Despite such a high-profile roll of conservative supporters deserving of mention, Connerly would have us believe that his various anti-affirmative action campaigns are grassroots efforts by ordinary citizens outraged at the injustice of "racial preferences." Yet Connerly's own account tells a very different story--one in which his high-profile connections have again made all the difference in the world. For example, in early 1996 the original authors of Proposition 209 (the California Civil Rights Initiative, which abolished state-sponsored affirmative action) were unable to muster the resources or support to gather the required number of signatures to get on the November ballot. That is, until Connerly stepped in and helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. Later in the campaign, Connerly secured a $1 million donation from Rupert Murdoch at a lunch meeting with him in the publisher's penthouse apartment.

Connerly's account of the campaign for Prop 209 does contain one important revelation: He confirms an allegation made in Nicholas Lemann's recent book The Big Test [see David Karen, "Scoring the SATs," December 13, 1999], that the passage of Prop 209 resulted from a compromise between opponents of affirmative action and the Clinton Administration. Fearing that the issue might undermine Bill Clinton's re-election bid in California or even nationally, the White House made sure that the state Democratic Party and labor unions would not provide funding needed by the anti-Prop 209 forces to mount an effective campaign against the measure. Even though the outcome was as rigged as a professional wrestling match, CCRI won by a margin of 54-46, hardly the landslide that many had predicted. In fact, exit polls show that the outcome rested overwhelmingly on white votes, as blacks, Latinos and Asians (whom Connerly conspicuously cites as the victims of affirmative action) all opposed the measure by healthy margins.

These heavily racialized results reveal the fundamental weakness in Connerly's claim that the campaign against affirmative action is an effort at color-blindness and neutrality. The method by which the attack on it has been mounted--direct voter referendums--reveals an overwhelming pattern of white racism. Throughout American history, in nearly every instance in which they have been given a direct vote on the matter, the majority of white Americans have rejected any measure beneficial to the interests of blacks. At times, such propositions have passed, but only with a coalition of a majority of minorities and a minority of whites. Connerly seems to have blinded himself to this pattern. He proudly mentions the role that he played in the passage of the Rumford Act, a pioneering open-housing measure passed by the California legislature in the early sixties. What he conspicuously leaves out is that in a 1964 referendum, whites overwhelmingly voted to overturn the act. In this respect, the comparison between Connerly and Booker T. Washington fails. As problematic as his message was, at least Washington never made common cause with white reactionaries and led the charge to further deny blacks their rights and access to beneficial programs.

If Booker T. Washington is to Ward Connerly as tragedy is to farce, then in The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson shows himself to be a worthy heir to W.E.B. Du Bois. Robinson is a powerful and eloquent writer, and at its best, The Debt compares favorably to the literary quality shown by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk.

Like Du Bois, Robinson possesses a sweeping historical vision. Unlike Connerly and others who wish to believe that the history of American race relations began in 1965, Robinson recognizes that a sense of history is crucial to the current predicament of American race relations. He understands that the subordination of black Americans requires a limited historical perspective, and that if one goes back in time to before such subordination began, that is to undermine its very basis:

Far too many Americans of African descent believe their history starts in America with bondage and struggles forward from there toward today's second-class citizenship. The cost of this obstructed view of ourselves is incalculable. How can we be collectively successful if we have no idea or, worse, the wrong idea of who we were and, therefore, are?... This then is the nub of it. America's contemporary racial problem cannot be solved, racism cannot be arrested, achievement gaps cannot be fully closed until Americans--all Americans--are repaired in their views of Africa's role in history.

Robinson then offers a brief retelling of some of the accomplishments of Africans prior to the rise of the slave trade in the fifteenth century, reinforcing the point that notions of black inferiority are not reason for--but the result of and a pretextual justification for--centuries of exploitation at the hands of whites.

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