Book Review
Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences
While still a shepherd boy in his father’s pastures, the future King David of Israel was sent to bring food to his older brothers, soldiers in King Saul’s army fighting against the Philistines. Goliath, a nine feet tall Philistian soldier, stalked the king’s army day and night, daring the terrified men to kill him. When young David arrived on the scene, he heard Goliath yelling across the valley. Unlike his brothers, David believed God would help him defeat Goliath. He sought permission from King Saul to kill the man who defied the armies of the living God. Initially rejecting the boy’s request because he was young and inexperienced, the king allowed David to fight the giant.
Armed with only a sling and five rocks, he approached Goliath, who bellowed, “Am I a dog that you come against me with sticks?” At that moment, David drew back his hand and slung the stone, hitting Goliath in the forehead, killing him.
In 1995, a black man named Ward Connerly rose from obscurity to take on a modern-day Goliath — the professional civil rights establishment. At a time when most opponents of race preferences were still cowering under the intimidation of quota supporters, Connerly led the charge against the evils of race-based discrimination.
Affirmative action’s original intent was to cast a wide net to include qualified blacks who’d been historically excluded from jobs and college admissions. It’s now become a labyrinthine system of quotas, set-asides, and preferences, benefiting the grievance-shopping, professional civil rights class.
As a University of California Regent, Ward Connerly’s eyes were opened to insidious discrimination prevalent in the university system. Realizing how fundamentally unfair to whites and Asians and how demeaning and self-defeating to blacks race-based admissions were, Connerly began slinging stones at an entrenched liberal institution in a war that’s still being fought. Slowing but surely, the giant is dying. America will never be the same.
Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences, is part autobiography, part political memoir. In his twelve-chapter book, Connerly gives the reader a glimpse of the man behind the controversial public figure. To clear up any misconception that he had a privileged childhood, Connerly spends the first few chapters on his impoverished background. Abandoned by his father, his mother died when he was four. When he was nearly 15, he and his grandmother — the woman who raised him — went on welfare for a year and a half. One day, Connerly had enough of the caseworker’s probing, personal questions. “As I listened to the bureaucratic drone and saw the submissive look on Mom’s [his grandmother] face, I suddenly stood up and announced that I would not accept another check.” The young teenager stormed out of the house and went directly to a prominent man in the community to ask for work. The next day, Connerly had a job. He’s been working tirelessly ever since.
Connerly learned the value of personal responsibility from his uncle James, with whom he’d lived for a brief period of his childhood. James taught him what it was to be a man. “The only thing James wanted was for this world to respect him and regard him as a man, a word he pronounced with his down home accent as mane,” he writes. Being a man meant taking care of your family and not accepting handouts. Honest work — no matter how menial —meant empowerment and independence.
Carrying these values with him throughout his life, Connerly worked as a civil servant in the early 1960s. He describes his optimism for the future while working with powerful, white businessmen — decision makers — in the community “I didn’t see the world in which they moved as being their world. I saw it as potentially my world, too.”
Excited by the success of the civil rights movement, Connerly was alienated by the caustic rhetoric of black militants of the late 1960s. He writes of the Black Panthers: “The historical moment felt bizarre, almost hallucinatory: black people were being asked to agree that America was a ‘concentration camp’ just at the moment that they were completing their great stride toward freedom.” Where black radicals saw oppression, Connerly saw opportunity. He seized that opportunity by quitting his government job and starting his own consulting business in 1973, which he still runs today.
In 1993, Governor Pete Wilson changed Connerly’s life by appointing him to the University of California Board of Regents. The turning point came in 1995 after he met with the parents of a student who’d been rejected by the UC medical schools. Armed with statistical evidence that UC was using racial quotas in admissions, they made their case. After reviewing the report, Connerly said, “This is wrong.” Those three words resulted in a campaign to dismantle race preferences in the UC system. Connerly not only forced the university to admit it had been discriminating against students of certain races, but he shamed its leadership into abolishing the practice altogether.
After championing Proposition 209, which eliminated state-sponsored discrimination in college admissions and hiring in California, Connerly endured the invective of black liberals, who called him “strange fruit,” “a white man with black skin,” a “con man,” “freak of nature,” and “lawn jockey,” the latter coming from a white liberal! But Connerly pressed on. After Proposition 209 passed with 54 percent of the vote, he became the central figure in the campaign to pass I-200, a similar measure in Washington State. I-200 was passed by 58.3 percent of the voters.
Connerly says he envisions similar measures being passed in the remaining states, but admits there’s a long battle ahead with “two down, forty-eight to go.” A true believer in “black pride,” Connerly seeks to eliminate not only race preferences in America; he wants to remove from black students the badge of inferiority such preferences place on them.
The book’s final two chapters are dedicated to the aftermath of the success of Proposition 209 and I-200. Unlike many political memoirs, Creating Equal is written by Connerly. Its flowing, conversational style draws the reader into his long and often intense battle against race preference proponents: the government, special interest groups, corporations, as well as other conservatives. He includes several disturbing accounts of how desperate the preference lobby was to hold on to the power and money behind discriminatory practices by resorting to some extreme measures.
Race preferences are an obstacle to the equality the Founding Fathers wanted to create, the “audacious theory that ultimately inflamed the rest of the world,” Connerly writes. All Americans are witnesses to how this theory of equality continues to inflame the world as millions of immigrants seek to enter our borders to embrace life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Armed with the weapon of truth, Connerly is a warrior intent on slaying the formidable civil rights establishment. For the reader who desires to know who such a man is, Creating Equal is an excellent place to begin.
Originally published in April 2003, on Townhall.com – Since the publication of this review, Connerly led an anti-race preferences campaign in Michigan. Proposal 2 passed on November 7, 2006, with 58 percent of the vote. On November 9, 1999, Florida governor Jeb Bush signed an executive order that purportedly bars race-based preferences in government hiring and admissions. Four down, forty-six to go…
