By Jeff Smith
Recently I went to a public hearing with a packed room of people there to offer up testimony on how they were deceived by canvassers who were circulating a petition to end affirmative action programs in Michigan. A few weeks after this hearing the Michigan Civil Rights Commission held a Press Conference stating that they believe there was a massive and systemic campaign of voter fraud. That is a pretty serious statement, but what has been missing in all the news coverage of what is called the "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative" or the MCRI, is the question as to why people have organized and spent a ton of money to end affirmative action programs in Michigan. Before answering that question myself let's talk a bit about how this issue has been framed.
The fact that the ballot initiative was called the Civil Rights Initiative was brilliant from a framing point of view. It doesn't matter that this is an anti-Civil Rights ballot initiative, the name of it frames it as something that most people would want. Think about that can of Pringles and how it says low fat because they use olestra. Sounds good don't it? Olestra, sounds like a fantasy village where elves live. However, if you investigate the can of Pringles a bit closer you read that "olestra may cause rectal leakage." Don't think having that as part of the advertising slogan is gonna get people to pony up to buy those chips. So, the name of the ballot initiative is inherently deceptive.
Next, these same people who are pushing this ballot issue have hijacked the conversation about the issue. They say that it is time that we stop having "racial preferences for Blacks and other minorities." Racial preferences....that is an interesting notion. Does it mean that Blacks are the preferred race? The language, the name of the issue has been taken over in this case. In their new book called Talking the Walk: A Communications Guide for Racial Justice, Hunter Cutting and Makani Themba-Nixon say that racial justice advocates must re-frame the discussion around the issue of affirmative action. What do you call a policy that tries to level the playing field or provide some restitution for the way that Blacks have been treated in this country? The authors of this excellent media justice book say that it would be better to call affirmative action a policy of "dismantling the vestiges of Jim Crow" era laws or "decreasing white privilege." According to anti-racism activist and author Tim Wise the question is not "should we have racial preferences for people of color, rather, should we continue to have racial preferences for Whites?" Herein lies the answer to the question I posed earlier - why are primarily White people spending so much energy and money to outlaw affirmative action programs in Michigan? I think one of the reasons is because the White power structure not only feels threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, but they actually want to do away with the rights people have struggled to obtain.
Look at what is happening in the US around the issue of immigration. Not only has the government proposed very racist legislation around the legal status of human beings, they have also recently at the federal and state level attempted to make English the "official language." Que chingado! What this government policy has done is to provide legitimacy to groups that would like racial purity. For instance, there was in early May a rally held in downtown Grand Rapids by a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens who were against allowing people in the US who didn't have any documentation. Some of us felt it was important to go and challenge these folks, but also to find out where they were coming from. Once we got past the initial back and forth on the general issue of immigration, it became clear that they were more than just anti-immigration.
One guy kept saying that "these people keep having too many babies." Another guy said they are "taking away our jobs." Then I got hold of one of the newspapers they were passing out which said that the Council of Conservative Citizens believes that this country should be for White, Christian, European descendants. Que Chingado! Otra vez. They also said in this publication that the US government should repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even though they were handing out this literature and had a big banner identifying themselves the local news media that covered this rally said nothing about the philosophy of the group nor reported the group's name.
Now, you might say that these folks are just the extreme fringe of society and that most people are not racists. Well, let's look at the facts. Why is it that one out of three Black men from their late teens through their early 30's is in the criminal justice system (The Sentencing Project)? Why is it that Blacks in this country earn only 57 cents for every dollar earned by Whites (The Color of Wealth) and are left with the type of work that Meizhu Lui calls "chiltin jobs"...left over jobs. Why is it that a disproportionate amount of Black and Latino youth are targeted by military recruiters? Blacks account for 29% of enlisted personnel in the military, but make up only 13% of the US population (American Friends Service Committee). We could go on, but I think you get the point.
Come November, we are all going to be faced with a choice about racism and White privilege and we must vote against this racist ballot initiative so wrongly named the "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative." We have to get everyone we know to do the same and then work with others to get people we don't know to vote NO in November. Then, once that is done we need to stop being satisfied with the crumbs from the table policies of affirmative action. We need to create what Joel Olson calls an Abolition democracy, a democracy that seeks to do away with White Power. Just voting against this ballot proposal is not enough and we can't be that arrogant to think we are doing minorities a favor when we do. We have to take ownership of the history of racial oppression in this country, give it a context, and then take action. Let me end with a quote from Malcolm X, who offers a powerful critique of liberal responses to racial oppression.
When someone sticks a knife into my back nice inches and then pulls it out six inches they haven't done me any favor. They should not have stabbed me in the first place. During slavery they inflicted the most extreme form of brutality against us to break our spirit, to break our will...after they did all this to us for three hundred and ten years, then they come up with some so-called Emancipation Proclamation. And today the white man actually runs around here thinking he is doing Black people a favor.
