Ted Shaw and other diversity proponents retool while Ward Connerly gloats.
By Jamal Watson
Opponents of higher education affirmative action programs are gearing up to launch their largest attack in recent years. The planned assault comes in the wake of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely limited the use of race in K-12 integration plans.
“I believe that we are now poised for a coup de grâce to say that race preferences in the eyes of the public should not be used,” says Ward Connerly, the chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, a conservative organization based in Sacramento, Calif., that opposes racial and gender preferences.
It was Connerly who orchestrated Proposition 209, a California ballot
initiative that outlawed race and gender preferences in state hiring and university admissions. A similar bill passed in Michigan last year.
Now, he is leading a national effort aimed at placing similar anti-affirmative action initiatives on the November 2008 presidential ballot in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
