Californians voted on Tuesday to keep a long-standing affirmative action ban.
The effort to keep the ban won by a wide margin, 56% to 43%, according to the Associated Press.
“The people are saying we want to be treated as equals,” said Ward Connerly, the activist leading the fight against overturning the ban. Connerly argued that affirmative action actually puts minorities at a disadvantage in education.
The ban, which was instituted in 1996, bars entities receiving government funds to discriminate based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. The proposition to overturn it was raised this summer after the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.
When introducing the bill, state Assemblywoman Shirley Weber cited the “ongoing pandemic, as well as recent tragedies of police violence” as major reasons why Californians should accept a measure that will make them “acknowledge the deep-seated inequality and far-reaching institutional failures” in areas of race and gender.
California was the first state to ban affirmative action in a ballot measure organized by Connerly. At the time, opponents argued that the practice, adopted in the 1960s to give black students better educational opportunities, had become an “entrenched” and counterproductive policy. The state’s ban became the model for similar successful measures in states such as Washington, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
Washington voters in 2019, by less than 1 percentage point, rejected a ballot measure to repeal the state’s ban on affirmative action, which was adopted in 1998. Public opinion has shifted widely on the issue, as well. Last year, a Gallup poll found that, for the first time, the majority of white Americans support affirmative action.
