Affirmative Action

Midwest Youth Fight for Equal Opportunity:  Report on the battle over affirmative action in Nebraska by Alex Stamm, Nebraskans for Peace/SDS at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

I view left-of-center politics as basically a double-helix, like a strand of DNA, with the two strands represented by liberals and radicals.  The two have space between them but are connected at many points, sometimes well-connected with stunning effect.  I believe we’ve created exactly such a connection here in Nebraska to oppose an out-of-state initiative effort attempting to change our state’s laws.

A little bit of a backstory first.  In 1996 a University of California regent named Ward Connerly successfully eliminated affirmative action programs from the U of C system, an action which had the immediate, predictable and indeed predicted consequence of rapid decline in minority enrollment in those schools.  Connerly went on to become the major figure behind two deceptively named groups (separate only for financial purposes), the American “Civil Rights” Institute and the American “Civil Rights” Coalition.  These two groups have proceeded to fund successful anti-affirmative action “Civil Rights Inititatives” in Washington state and Michigan.

Riding off of their 2006 success in Michigan, the ACRC declared a campaign called “Super Tuesday for Equal Rights” and proceeded to fund similar anti-affirmative action initiatives in Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona, and Nebraska.  It should have been a shoe-in, every single one of the states have been conservative political strongholds for years with very little exception.  Connerly hired groups such as National Ballot Access to spread across states collecting enough signatures to put his initiatives on the ballot.  NBA has been known to notarize petitions before gathering signatures (illegal), have citizens sign multiple times on several clipboards of the same petition (or they will copy the names themselves, both illegal), refuse to read the petition statement to potential signatories (also illegal), and outright lie about what the petition entails (you get the idea).  Sometimes petitioners will ask people “Would you like to sign a petition for equal rights,” or tell people “this helps affirmative action” – deceptions which have tricked numerous people into signing the petition, some of whom have requested to take their name off.

The petitioners are explicitly playing off of bigotry in Nebraska.  They have claimed the petition ends special privileges for illegal immigrants such as (get this absurdity) free education at the University of Nebraska.  A friend of mine, member of our SDS chapter, was educating people about the petition in West Omaha just weeks ago, where the petitioner yelled that my friend was “a homosexual” and that he should “go fly [his] rainbow flag!”  A person near the petitioner then said “Oh, he’s gay?  I’ll sign twice!”  In another instance, a petitioner called another friend of mine a “Communist” and “illegal immigrant” for attempting to educate people about the petition.  Connerly’s group itself recently released a radio ad in the Lincoln and Omaha AM markets which plays up the “racial divisiveness” of Barack Obama’s former minister Jeremiah Wright and Nebraska’s only black state Senator Ernie Chambers – neither of which has had remotely anything to do with the initiative or the opposition, but whom Connerly can play up as “scary black guys.”  Even red-baiting has come back from the Cold War, as a bitter conservative professor has threatened to take out an ad in the Lincoln Journal-Star exposing the “Trotskyite” history of a columnist who dared criticize his position against affirmative action.

Connerly has bitten off incredibly more than he can chew.  First, the initiative in Oklahoma failed to have enough valid signatures to get on the November ballot, due to the ineptness of their fraudulent signature gatherers, and they quickly packed up and left.  Then in Missouri in early May the group failed to turn in any signatures at all, despite an enormous last-ditch effort to get petitioners to the state – including paying people $1,000 a week, and bringing in the notoriously racist “Minutemen” from California to gather signatures.  The success in Missouri was produced by a grassroots coalition of groups educating citizens about the petition called WeCAN, including ACORN, SEIU, and Jobs With Justice, who deserve special mention for the extraordinary effort they put into it.  In Colorado the Initiative succeeded in submitting the required number of signatures and declared victory, only to see over half of their signatures challenged in court – which is still pending.  And that has left us with Arizona and Nebraska, both of which have petition deadlines of July 4th.  Arizona is becoming the main battleground.  Information is sparse, but we do know that ACRC is sending their main leaders there, and a group called By Any Means Necessary has gone there to help aid the opposition (named Stop ACRI) to the initiative.  In Nebraska we have formed a grassroots coalition called Nebraskans United with a very diverse staff to oppose the initiative effort.  One of the executives is a conservative and former Republican state chairman, another is a Democrat state Senator.  The volunteers who are out educating people in the streets are mainly students who are progressive and left-liberal, many involved in our SDS and Nebraskans for Peace chapter, others involved in feminist, ethnic, and gay rights groups.

The Nebraskans United volunteers have been incredibly successful so far.  Petitioner presence has decreased in Lincoln to only a handful of sites – though many, we know, are moving on to Omaha and other cities for more signatures.  On one occasion where I was out handing out “Decline to Sign” palm cards downtown it took only our presence for a few moments to scare away the petitioner, who ducked into a large Wells Fargo Bank building never to be seen again.  At the Lancaster County Department of Motor Vehicles with our first use of a video camera, simply recording the petitioner’s behavior and how they received signatures was enough to scare a petitioner away.  The next day petitioners came back with their own cameras, which were used to no effect of course because we were doing nothing wrong, and then threatened to break our camera.

They have attempted to intimidate us, even called the sheriff on our volunteers; they have made all sorts of wild and unsupportable claims about the rules of petitioning and counter-petitioning.  But we know the laws, we know what we can do and what they can do, and we have caught the liars breaking those laws at every turn to get this initiative on the ballot.  This out-of-state group which had such high hopes for success just months ago will, we hope, be broken this year by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and receiving not a single successful initiative.  And it will be thanks, in great part, to the grassroots efforts of “red state” youth and activists to whom I am incredibly grateful.