By BOB HUFF |PUBLISHED: July 29, 2020 at 10:09 a.m. | UPDATED: July 29, 2020 at 10:20 a.m.
Here we go again.
In 2014, while flexing their newly found two-thirds supermajority, the state Senate passed Senate Constitutional Amendment 5 (SCA5) and sent it to the Assembly for their vote. As Senate minority leader then, my wife Mei Mei and I were at the epicenter of the battle to defeat SCA5, working with thousands of concerned parents and students.
We prevailed, but with a backdrop of a presidential election coupled with rampant health, economic, racial and social unrest, this year, the Legislature succeeded in passing Assembly Constitutional Amendment 5, placing Proposition 16 on our November ballot.
We live in troubled times. Racism exists. Discrimination exists. But the answer to racial and ethnic discrimination is not more discrimination. That is what Prop. 16 does.
The safeguards we put in place with Proposition 209, the state legislature wants to eject from our constitution to more easily unbalance the scales of equality.
Here are the words found in Article 1, Section 31 of our state constitution that the legislature finds objectionable and want to remove: “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”
By removing these words from our constitution, politicians want to roll back our civil rights protections, and make government discrimination legal for who we admit to our public schools, who we hire for public jobs, and to whom we award government contracts. Merit and fairness will be out—cronyism will be back in.
We got it right when we passed civil rights laws in the 1960’s to prohibit discrimination and we got it right with Proposition 209 a generation later that strengthened antidiscrimination policies here in California.
Following the passage of Prop. 209, the cost of Government contracts dropped. According to research by Professor Justin Marion at the University of California, Santa Cruz, costs on state-funded contracts fell by 5.6 percent relative to federally funded projects that still employed preferential treatment. This has saved taxpayers billions of dollars without compromising quality of work performed.https://381aa712881589259dc6eae098e7a0ab.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
It is worth noting that even six years after Prop. 209 passed, women owned businesses were still receiving the same percentage of construction contracts from Caltrans. They were able to successfully compete without the preferential treatment they previously received.
At the same time there has been an increase in small business contracting programs which are completely legal, where all small firms are competing against each other without preferential consideration. That has benefited all taxpayers in our state.
University of California data reveals that in 1999, shortly after Proposition 209 was passed, there were 4,527 African-Americans enrolled system wide; in 2019, the number had grown to 9,317, a 106 percent increase. Hispanics saw even better results and went from 16,967 in 1999 to 55,971 in 2019, a 230 percent increase.
Clearly, the existing language of our state constitution is not holding back diversity in our public universities.
The real solution to getting even higher admissions by Latinos and Blacks to our public universities is to better prepare them from Kindergarten through high school. We force our kids to attend school from ages 6 to 18, but the public schools they experience are not equal.
For example, the Legislative Analyst notes that 21 percent of African American students who graduated in 2018 were considered prepared for college or career, compared 33 percent of Latinos, 52 percent of white students and 74 percent of Asian students. This is not acceptable.
Additionally, students are held hostage by the zip code in which they live. If a mom or dad in a poor K-12 school district want to take their child across town to a public school with a better program for his or her child, there are extremely limited ways to do so, even though both schools are funded with public tax dollars.
California is the most diverse state in the nation and must step up to the challenges that brings. The real solution for racial equality is comprehensive public-school reform in our K-12 system, not government sanctioned discrimination to create more losers than winners as Proposition 16 will do. Vote No on Proposition 16.
Bob Huff was the Calfifornia Senate minority leader from 2012-2015. Huff represented California’s 29thSenate District which covers portions of Los Angeles, Orange, and San Bernardino counties.
Proposition 16 will bring back racial discrimination: Bob Huff
NO on PROP 16