Prop 209: Ten Long Years

November marks the tenth anniversary of the passage of Proposition 209--the 1996 California voter initiative that eliminated consideration of race and gender in contracting, hiring and admissions practices. The anniversary is a bitter one for activists concerned about equal opportunity. "Prop 209 took away one of the few effective tools we as a society had to counter race-based exclusion. We're paying for it now," says Julie Su, litigation director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) in Los Angeles.

Jarring statistics about UCLA's freshman class this year testify to Prop 209's devastating impact on diversity in higher education. Only 100 African-Americans enrolled--2 percent of the 4,802 total and twenty-five fewer than last year. Twenty of those 100 were recruited athletes. This year's number is the lowest in more than thirty years--particularly troubling considering that the percentage of African-American applicants who meet minimum requirements to be considered eligible for admission to the University of California system has risen steadily in the past decade. "That is the strongest evidence of an anti-civil rights and anti-equal opportunity measure," says the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The crisis at UCLA has sparked an angry outcry from alumni, community leaders and students. In May the African Student Union organized a walkout of about 300 students, who left their classes and marched to the chancellor's office to demand that something be done. According to Karume James, 21, a recent UCLA graduate, their message was simple: "Why are there no black people here?" In June the Alliance for Equal Opportunity in Education, a coalition of organizations including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Urban League and the UCLA Black Alumni Association, demanded an overhaul of the admissions process, alleging that UCLA's flawed practices had harmed black enrollment as much as Prop 209.

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