California wrote the playbook to gut affirmative action

After the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted affirmative action in higher education and effectively ended raceconscious admissions at colleges and universities last month, the West Coast rebuke was swift.

California Democrats ripped conservatives. Higher education leaders in the state vowed that the ruling wouldn’t stop their efforts to ensure their campuses are “reflective of Californian’s rich and dynamic diversity,” according to a joint statement from California State University chancellors on June 29.

Gov. Gavin Newsom went so far as to say “right-wing activists — including those donning robes — are trying to take us back to the era of book bans and segregated campuses.”

But opponents of affirmative action aren’t just in red states or black robes. Many of them live in California, where voters eliminated affirmative action programs in public education, employment and government contracts at the ballot box in 1996, and then upheld their decision in 2020 by rejecting Proposition 16, which would have restored affirmative action in the state.

If the recent Supreme Court ruling represented a long-awaited victory for conservative groups, the playbook for it was written in California 27 years ago.

“California, which is supposed to be this liberal place, has had an explicit role in this chiseling away at affirmative action in this country,” B.B. Bradley, a UC Hastings law student and former vice president of the school’s Black Law Students Association, told me. “For people complaining about the Supreme Court’s decision now, y’all missed the boat. We’ve already been fighting for crumbs in California.”

There’s more to the story, though. After a majority of California voters ended affirmative action through 1996’s Proposition 209, state legislators and higher education administrators worked to blunt the loss of race-conscious considerations in public school admissions.

Between 2001 and 2011, highachieving high school seniors in

California were guaranteed admission to most UC campuses. This program helped curb the trend of declining college enrollment among kids from low-income families, which was exacerbated by Prop. 209. Admissions offices also started considering other criteria outside of test scores when vetting applicants, like students’ personal histories and where their high schools were located.

In 2020, the same year voters rejected an opportunity to restore race-conscious initiatives, the UC system nixed standardized test scores as an admission requirement altogether, a move that accounts for hidden biases in tests like the SATs toward students who are white, male and from higher-income families.

These are just some of the progressive initiatives California has adopted to combat the effects of Prop. 209 and make college enrollment levels more equitable over the years. Still, Black and Latino students attend college at lower rates than their white and Asian peers, state education figures show.

Today, both the California Reparations Task Force and the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee recommend that the state Legislature

and governor repeal Prop. 209 as one measure of reparations to Black people. Both groups know what our state’s recent history has made clear: if left up to voters, affirmative action will remain a thing of the past in California.

“We’re talking about shifting the culture here. … How can California do things policy-wise that are progressive and more humanitarian,” said San Francisco attorney and California Reparations Task Force member Don Tamaki. “Getting a recommendation like that approved is a winning-overhearts-and-minds thing.”

It’s also a messaging thing. While the passage of Prop. 209 harkens to a more conservative era in California, the legislation may have also benefited from people not completely understanding its objective.

Bradley explained that voters may have been duped into thinking they were backing something progressive when they voted for the “California Civil Rights Initiative,” which contained terminology similar to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“I don’t think a lot of people realized they were actually voting for a ban on affirmative action at the time,” Bradley said.

It doesn’t help that 2020’s Prop. 16, which would have brought back affirmative action, was also badly worded and left many voters scratching their heads.

But overall, the state’s debate over affirmative action hasn’t evolved much since the 1990s. Well-organized opponents still argue that it undermines the concept of merit and is unfair. Those in favor still argue that it’s essential for ensuring racial and ethnic diversity in educational institutions.

After 27 long years of relentless efforts, California still hasn’t achieved true equity in college enrollment. And without affirmative action, educational institutions in our state and beyond will continue having limited tools for leveling the playing field for students of color that don’t come from money and deserve to attend elite schools.

“We’re at a crossroads as a country. The case for the next 20 years is, do we go back to Jim Crow or do we go toward a racial democracy?” said University of San Francisco political science Professor James Taylor, who also serves on San Francisco’s reparations committee. “Right now it’s looking like Jim Crow.”