Avalanche Against Prop 54

By Suzy Khimm, AlterNet. Posted October 17, 2003.

The message cut across all the hoopla of recall election day, banding together teachers, health officials, police officers, political leaders, and voters of all racial and ethnic categories. The message was simple: Voting against Proposition 54 will help save your life. And its success was resounding.

Defeated by a 64-36 margin, the so-called "Racial Privacy Initiative" would have banned California from collecting data on race and ethnicity in all but a few exempted areas -- restricting, among other things, information crucial for identifying and containing public health epidemics. The defeat of Prop 54 has cheered on civil rights advocates, who believe that the campaign's success may mark a turn toward a more progressive, pro-diversity agenda in California and across the country.

"Prop 54 got more 'no' votes than Arnold Schwarzenegger got in support. The Prop 54 vote wasn't a landslide, it was an avalanche," said People For the American Way President Ralph G. Neas in an October 8 press release. "California shouted down this attempt to erode civil rights, eviscerate health research, block hate crime enforcement and undermine school accountability."

Prop 54 was the brainchild of Ward Connerly, a conservative businessman and member of the California Board of Regents. In 1996, Connerly had spearheaded Prop 209, the ballot initiative that banned the use of racial and ethnic preferences in California's public hiring and university admissions. Dubbed by some as the "Son of 209," Prop 54 was another one of Connerly's attempts to create a "color-blind" society by removing all racial and ethnic classifications from the public sphere.

But, as the initiative's opponents pointed out, Prop 54 would have effectively eliminated any quantitative evidence of racial disparities, crippling the state's ability to track or remedy discrimination. Prop 54 would have barred state agencies, the University of California, public hospitals, and law enforcement officials from gathering data on citizens' race or ethnicity in all but a few -- and, according to Prop 54's opponents, poorly described instances. Rather than creating a color-blind society, the initiative would have simply turned a blind eye to discrimination.

Forming a broad-based, ever-expanding coalition, the opponents of Prop 54 ran a focused and pragmatically minded campaign. They explained that schools would lose accountability, no longer being able to track whether some groups of students were improving more than others. Local police would no longer be required to collect data on victims and suspects, hindering hate crime enforcement. And -- in what proved to be the most compelling argument -- public health officials would be severely hampered in their ability to identify and prevent diseases, as certain health problems have a disproportionate effect on different racial and ethnic groups.

It was the potential threat to public health that ultimately won the public over. "Nobody thinks you get better advice from your doctor when they have less information on you," Jay Ziegler, co-director of the No on 54 Campaign, told the Sacramento Bee. Bringing together hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals across social, racial, and political lines, the coalition opposing Prop 54 was unprecedented for a ballot initiative. Exits polls indicated that three-quarters of blacks and Hispanics and a majority of whites voted against the initiative.

Ziegler compares last week's victory to the passing of Prop 209 in 1996. Back then, civil rights groups and progressive leaders were taken aback when the advocates of Prop 209 appropriated the language of the civil rights movement itself to support their campaign. Prop 209's opponents then attempted to demonize the supporters of initiative as racists, running an infamous television ad featuring former Klansman David Duke as a supporter of Prop 209. The move backfired, alienating white suburbanites who were incensed at the KKK comparison.

"We really learned some important lessons from 209 that we applied this time around: You can't make it personal or make it look like it's a negative campaign," said Ziegler. "Diseases aren't colorblind," says Paul Turner, senior project manager of the Greenlining Institute. "That message resonated with the bulk of the electorate -- we didn't make it about affirmative action."

The proponents of Prop 54 once again tried to use civil rights-oriented rhetoric, comparing the existing racial categories to those that slave owners and Nazis used and placing the words of Martin Luther King Jr. alongside those of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. But this time, the television ad the opponents aired featured former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who simply declared that Prop 54 was "bad medicine" and that the public was making a "life-and-death decision."

Turner also credits the campaign's success to its organization and strategic outreach to the public, media outlets, and politicians. "We put pressure on the Democratic Party early on -- it wasn't enough for them just to be opposed to campaign. They had to prove it through fundraising and getting others on board."

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