Saturday, November 2, 2019

The "vote no" campaign on Washington's Referendum 88 only further demonstrates--as I-200 did--that racists are blind to the meaning of "justice" and only support the "equality" of their own


I recall back in 1998 seeing a black man soliciting signatures for a ballot initiative called I-200. I asked him if he knew what the initiative was about; he told me it was about “equal rights.” I chuckled at that and responded “Is that what they told you? Yeah, it’s equal rights for white people.” He just gave me a dumb grin; I guessed that someone was paying him to con not just himself but others who didn’t read between its lines. The initiative, sponsored by perennial far-right anti-tax hack Tim Eyman, stated that “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.” The only phrase in this otherwise empty proclamation is “grant preferential treatment”—code for “affirmative action.” 

The reality is that preferential treatment is practiced all the time, whether it is white people only hiring other white people, Asians and Indians only hiring other Asians and Indians, women only hiring other women, etc. It happened before I-200, and continued even after its repeal by the state legislature last April. I-200 was principally meant to effect college admissions; despite the fact that only a handful of black students are admitted to the University of Washington every year, and Hispanics barely more, you still have 5,000 white high school students in this state every year who may try to blame “inferior” black and Hispanic students for being rejected for admission. UW’s Fall 2019 freshman admission profile indicates that only 34 percent of the freshman class are white, which seems quite a low percentage for a state often thought of as “white.” Who to blame? The black enrollment? Only 2.6 percent of the incoming class is black. How about the Asian and (mostly Asian) international class? They account for 44 percent of UW’s enrollment; while there were always a lot of east Asian students at UW, the number of south Asian students there has risen dramatically in the last few years. 

I-200 actually passed by a margin of 58 to 42 percent in this so-called “blue state,” either out of a “misunderstanding” of its intent (despite the fact that the governor and most newspaper editorials advocated for its rejection), and has remained a blemish on the state’s supposed reputation as a “progressive” state. In 2018, activists began gathering signatures for Initiative 1000, and enough were gathered to require only approval by the legislature, which passed it along a party-line vote last spring. The initiative still bans “preferential” treatment, although with some rather confusing mental gymnastics:

The act of using race, sex, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, sexual orientation, the presence of any sensory, mental, or physical disability, and honorably discharged veteran or military status as the sole qualifying factor to select a lesser qualified candidate over a more qualified candidate for a public education, public employment, or public contracting opportunity.

The key phrase is “sole qualifying factor.” Again, there is more than a crumb of hypocrisy here —not because it would be underrepresented and discriminated against minorities who were ever the “beneficiaries” of “preferential treatment”  to begin with, but because whites (men and women) and Asians have been and always will receive de facto “preference” in employment because of perceptions of “superiority,” and that these groups or subgroups prefer their own company (isn’t it “coincidental” that “prefer” slips so easily into “preference”?). Of course “preference” can swing both ways, depending upon local politics; I could point to the fact that seemingly half of all of King County Metro’s bus drivers are black—thus well over-represented—and there seems to be almost no Hispanic drivers. I have frequently sent in on-line complaints about what I view as a Metro’s culture of discrimination against Hispanics as exhibited by the behavior a few of its drivers; but as I have pointed out before, this just seems to be part of the “culture” in general.

Opposition to the initiative is based in part by the privileged groups' desire to “prefer” to work with people they feel “comfortable” with—they don’t want to be forced to “reverse-discriminate” against their own kind—but mostly because it suggests a return to a “quota” system in college admissions. We are talking about, of course, the concept of “affirmative action.” I-1000 defines affirmative action as 

A policy in which an individual's race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, age, the presence of any sensory, mental, or physical disability, and honorably discharged veteran or military status are factors considered in the selection of qualified women, honorably discharged military veterans, persons in protected age categories, persons with disabilities, and minorities for opportunities in public education, public employment, and public contracting. Affirmative action includes, but shall not be limited to, recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, outreach, setting and achieving goals and timetables, and other measures designed to increase Washington's diversity in public education, public employment, and public contracting.

Again, what is important is one phrase here: “factors considered,” meaning that race, sex, disabilities, veteran status and the like are to be considered in order to “increase diversity.” You would think, of course, that in a state that wraps itself in the “progressive” mantel people wouldn’t get all worked up about this, but that is what was thought in 1998 too. There are a lot of people in this state who are not only not “progressive,” but wear their racial “privilege” and “entitlement” like a wet rag. It isn’t just white people, but many Asians and Indians as well. Although “sex” is listed as a “factor,” white women won’t be effected one way or the other; their “privileges” and “entitlement” is something that is ingrained in the culture as well as by law. Title IX is a de facto affirmative action program that benefits women, and it has had a hand in bringing the percent of undergraduate students at UW who are female to 53 percent.

The only groups who might benefit from I-1000 are already under-represented racial or “ethnic” groups, and that is not entirely a certainty, if it ever was even in the pre-200 days. On the state ballot this coming Tuesday in Referendum 88, which received enough signatures faster than shit out of duck after April’s vote. The referendum is basically an up or down public vote on I-1000 with a “yes” approving the initiative, and a “no” vote overturning the action of the legislature. The “no” campaign has a “cute” poster on the roadsides, displaying the “justice is blind” image and declaring that everyone is “equal under the law,” which doesn’t make sense either way. Racists are not “blind,” and what they “see” is the sole basis of their prejudices; “equality” under the law is a hypocritical fraud in practice as well, since the self-privileged and entitled in power are the ones who define what “equal” means and how it is applied—and if need be, keep their discrimination hidden behind the “silent” treatment.

One of the referendum’s backers is Russian immigrant Anton Sakharov, who is running for governor. On the Grassroots Against I-1000 twitter page, Sakharov declares himself as one of those “real” Washingtonians who thinks those “real” people should be the ones who decide who is “equal,” not the government. Of course, if we left had left it to “real” people who is or isn’t “equal,” this would still be a country where the pre-civil rights era fraud of “separate but equal” would still be the general practice. Sakharov is white, of course, and he seems to be "concerned" about how I-1000 would "negatively" effect his obviously white children. But you can never know what a bigot looks like; the twitter page also includes three photographs of what appears to be people either Southeast Asia or Filipino exhibiting the aforementioned posters, which at first reminded me of the black man gathering signatures for I-200, although his "rationalization" for doing so probably had more to do with being uninformed. It is also emblematic of the self-serving hypocrisy of the white racists who are using these people to promote defeat of 1-1000 under false pretenses, just as that black man was being used by racists.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, vote “yes” on Referendum 88. It might not change anyone’s life, but at least it will remove the stain of I-200 from this state’s bio.

No comments:

Post a Comment