SACRAMENTO, Calif. ― Nearly 20 years after California became the first state to ban the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions, a proposal to reinstate affirmative action has sparked a backlash that is forging a new divide in the state’s powerful Democratic Party and creating opportunity for conservatives.
The debate is unfolding in the nation’s most populous and most ethnically diverse state as an unrelated U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholds voters’ rights to decide whether racial considerations should factor into university selections.
The California proposal would allow voters to rescind their state’s affirmative action ban, but unexpected pushback from families of Asian descent who mobilized through Chinese-language media, staged rallies and organized letter-writing campaigns has all but killed the measure.
“I was surprised,” said Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-Covina, the author of the bill. “I didn’t expect it.”
Asian-American students are enrolled at many of California’s top schools in numbers far greater than their proportion of the state’s population. Critics of Hernandez’s plan expressed concern that qualified students would be dismissed simply because of their ethnicity.
The ensuing debate has reopened an old fissure over the role of race in college admissions, divided Democrats along racial lines and created an opportunity for the California GOP.
California voters were the first in the nation to ban the use of affirmative action in university admissions in 1996. Hernandez has tried recently to undo that action, saying it harms black and Latino students. His proposal, SCA5, was his fourth attempt.
