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2	Up Front Columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr., explores both sides of the affirmative action debate, read more...
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Race to the Top

By taking into account race in school admissions, are American schools closing the racial divide or widening it?

It’s still permissible for K-12 school districts in the United States to consider race in deciding which students are assigned to which schools. It’s also still permissible, in most states, for colleges and universities to take “affirmative action” to diversify their campuses by considering race in admissions.
But that might not be true for much longer. Both of these practices are under siege, mostly by the right wing but also with the tacit support of some liberals who have had their fill of racial preferences—especially when they hit close to home. The new definition of a conservative is a liberal whose 8-year-old daughter is assigned to a school across town or whose 18-year-old son is applying to college.
Not that the left wing has a monopoly on hypocrisy. Conservatives have long espoused the virtues of local control in education because they thought it might save them a few bucks off their tax bill. Now, they’ve done an about-face as they wave a disapproving finger at local school districts who take note of race to desegregate schools and scold state colleges that do the same thing to ensure diversity.
All this is coming to a head because of what’s happening at the U.S. Supreme Court and with state ballot initiatives.
The court is wrestling with whether it’s constitutional for school districts—such as those in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle—to consider the race of students in implementing voluntarily integration plans. From the sound of the arguments in December, at least five justices are ready to strike down the practice of making student assignments based on skin color. Five votes are enough to seal the fate of such programs in school districts across the country.
That would be a supreme mistake. It’s easy to say that race shouldn’t matter and that we should be colorblind. It’s more difficult for a district like the one in Louisville—which has a history of racial segregation—to shed its past and become a world-class city. The last half-century taught us that institutions can’t leap from segregation to equality in a single bound. There is a weigh-station, and it’s called integration. It can be messy, but it’s almost always necessary. Someday, the process will no longer be necessary. But it should be up to local districts to decide when that day arrives.
I feel differently about the debate over racial preferences at the college and university level. And that’s where ballot initiatives come in. The trend started in California, where in 1996 voters approved Proposition 209. The initiative barred public institutions from considering race or sex in public education, employment or contracting. The state of Washington followed suit. Most recently, in November, Michigan voters approved Proposition 2, which bans racial and gender preferences by amending the state constitution.
These are all victories for affirmative action foe Ward Connerly. The former regent of the University of California was a driving force behind Proposition 209.
I like Connerly. I have ever since we first met in 1996. It didn’t hurt that, as an African American, he is despised by some of his own kind for doing his own thinking —an experience with which I was then, and still am, intimately acquainted.
I even like ballot initiatives such as Proposition 209. It’s not that I buy the fairy tale advanced by white males who can’t wait to jump on the victim bandwagon and insist they were wronged by “reverse discrimination.” Only a tiny percentage of reverse discrimination claims ever prevail in court. That’s because, in order to win a discrimination suit, it helps to be able to prove that the mistreatment was systematic and done on the basis of race. That is, were other white males singled out and discriminated against because they were white males? Not likely.
Connerly acknowledges that different people have different motives for opposing preferences.
“There is one camp,” he told me in an interview, “and I’m in it, which says that there are certain principles that you hold dear in a democratic society. There is another camp that is probably borderline racist, the KKK’ers and others, who—and they’re small—they just don’t want those n-word people and minorities getting all these benefits that they don’t get. They don’t care about the principle. They just have these attitudes that are racist. Then there’s the group that believes that they’re losing contracts or jobs because they’re white males.”
Put me in a fourth camp. Over the years, I’ve come to oppose racial preferences because these programs often hurt the people they intend to help by lowering standards and camouflaging the mediocrity of our K-12 public schools.
And how do you cure that mediocrity? The answer may have something to do with preserving the local control that many conservatives support—at least, some of the time.

Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is an editorial board member of the San Diego Union-Tribune, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group and a regular contributor of commentary to USA TODAY and CNN.com.