Last night, Mark Fancher of the Michigan ACLU’s Racial Justice Project spoke on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), a ballot initiative that, if it passes, will ban affirmative action in the state of Michigan. Throughout the lecture, Fancher told the crowd of about 25 people that the ballot initiative was a “misguided mistake” and that the only reason it had gained any support was due to the misperceptions of affirmative action by many and the conscious deception of the initiative’s backers.
Whereas many have see affirmative action as benefiting only those that Fancher termed the “Oprah Cosby kids” or wealthy children of color that already have opportunities and simply want more opportunities at the expense of others, the reality is that most benefactors of affirmative action need the program. As has been the case with previous speakers on the topic at Wealthy Theatre (Frank Wu and One United Michigan), Fancher described how the benefactors of affirmative action are not only people of color, but also include women and in some cases, white males, as the MCRI would end special outreach programs designed to get men into the nursing and teaching professions. The MCRI will not just eliminate educational opportunities for people of color, but would also threaten programs such as prostate screening and breast cancer screenings (read more about the impact of the MCRI on women). Fancher also cited an interview in the Detroit Free Press where initiative backer Ward Connerly explained that the MCRI would prevent the Detroit Police Department from hiring African American police officers as part of an effort to make the police force more representative of the community and would ban educational programs offering specific assistance to young women.
Fancher attacked the paternalistic attitudes of some of the MCRI’s supporters who argue that they are helping benefactors of affirmative action become less reliant on affirmative action and are helping them overcome the “stigma” of being benefactors of affirmative action. The idea that people within institutions treat people different if they know that they are benefactors of affirmative action was challenged by Fancher who argued that once one enters an institution, all special treatment is gone and that it is only merit keeps one there. He went on to criticize Jennifer Gratz, the white female student that sued the University of Michigan when she was “wait-listed” and did not get into the school. Gratz, who was in fact not denied admission as the MCRI’s supporters claim, engaged in what Fancher described as racial profiling and decided that since she did not get “her” spot in school, that it must have been people of color that denied her spot, just as police officers assume it is people of color that commit crimes. Interestingly, some 1,400 white people with lower scores and grades got in to University of Michigan that year, but it was only people of color that were blamed. These kind of distortions have been key to getting what little support there has been for the ballot initiative with petition circulators going into communities of color and telling people that it would protect affirmative action and the misnaming of the petition to give the illusion that it protects civil rights. Recent hearings before the Michigan Civil Rights Commission have even featured testimony from circulators who were told to lie when collecting signatures.
The MCRI, whose spokesman is the African American businessman Ward Connerly, is being bankrolled by rich white male millionaires who are seeking to ban affirmative action in as many places as they can. Michigan was chosen because the state is already racially polarized and because it has a declining economy that allows the petition’s supporters to create what Fancher termed “mythical threats” encourage people to scapegoat other racial groups. Understanding that such an effort to ban affirmative action would play poorly in the public’s mind if it was led by white males, the movement’s backers hired Ward Connerly to be the spokesman for the movement and pay him nearly a million dollars a year, which Fancher joked may make Connerly the wealthiest benefactor of affirmative action. Because the MCRI originated outside of the state, it is easy to look at places where similarly worded initiatives have passed to see their impact on diversity. In California, where Connerly and his backers passed Proposition 209, there has been a 40% decrease in African American and Latino students at the University of California Berkley, a 30% drop in new women professors at University of California Davis, and one-third fewer women in construction trades.
Fancher ended his speech by encouraging people to fight against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative and described how he believed fighting against the MCRI would be the current generation’s contribution to the ongoing struggle for civil rights. According to Fancher, people need to “pick up the banner for this” and “push the struggle forward,” building on the struggles for racial equality and dignity that have their history rooted in the abolitionist movement against slavery and the struggles for basic civil rights in the 1960s.
