Affirmative Action May Return To California

Speaker 1: 00:00 Affirmative action in which hiring practices can favor candidates based on race, ethnicity, and sex was banned by California voters with proposition two Oh nine back in 1996, but it could be making a comeback assembly woman, Shirley Weber, a San Diego Democrat has authored a new bill that would put the issue before voters. Again, this fall assembly woman Weber joins me now. Welcome to [inaudible]. Speaker 2: 00:25 Well, thank you for the invitation. Speaker 1: 00:26 So your bill comes at this turbulent time with a nationwide debate about race and justice, and it's passed the state assembly and is now in the Senate. What would it do exactly? Speaker 2: 00:37 What it would do is basically remove the ban, uh, prop two Oh nine, put a ban on all, um, issues that might deal with race or gender in the area of employment, um, and, uh, admin school admissions, as well as contracting. And this bill basically lifts the ban, takes us back to the original, uh, affirmative action programs that existed, uh, under the federal guidelines back in the sixties. So it, uh, it is designed to address the issue of racial inequality, uh, by making sure that we remove all barriers to, uh, individuals who may be qualified to attend institutions or employment, or even contracting, Speaker 1: 01:17 And your bill by itself, doesn't reverse the ban on affirmative action, but rather asks voters to decide, is that right? Speaker 2: 01:24 Exactly. It has been 24 years since prop tool nine went into effect. And, uh, we think after 24 years, the people of California should decide whether or not it's working for them, whether it's not creating the kind of workforce that we want and the kind of educational environment that we need in California. So it's been 24 years and it was, um, passed during a time of tremendous racial division fostered by our governor, Pete Wilson at the time who was attacking, uh, bilingual education, attacking diversity and all those kinds of things. We had his, he at high aspirations of running for president and he thought that the divisive thing that he was going to do was basically going to allow him to move into the white house. And it didn't, but it had an adverse effect. All of those things and an adverse effect in California, Speaker 1: 02:09 What would you say has been the effects of the state's ban on affirmative action? I mean, did it increase diversity on college campuses? Speaker 2: 02:16 No, it did not. And those who thought it would hurt it. It did not do that, but it did decrease some of the engagement and, and it did increase decrease for, uh, and many of our schools or professional schools, our law schools, our med schools, those kinds of places where we had, you know, maybe 20% of our students with kids of color went down to one or two students. Um, when we look at what happened in San Diego, particularly in area of contracting in the nineties, doing affirmative action, we had, uh, contracting in the city of San Diego where about 30 to 40% of all of our contracts and, uh, went to, uh, women and minorities and veterans and disabled. And when I was chair of these citizens equal opportunity commission in 2010, uh, that number had gone from 30, 40% down to one and a half percent for all of them. Speaker 2: 03:05 And the same is true in Los Angeles. So that what we're seeing is that those businesses are no longer being able to do a work with the city. Many of our small businesses have gone out of business because they can't survive without at least stable contracting from the, from the cities and the counties. And so we saw a drop of about 30 to 40%, uh, women who were maybe 20% of contracts in the city of San Diego, went down to one and 2%. Uh, Los Angeles tells me that their women contractors now are at 2%, the Latinos at 2%. And the number of African American contractors is so low. It is not even registering as 1%. So what we've seen is that particularly in the area of contracting that the numbers have gone down dismally. And the interesting thing is that when prop 209 came into effect, everyone thought it was about the universities. They thought it was about admissions to college. And what it really was about business, because it was funded by the bids, by the building industry. And the businesses began to, they funded a prop two Oh nine and as a result, they were the ones who have benefited immensely from, um, from, uh, proposition tool nine. And the rest of the communities that exist in the city have, uh, have lost contracts, have lost businesses and many have moved away because they can't survive in California. Speaker 1: 04:20 So assembly woman Weber. I wanted to ask you some might say that taking race into account when making a decision about hiring and college admissions is its own form of discrimination. That's what they argued when two and nine passed. What's your response to that argument? Speaker 2: 04:35 You know, there are many things that this, that, uh, that, uh, we take into consideration and, and oftentimes people will focus on that, but nobody takes into consideration that our universities give preference to athletes, our universities and employment give preference to a legacy that if your parents went to that school, you get special treatment. If you remember the board of Regents who were the first ones to talk about equal opportunity and access back in 1996, did not want to give up their preference of allowing all of their relatives to go to university of California without, regardless of their qualifications. So, you know, this is not the people who are still controlling admissions and what have you are still basically the majority of the society so that you can't discriminate against yourself. Number one, if you, if you're, if you're putting together a program, you can't say, Oh, well, I've discriminated against myself, simply because you've decided to have diversity in the program itself, but it's not, it's not discrimination. Speaker 2: 05:32 And, and, and, and the bottom line is that you can't look at a system as our system does, that has been built on discrimination, continues to promote discrimination, and then turn around because someone says, wait a minute, this has been unfair. Uh, let's change the name of the game. It's changed the rules and regulations. Let's make it equal for folks to compete and help those to get to an equal playing field. Now you're saying, Oh, I'm being discriminated against why? Because you've got your benefits doing discrimination. And, and, um, you got your benefits doing that during the timeframe where we were denying everyone else and opportunity and access, uh, you can't turn the, you can't turn around and say, Oh, now let's all be, let's all be equal. And so people want to say that, Oh, it's reverse discrimination. It is not diverse discrimination. It is basically trying to level the playing field so that everyone is able to compete and to be successful. Speaker 1: 06:19 Well, speaking of, of universities, the UC Regents last week, endorsed restoring affirmative action, which is interesting since it was a UC Regents ward currently who proposed, proposed ending affirmative action in the first place. But let me ask you, if this measure is approved by voters, will schools and government agencies actually be required to adopt affirmative action programs. Speaker 2: 06:40 They should. Yes, they will. They will adopt affirmative action programs. The, the, uh, hopefully the constituents and the citizens of California will, will demand that they do, uh, because what will happen as a result of that, we will start looking at the data and we will say, okay, you need to have some goals. And then we don't set quotas, but you need to look at your numbers. And people don't often look at their numbers. They don't even recognize the fact that because we've gotten away from it so much, that their workforce is not very diverse, Speaker 1: 07:07 Right? There's another bill you've introduced that would form a task force to begin to study how to give reparations to African Americans. And both of these issues, reparations and affirmative action had been debated frequently in the past. What do you think is different about this moment? Speaker 2: 07:21 Well, I think this moment clearly, you know, it's interesting. We have had a number of racial incidents in this country, uh, and, uh, since the early 19 hundreds, and sometimes even before that, uh, and oftentimes our response has been very, um, light, sometimes very weak, um, ceremonial. Uh, you do a couple of things. You change the name of a building. You do this, you do that. And as a result, we, we go about our business as usual. This bill, uh, will, um, the reparations bill 2131, we'll focus on California because obviously this is California. And we'll focus on the California's role in slavery, because most of us believe in California was lifted as a, as a, a free state, not a slave state. Yet it enacted a number of laws that had an adverse effect upon, uh, individuals who were brought to California as slaves. Speaker 2: 08:13 It returned people back to slavery who came to the free state. It participated in the fugitive slave laws, and afterwards it still continued to, uh, discriminate against Negroes and Indians and forbidding them to live certain places and to interact with certain places and deny them the rights in court as well, that they could not go and testify against the white person in court. So there were a lot of things that California did that, that had an adverse effect on that. So this is a bill that we think will begin to address those issues and figure out what California needs to do to basically atone for its its participation in, um, in the slave trade. Speaker 1: 08:51 I've been speaking with assembly woman, Shirley Webber, Democrat of San Diego. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: 08:55 Well, thank you for the opportunity you take care.