A group of Missouri lawmakers are preparing to fight a potential ballot initiative anti-affirmative action groups are trying to put before voters in 2008 targeting colleges admission standards, employment opportunities and access to public contracts for minorities.
The Missourian reported last week that a group called The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative will be part of a “Super Tuesday for Equal Rights” campaign led by the American Civil Rights Institute, which also hopes to ban racial preferences in Colorado, Oklahoma and Arizona.
State Rep. Talibdin El-Amin, a Democrat from north St. Louis, is among those ready for the fight.
“Beneath the claim that ability and merit should be the only basis for advancement is the documented history of denial of opportunity to minorities and women that must be remedied,” El-Amin said in a statement.
According to El-Amin, Californian Ward Connelly, “the African-American face of the anti-affirmative action movement”, was in Missouri on April 24 to announce efforts to launch an initiative drive to eliminate affirmative action this state. Connelly helped put such a measure, Proposition 209, before California voters.
Assistant Senate Minority Leader Chuck Graham, D-Columbia, said protections to help women and minorities advance should be preserved.
“Achieving the maximum potential of society can only be done when all people are allowed to participate in the system,” Graham said.
“This country has made significant strides with the passage of civil rights legislation, but all of the goals of those landmark bills have not been met nor negated the legacy of centuries of discrimination and racism.”
El-Amin, Graham, and other legislators will hold a press conference on the anti-affirmative action proposal on Tuesday, May 8, at 9:00 a.m. in the State Capitol.
May 4th, 2007 at 9:01 am
A strategy that the anti-affirmative action group will use is to find black leaders who are also against the policy. This is what conservative whites will do in order to undermine the pro-affirmative action position. This strategy is and has been used by many conservatives to undermine policies which benefit the disadvantaged. Ronald Reagan, and nearly every Republican since, use it effectively.
These Thomas Sowell hypocrites, who stress personal responsibility and achievement over equality, forget that they wouldn’t have achieved their success if it wasn’t for affirmative action and its intent of equality!
Affirmative action disproportionally benefits middle class minorities as these individuals often reach the same merit requirements as white males, thus are given preferential treatment over white males because of race or gender. Thus, those that what want to dismantle the policy, ironically, achieved their position of status through it.
What affirmative action does not do is help the lower socioeconomic class as their achievements are constrained by ghetto poverty and its related outcomes such as substandard education. Thus, they do not make it into the top 3 - 6 and are not considered from that pool. The middle class minority candidate, however, reaches the same high score as a white male and gets the position.
Affirmative action should be need based and class based, not simply based upon race, gender, or ethnicity. This would provide preferential treatment to all members of minority groups not simply the upper echelon. In effect, affirmative action currently benefits the elites within minority groups, not all members. These elites are those individuals which the conservatives will use as icons against affirmative action.
Affirmative action, while a step forward, did not go far enough and needs expansion not repeal.
May 4th, 2007 at 9:07 am
A similar ballot initiative passed in Michigan something like 58-42 in November, with churches, just about all business groups and academia all against it. I don’t see Missouri as more pro-affirmative action than Michigan.
May 4th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Affirmative action was initiated to help subsidize the years of discrimination against blacks in the United States. Affirmative action became a law to help all minorities, however once most minorities gained equality with their white counterparts, they abandoned their minority community in all aspects of life.
A great number of white people have always been in charge so there has not been any difference in those white people’s life over time as a race, but minorities have not historically been in charge of anything so it is a new phenomenon to them.
Unfortunately, minorities who are in power, discriminate against other minorities just as bad as white people have done in the past and present. Some minorities even treat other minorities worse than white people will or would.
Yet, when you do what you have always done, then you get what you have always gotten.
The problem is that society is getting worse than it has ever been, by it continuing in the same direction.
The United States of America has some important gauges of society that are declining at an alarming rate, such as education, family, home ownership, poverty, healthcare, financial institutions, morality, and religious institutions.
Affirmative action should be given to all people that are in the lower socioeconomic bracket, instead of the middle class. I think Douggie Fresh was right on that one.
However, what the hell is ghetto poverty, and what is one step below and above ghetto poverty!
May 4th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Affirmative action does not mean set-asides and quotas for those who are deemed undesirable by the xenophobes on the coniving right. What it means is allowing everyone to step through the doors of opportunity before narrow-minded corporate cronies slam the door shut. Its purpose is to prove that there is no narrow definition of who is technically the most qualified to be in a said place or position. It protects the most vulnerable members of our society from those who would use every excuse in the book to deny others outside their sacred circle that chance to prove their value through a worthy contribution.
Affirmative Action is simply this - that the Government of the United States will not do business with concerns whose hired population is not reflectively representative of its local population. Therefore, since these self-serving, greedy corporations tend to plant their headquarters and operations in the most depressed areas anywhere for the purpose of taking advantage of tax perks unavailable to anyone else, Affirmative Action dictates that their workforce include poor, non European Near North Saint Louisans, not just the local commuters from affluent, Occidental Ladue. State funded schools, private and parochial, must educate the citizens of the ACTUAL state who qualify, no matter who these citizens are, be they Eastern Europeans, Africans, Mexicans, Asians, punks, tramps, jailbirds, lunatics, politicians, perverts, pundits, skeptics, whores, pimps, drug addicts, drug sellers, drunkards, wine bibbers, reefer suckers, ravers, holy rollers, boot-leggers, selfrighteous mysogynists, snake handlers, pinheads, and any other repugnant right-winged Republican who follows Jesus.
In short, Affirmative Action allows us all to pursue education enough to subsequently qualify for gainful employment that will allow us each to reside in a modest home in the neighborhood our money affords us, nothing more. The consequences of hiring a workforce that is qualified irregardless of national origins, sexual proclivities, political-religious affiliations, or social status are a benefit the whole NATION, despite the contrary rantings of the “liberal media.”
Though Missourians have nothing to fear from the consequences of the fervent exercise of Affirmative Action, and claims to be so liberal and progressive, this state is still a very bigoted place. A stretch of I55 was recently sponsored by a local chapter of the KKK, who also posted its white supremist propaganda on the walls of mass transit vehicles patronized primarity by African Americans. We hosted a red-neck gun show downtown Saint Louis to pertuate local gun-laws that are literally bringing us to our graves. We are a free-hire state, advocating that corporations are free to fire an employee for the flimsiest of reasons. Missouri’s ways still give credibility to the thinking that only Western European American men are heirs to this American empire by virtue of Divine Manifest Destiny, while the rest of the world exists at their pleasure. We should never for a minute think that when presented with an opportunity to solidify the European American male’s position at the pinnacle of the American social heirarchy by eradicating the policies and protocols of Affirmative Action, Missouri will defiantly join forces with the supporters of truth, justice, and equality. We, the People, the victims of the rapacious conquests of this Empire, are going to have to fight for our rights to our fair share of this Nation’s common wealth here in Missouri, as always.
May 4th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Equality of outcome: Most people have not gained equality under this criteria, especially when the top 1 percent controls a super majority of wealth. What has occurred, for African Americans specifically, is a socioeconomic and physical divide between the middle and lower class.
Equality of opportunity: de jure equality, first granted under the Civil War Amendments and then reaffirmed and applied onto the States under the Civil Rights Act of ‘64, through the commerce clause, does not apply to those in the ghetto. They are constrained by their isolation and do not have equal opportunity.
“Ghetto poverty” “concentrated poverty” etc., is census tracts in which 40 percent or more of the households are below the census definition of poverty. It is called that because the areas are largely devoid of the middle class, thus the poor are isolated and cut off from society. Much of their situation is the result of failed government policies, or as Columbia University Professor Manning Marable argues active underdevelopment. Active underdevelopment implies not ignoring blacks but taking steps to undermine their socioeconomic progression. What is not in dispute is that ghetto poverty has huge affects on the political capacity and social development of those that reside. This is why they are also called “disadvantaged.”
Look into William Julius Wilson and Manning Marable. University of Chicago professors Cohen and Dawson have an excellent article “Neighborhood Poverty and African American Politics,” which examines ghetto poverty and its affect on political participation, as well as the schism between middle class and inner city African Americans.
Most of these articles are copyrighted, thus I cannot post them here. If you have access to a library, search .
May 4th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Can’t Blame White People
by Bill Cosby
They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English.
I can’t even talk the way these people talk:
Why you ain’t,
Where you is,
What he drive,
Where he stay,
Where he work,
Who you be…
And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.
And then I heard the father talk.
Everybody knows it’s important to speak English…except these knuckleheads.
Mushmouth is what they speak!
You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.
In fact, you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.
People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads throwing that all away.
The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.
These people are not parenting.
They are buying things for kids. $500 sneakers, for what?
And they won’t spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.
I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.
Where were you when he was 2?
Where were you when he was 12?
Where were you when he was 18?
And, how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol?
And where is the father?
Or who is his father?
People putting their clothes on backward:
Isn’t that a sign of something gone wrong?
People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn’t that a sign of something?
They’re walking around with their nasty underwear showing, and holding onto their pants to keep them from falling to the ground!
Or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up?
Isn’t it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up to her panty line, and got all types of needle piercings going through her body?
What part of Africa did this come from?
We are not Africans.
Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a thing about Africa.
With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail.
Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem.
We have got to take the neighborhood back.
People used to be ashamed.
Today a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands’ –or men or whatever you call them now.
We have millionaire football players who cannot read.
We have million-dollar basketball players who can’t write two paragraphs.
We as black folks have to do a better job.
Someone working at Walmart with seven kids saying…you are hurting us.
We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.
We cannot blame the white people any longer.
It is not for media or anyone of this time anymore to say whether I’m right or wrong.
It is time, ladies and gentlemen, to look at the numbers.
Fifty percent of our children are dropping out of high school.
Sixty percent of the incarcerated males happen to be illiterate. There’s a correlation.
Tell the media to stop asking me what I think about people who don’t believe what I’m saying, or feel that I’m too harsh or feel that I’m just running my mouth because I’m old.
Seventy percent of the teenagers pregnant happen to be African American girls.
Don’t ask me to soften my message.
Bill Cosby