Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 30, 1998
Connerly, others form alternative race panel
By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A prestigious group of scholars and public policy experts announced yesterday the formation of a panel to serve as a "more balanced" alternative to President Clinton's Initiative on Race.
"Incredibly, the views of the majority of Americans are not even represented by the people selected by Mr. Clinton" for his panel on race, said Ward Connerly, a black member of the University of California Board of Regents who championed the passage of Proposition 209, which ended racial quotas in that state.
He is the chairman of the newly formed Citizens' Initiative on Race and Ethnicity.
Mr. Connerly and other leading members of the Citizens' Initiative were among a group of opponents of race-based preferences that Mr. Clinton invited to the White House last December, in part to answer criticisms that his race initiative was biased.
Elaine L. Chao, a member of the new group who is of Chinese descent, said the panel was formed because the commission on race appointed by Mr. Clinton last year is one-sided.
"The president's panel on race and his policies on race are not bringing us together but driving us apart," said Mrs. Chao, chairman of the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center Advisory Council and former president of the United Way of America.
She said the panel Mr. Clinton appointed last year "has strategically excluded all persons" who don't share the president's views on race.
Abigail Thernstrom, vice chairman of the group, said it plans to publish recommendations on issues that the president's panel is ill-equipped or afraid to discuss.
"We are frustrated by a 'dialogue' that ignores change and thus avoids the hard and controversial issues," said Mrs. Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of the book "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible."
"We are ordinary citizens, not government appointees, and we think we have a few things to say on the subject that are not likely to be found in the official report of the White House-appointed commission," said Mrs. Thernstrom, who is white.
The new panel will make recommendations on how to improve academic achievement for blacks and Mexican-Americans. The group will also suggest ways to reduce the illegitimacy rate among blacks and to strengthen the black family.
"It's easy to talk about the relatively small numbers of blacks in managerial positions in professional sports," Mrs. Thernstrom said. "It's much harder to talk about the excessive focus of young black males on athletic accomplishment and the neglect of academic success as the measure of a life well-lived."
Linda Chavez, whose father was of Mexican descent, said that the dialogue on race in which Mr. Clinton and his panel have participated has entailed more "hand-wringing" and has been "more cathartic and designed for entertainment value than for serious discussion."
After the December meeting at the White House -- which included Mr. Connerly, Mrs. Chavez and Mrs. Thernstrom -- Mr. Connerly praised Mr. Clinton's "good will" on the subject.
But at yesterday's announcement at the National Press Club, Mr. Connerly said that at the December meeting he was promised repeat visits to the White House to discuss race relations but hasn't heard from the president since.
Nor have Mr. Clinton's race policies changed, Mr. Connerly said, leading him to conclude that Mr. Clinton misled him.
Nonetheless, Mr. Connerly yesterday credited Mr. Clinton "with setting out to use the power of his office to elevate the dialogue" on race. But Mr. Clinton appointed John Hope Franklin to head his race panel and ended up with members who "are committed to color-conscious policies, the quotas and preferences that reinforce racial distinctions," Mr. Connerly said.
The views held by Mr. Connerly and Mr. Franklin, who is also black, could not be further apart.
At a hearing in North Carolina, Mr. Franklin refused to hear from Mr. Connerly, who led the successful ballot initiative barring racial preferences in California. For that, Mr. Connerly had endured attacks and assassination threats by other blacks.
Mr. Franklin, however, said people who represent Mr. Connerly's viewpoint have nothing to contribute to a dialogue on race. At a community gathering in Dallas sanctioned by Mr. Franklin's panel and led by Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, whites were barred from participating.
Mr. Connerly opposes racial preferences and quotas, insisting that merit should be the sole criterion for advancement.
Mr. Franklin, 83, a former Duke University history professor, takes the opposite view, saying that setting quotas is the right thing to do so long as each quota acts as a floor and not a ceiling on the number of blacks hired.
Mrs. Thernstrom observed that one of the differences between the two panels "is that there are scholars on this panel who know how to weigh social science evidence and know what kinds of questions to ask. There are no social scientists involved in the president's initiative."
Mrs. Chao said Mr. Clinton's initiative has ignored "the viewpoint of Asian-Americans who are discriminated against by government-mandated quotas and preferences. This state-sanctioned discrimination is particularly hard in education."
She noted that Mr. Clinton has argued for continuing preferences that limit university admittance for Asian-Americans.
In 1995, Mr. Clinton told the Sacramento Bee newspaper that without preferences, "there are universities that could fill their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asian-Americans."
Since then, California voters approved Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that banned racial, ethnic and sexual preferences and quotas in state-supported schools.
"The president's prediction of an all-Asian freshman class did not happen in California this past year," Mrs. Chao said, noting that even at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, minority enrollment fell by only 8 percentage points, from 57 percent to 49 percent.
"If you are wondering why you have never heard these numbers before, it's because the proponents of preferences conveniently exclude Asian-Americans from the minority category whenever it suits their purposes," she said.
Mrs. Chao said she and other Citizens' Initiative members are "not blind to continuing racism."
"We don't think America's racial problems have been solved or that this is a color-blind society," she said.Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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