Maybe there is yet hope for affirmative action in the State of California. Proposition 54, Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative, was rejected by the voters 63.9% to 36.1% on Oct. 7, 2003, exceeding the ballots cast for Arnold Schwarzenegger by more than 1 million votes. If the measure had passed, it would have restricted the prosecution of hate crimes, derailed efforts to curb racial profiling, prevented collection of medical data unique to certain ethnic groups, eliminated the educational tracking £or disadvantaged students and made it most difficult to detect discrimination. Can you believe that such a measure was put on the ballot by a Black man?

Now affirmative action is threatened by another crisis. Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a Black woman justice on the California Supreme Court, has been nominated by Pres. Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC. The "upshot" of this is that if she is confirmed in the U.S. Senate, this is a stepping stone for her to be named to the U.S. Supreme Court. THAT WOULD BE A DISASTER FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTlON!

In November of 2001, the first test case of Proposition 209, which "gutted affirmative action" in State and local contracting, came before the California Supreme Court. As Associate Justice, Brown "trashed" affirmative action as the Court upheld Prop 209. Although a beneficiary of affirmative action herself, she chastised "modern day affirmative action" so badly, that even the white Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court admonished her.

On this event, I was deeply hurt and felt betrayed, as was the minority community. I had personally known Justice Brown here in San Francisco and served with her and now Congresswoman Barbara Lee on the California Commission on the Status of the African American Male. On her appointment I had lunch with , Justice Brown to offer congratulations and any assistance to her in support of civil rights and affirmative action. She assured me that she was "in. step" with all the things that we had worked the Commission, including affirmative action. She has demonstrated to be totally opposite.

The Commission that Janice Brown, Barbara Lee and I swerved on is now a National Initiative on the State of the African Male, convened by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, the Urban League, NAACP and others in Washington, DC on Nov. 14th and 15th this year. The Conference will explore why 20% of African American males live below the poverty line, why 31.9% are not employed, why nearly 40% are in the criminal justice system, why 22% have no high school diploma and why African American males are 2 to 3 times more likely to die from prostate cancer than white males. With these statistics, an even more elusive question is: Why do successful Black beneficiaries of affirmative action, such as California Superior Court Justice Janice Brown, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and UC Regent Ward Connerly, hold with contempt the hopeless plight of their own people?

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