Days before the California primary, Bob Dole stopped at a pagoda-roofed mall in Orange County’s Little Saigon to remind voters of his support for the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), the fall ballot proposition that would end state affirmative action programs. The site was chosen deliberately: Some groups, including Asian-Americans, are necessarily among the unpreferred in racial-preference programs. But the “visual” for the event said something quite different. A banner hanging behind the candidate invited viewers, in both English and Vietnamese, to “Celebrate Diversity With Bob Dole and CCRI.”

CCRI, of course, is not meant to promote “diversity” but to expose it as a fraud — the latest justification for state-sponsored discrimination. For the first time since these programs began to germinate in bureaucracies and admissions offces 30 years ago, the California initiative will give citizens a chance to vote up or down on ending group preferences, regardless of their rationale. As such, it presents a choice that many Republican elected offcials are finding more difficult to make than their constituents. For restoring the principle of colorblindness means rejecting more than “quotas” and “discrimination.” It calls for penetrating-and casting off the elaborate cloak of aliases and assumed identities under which affirmative action has learned to operate. Among other things, it means rejecting the seductive call to “celebrate diversity.”