Another Bridge Crossed

SAN FRANCISCO —  They marched north to south across the Golden Gate Bridge on Thursday. They chanted the old chants, sang the old songs.

Hey, hey, ho, ho, 209 has got to go.

We shall overcome.

The weather was all wrong. It was a perfect California day, bright and clear with a fresh breeze blowing off the Pacific. This was a march that belonged in the sultrier climates of the Deep South, in some place like Selma, Ala., circa 1965.

The marchers put one foot in front of the other, but in a larger sense they--and the rest of California--moved only backward. “This same kind of march,” said Willie Brown, the mayor of San Francisco, “was held years ago, when Southern bigots were doing the same thing.” If the march was a museum piece, so too was the race-baiting politics that forced it.

They marched on the day that Prop. 209 became law. Despite all that fine, deceptive rhetoric about creating a “color-blind” society--plain “blind” would be more like it--the measure, in fact, marks a collective surrender on the field of racial and gender equality. Enough is enough. That always was the gut-level message of Prop. 209, and everybody knows it. “Some white folks,” one marcher told the television cameras, “seem to feel they’ve done enough for black folks.”

Message sent, message received.

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Such historic crossings are the culmination of many steps. The march across the Golden Gate began a few years back, with a white professor who failed to land a state college job. He claimed that the fix was in, that the position had been slotted for a minority. Otherwise, he simply would have “waltzed” onto the faculty. Efforts to verify this tale were stymied by the professor himself.

It sounded, however, an awful lot like just one more of those self-pitying stories told around water coolers everywhere, the gospel according to white guys who failed to win a job or promotion. With them, it is always a race thing, a gender thing, an affirmative action thing. It is never a mediocrity thing.

In any case, the professor’s gripe was soon co-opted. Pete Wilson saw an opportunity to play wedge politics. Just as Prop. 187, the illegal immigration measure, bolstered his reelection campaign, so could Prop. 209 power his presidential ambitions, while also enhancing Republican chances down the state ticket. He admitted as much in a telephone solicitation to contributors--a conference call which, to the governor’s embarrassment, was joined by a reporter.

The governor had turned to Ward Connerly, a black businessman, UC regent and longtime Wilson ally. Connerly led the drive to eliminate affirmative action within the university, then headed the Prop. 209 campaign. It made for powerful politics, a black man crusading against affirmative action. The New York Times later would uncover an early strategy memorandum, which called for minorities and women to be placed front and center in the campaign.

“It was like using affirmative action to defeat affirmative action,” Joe C. Gelman, an early manager of the campaign, told the newspaper. “We were being pretty cynical. I have to admit it.”

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Fighting cynicism with cynicism, Democratic candidates chose to all but ignore Prop. 209. Lowering its profile diffused the measure’s potential for creating another Republican landslide. While a tactical success, this left the Prop. 209 opposition underfunded and disorganized. The opponents had other problems as well.

With its title of “Civil Rights Initiative” and its radio spots selectively quoting Martin Luther King Jr., Prop. 209 was camouflaged as an enlightened step toward racial equality. That it sought to eliminate an essential tool of the civil rights movement was a fact proponents, naturally, left to the fine print. Instead, they railed about quotas, which have been illegal for years. They suggested unqualified minorities are admitted in droves into the UC system, which they are not.

Opponents also were forced to defend a government program, never an easy task. They failed to focus the debate on integration, the laudable end game of affirmative action. Thus, what unfolded was a battle over a Band-Aid, and not the gaping wound it sought to cover. Interestingly, Prop. 209 was defeated in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area. Perhaps in these urban centers--where diversity and the hard work of getting along are not political abstractions--it was easier to see through the tautologies, to locate the spirit of the thing.

Remember. Prop. 187 was sold as nothing more than a simple crackdown on illegal immigration. Of course, once it passed, legal immigrants immediately found themselves in the gun sights, the next target. No doubt Prop. 209 also is but a first move. Who knows what dismal mischief its champions plan next for the long march backward? Water cannons, perhaps.