVID-19 as the Chinese or Kung Flu virus. This has diminished the ability of small businesses to contract with the state for those covered by Proposition 219 and these racist comments.

"Since President Trump used these terms we have documented 2500 reports of hate incidents," said Vincent Pan, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a San Francisco-based social justice community organization. "Although Congresswoman Grace Meng introduced a resolution against hatred of Asians (which eventually passed), 164 Republicans voted against that resolution and that is the party that most vigorously opposes Prop 16.

Pan said that in cities like Atlanta or Chicago the possibility for Asian Americans to hire with the state is much greater than in San Francisco, even though in the latter city the workforce of that race is superior in number. And the reason, he said, is the absence of affirmative action. The same goes for access to the wage protection program (PPP), a federal measure to help small businesses during the pandemic that 90% for businesses owned by women or non-white people could not access.

Validators and villains

As a result of Prop 209, women and ethnic communities have lost nearly $1 billion a year according to Equal Justice Society estimates shared by Paterson. The activist said there has been no incentive for white people to employ subcontractors from other races, which also limits the growth of business and resources within the community.

But his optimism with Proposition 16 is based on the fact that the demographics in California have changed a lot in the last two decades, to the point that almost 43% of the state's voters are of a different race than white. Paterson also said that even before George Floyd's death at the hands of police in Minneapolis, a fact that has aroused the solidarity of white Americans who "took off the blindfolds in the face of racism," most of them already agreed with affirmative action.

"We have a strategy that's called validators and villains," Paterson said of this home stretch. Prop 16 is supported by people like John Legend, the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kamala Harris, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and every professional sports player in the Bay Area.

"When people recognize that they are the validators, they come over to our side," Paterson said. "And when they know that among the villains who oppose this proposal, there are people like Trump, then they come over to our side as well," he concluded.