``They're taking the easy way out'' now, said Doug Tietz, executive director of the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative, which is pushing the measure. ``You can do the skin color check or the gender check and that's the easy way out.''
A better way to recruit people who face barriers, Tietz said, is to seek them out based on socio-economic status.
But that doesn't mean a university couldn't recruit at a church with mostly Black members, he said. They just couldn't give preference to those people when choosing who to admit.
Knight urged those at the conference to work in the next 60 days to keep the measure from passing.
But he said it's difficult to defeat once it's on the ballot, because ``the language is innocuous'' and most people don't know what they're voting on.
``On its face, what could be wrong with the principle of neutrality?'' Knight said.
But, he added, ``it's a red herring.''
It's not about taking two equally qualified candidates and choosing the Black one, he said. It's about realizing that ``most of what we call qualifications are subjective, qualified preferences.''
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