By Phillip Bailey
Initiated by the Federalist Society and co-sponsored by the McConnell Center as a part of their “Variety: Left and Right” lecture series, the impending speech by anti-affirmative action activist Ward Connerly at the University of Louisville will be a most audacious public assault on U of L’s diversity initiatives to date.
It will be more controversial because of the McConnell Center’s tagline, “a black man’s opposition to affirmative action.”
Radical, liberal and conservative students alike should be eager to attend and question the logic of a black man who, in a recent documentary, blessed the KKK.
“If the Ku Klux Klan thinks that equality is right,” Connerly said, “God bless them.” He was referring to a chapter of the KKK that supported his campaign to outlaw affirmative action in the state of Michigan.
Of all the black conservatives purchased by conservatives, he is certainly the most well funded hired gun. According to the watchdog group Media Transparency, Connerly’s organization, the American Civil Rights Institute, has collected $5,190,000 from hard right-wing foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
Coinciding with this funding, Connerly, like other prominent black conservatives, has championed current opposition to affirmative action, despite benefiting from those very same programs earlier in life. In his home state of California, Connerly’s firm received up to $1 million in state government contracts by registering as minority-owned.
More than a raconteur for the right, Connerly’s activism makes him the leader of the anti-diversity wing of the modern conservative movement. He has a track record of eliminating diversity policies across the country wherever he appears. Beginning in 1996, ACRI ended affirmative action policies in state institutions and agencies in California with the passage of Proposition 209.
Since then, he has sparked similar ballot initiatives in other states with a mix of success and failure. In 2007, according to a New York Times article last month, Connerly “is planning a kind of Super Tuesday next fall, with ballot initiatives against racial preferences in several states.”
The Times also reports that Connerly will announce next month, which states he has chosen for his fall campaign. Many believe that his lecture, to be held in the Brandeis Law School’s Allen Courtroom at noon on March 6, will jumpstart a ballot initiative in the Bluegrass.
Blatantly or not, one can assume that Connerly will specifically target the Society of Porter Scholars, a scholarship program that has given thousands of African-American students the opportunity to attend U of L since the early 1980s.
Behind closed doors the entire diversity machinery, from the Undergraduate Students Helping to Recruit in admissions to the Multicultural Academic Enrichment Program, are all murmuring over Connerly’s visit. Somewhere at some time a rapid response meeting has been, or will be, held.
Whatever their official position on the lecture, one would hope they will say more than the usual supportive stance of Connerly’s right to speak. Even those who are in absolute opposition to Connerly’s views do not seek to disrupt or prevent his upcoming lecture.
In fact, they welcome the opportunity to defend a policy that has enriched America and do not need a civics lesson on the first amendment. They’re just hoping the U of L machinery, which uses diversity as a badge of honor, will defend it with them.
Phillip Bailey is a senior majoring in Pan-African Studies. E-mail him at opinion@louisvillecardinal.com.
