| 摘要 | He is America’s most ardent proponent of colorblindness, a successful grassroots political leader, and a bold thinker on questions of race, education, and government policy. Californian Ward Connerly vaulted to national prominence in the 1990s as the most visible and articulate leader of the Proposition 209 campaign, which in 1997 outlawed racial discrimination or preferences in all decisions by the state of California. Since then he has continued to shake up the political establishment with his adamant calls for colorblindness in public policy. A businessman and regent of the University of California, Connerly has recently turned his attention to passage of a Racial Privacy Initiative, which would end nearly all use of racial classifications by the government. He views this as the next step toward his dream of a society where skin color is truly irrelevant. TAE ran a long, illustrated extract from Ward Connerly’s autobiography, Creating Equal, in our June 2000 issue. This February, Connerly spoke with TAE senior editors Karina Rollins and Eli Lehrer in Arlington, Virginia. TAE: What are the biggest problems facing young black Americans today? CONNERLY: The problems that face black Americans are really no different from the threats that face all young Americans. I would sum them up this way: How do we preserve a culture in which every American citizen is treated as an equal without regard to his race or color? TAE: Is it easier to be a white person in America than a black person? CONNERLY: Maybe, but that really should not be important. It certainly is a lot easier for a black person growing up today than it was 40 years ago. But that didn’t stop blacks 40 years ago from overcoming their problems. And they didn’t do it alone; the nation grew with them. There is no obstacle in the way of any black kid or Latino kid today that is insurmountable. A lot of things that we present as barriers for black people are barriers that are created by expecting the worst. When you expect the worst you get it. So I don’t think that the challenges facing black people once they step outside the prism of blackness are any greater than they are for anybody else. TAE: There now exists a sizeable, reasonably well-off generation of African Americans who have never faced legal discrimination. Is this group eventually going to conclude that affirmative action is no longer needed, and how soon do you think that might happen? CONNERLY: There is indeed a sizeable black middle class, and also a sizeable group of very wealthy blacks that we don’t know much about–people who are flying around every day in their own private jets. But there’s still an element of political correctness that stops black Americans from making the next jump and saying, “We don’t need affirmative action.” That won’t happen until the cultural and political waters are warmer for them to say that. Today’s successful blacks have taken advantage of opportunities that were there. They were prepared, worked hard, and made it. But it’s not yet fashionable among blacks to say that. If you do, the wrath of the “professional” blacks–people for whom being black is their profession–will come down on you. If you’re the CEO of a big company, you don’t want Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus ragging on you every day. So you just roll over–and let the Connerlys of the world do the dirty work. TAE: So what do you think a modern civil rights movement should focus on? CONNERLY: A modern civil rights movement should focus on making sure that every American understands that civil rights are not just for black people. They’re for everybody. I think it’s time for the conservative movement to conduct a friendly, or perhaps a hostile, takeover of the civil rights movement. We’re at the point right now where the most productive leadership on civil rights is already being led by conservatives. The next step, I think, is to articulate the absolute importance of deregulating race. Getting it out of the equation. Getting to the point where you no longer have to ask me about black people. TAE: Tell us about the Racial Privacy Initiative. CONNERLY: The Racial Privacy Initiative is aimed at breathing life into what I think is at the core of America–taking people from all around the globe who come here, and saying to them: Once you are fully here, you’re just an American citizen, no more, no less. You have the same expectations, same privileges, same benefits as any other American citizen. You’re not a black American citizen. You’re not Irish. You’re just an American. In the privacy of your own life you can celebrate anything you want to celebrate. But the government will not be a party to that. The government doesn’t give a damn about whether you are black or white or whatever. TAE: How hopeful are you that that is going to happen? It seems like racial identity politics has become very entrenched. CONNERLY: Let’s step back for a moment. Just a short nine years ago, I was sitting in a meeting in San Francisco and I said, “I think affirmative action has become a system of preferences and quotas; we need to be very careful about it.” There was deathly silence in the room. To even think of challenging affirmative action was the unthinkable. Now affirmative action is on the ropes. When the Supreme Court rules this June in the University of Michigan case, the whole issue of race preferences will hang in the balance. If the Court goes the route that I suggest in the brief I’ve filed, it will deal not only with racial preferences, but also with the racial classifications that underlie preferences. You cannot argue in favor of diversity without having some system in mind of who it is that you want to elevate under this diversity. I think we’re very close to the highest court in the land saying “racial classifications are suspect.” Who’s black? How many black ancestors do you have to have in order to be black? You get rid of that, and you eliminate a lot of social problems. TAE: Are public schools leaving black youths ill-prepared for competitive colleges? Isn’t this one of the main factors creating the pressure for admission quotas by race? CONNERLY: Yeah, I think that public schools are a large part of the problem. But you cannot dismiss the role of the family. Public schools provide lesson plans and homework assignments, and babysit the kids during the day. When kids get home it’s the parents who make sure that they’re learning. Before children have their first day in school they need to know their ABCs, and they need to be disciplined. In all too many black families, they have not been taught how to speak proper English. And therein lies the basic problem. A kid who comes to school speaking little proper English is severely handicapped. For many black kids all they’ve heard every day is “Boy, don’t do that or I’ll slap you upside your head.” They are taught that learning is a white man’s game. Many of the black kids we are worried about are low income kids; kids without parents who understand the importance of getting them prepared. These are not problems of their skin color, and the minute we say they’re black that just translates into a whole different approach to how we deal with the problem. We think they’re being discriminated against yadda, yadda, yadda, and we never get to the real core of the problem, which is that the kid is in a dysfunctional family setting where race isn’t the real problem. TAE: Are there any leaders out there, of any color, who you think are doing a good job of sending this sort of message? CONNERLY: No. There are none in politics. We have more cowards per capita in our political system today than we have had at any point in my lifetime. Those of us on the conservative side of the aisle who talk about school vouchers and the like don’t get to the next step and talk about the family. TAE: Are there any church leaders that send the right message? CONNERLY: Black churches are now irrelevant institutions. Most have been commandeered by leftists–political activists, who hide behind the cloth rather than really getting involved in the lives of their parishioners and trying to improve them. I’ve had more grief from black ministers, who are often politicians more than people who provide spiritual leadership and guide their flock. TAE: Would you ever run for office? CONNERLY: No. I think it corrupts you. Not in a financial way, but in a moral way. You become so obsessed with winning. Once you’ve won you want to maintain power. Someone needs to run, and somebody else needs to stand on the sideline and hold him accountable. The course I’ve chosen is to maintain that vigil, to remind elected officials of what they ought to do. TAE: How would you describe your politics? CONNERLY: I am, on most things, right of center. But I think my politics grab a lot of people because they are conservative for the most part, libertarian at the core, and on some issues moderate of tone. I detest labels and generally don’t fit neatly under just one. Although, I proudly say that I’m conservative because that’s generally where I fall. TAE: How would you evaluate President Bush’s record on race? CONNERLY: On race I’d give him a D- until the University of Michigan case. His statements on that issue brought him up to a C. He’s scared to death of racial issues. For no reason. There has never been a Republican President who commands more good will from people across the board than George W. Bush. He is superman when it comes to deflecting attacks of being a racist. The guy just exudes the sentiment, “In my heart, I love everybody and I’m everybody’s President.” On the Michigan case, 80 percent of Americans support the position he’s taken. So I think that if he stops making these political calculations about how this position’s going to play out here, and how it’s going to play out there, and just follows his instincts to what he knows in his heart is right, he could hit a home run. TAE: Is this timidity you see in Bush the same reason why black Republicans like J. C. Watts and Colin Powell don’t come out against preferences? CONNERLY: Yes. Colin Powell, if you read his book, is very strongly opposed to preferences. When he was flirting with running for President and he wanted to appeal to a larger audience, he said, “I’m opposed to preferences, if it means treating people differently.” Then, after he decided not to run, he took the easy way out, because support for preferences is what corporate America wants to hear; the fuzziness of diversity and all that mindless blather. When you’re on a speaking tour and giving $80,000-a-pop speeches you don’t want to be a source of controversy, do you? So I think that Colin Powell is enjoying the route of least resistance. As far as J. C. Watts goes, J. C. is close to John Lewis and didn’t want the Congressional Black Caucus to oppose him. When I met with J. C. he said “of course preferences are morally wrong.” But then he manufactured all of these excuses about having been racially profiled himself and everything else, to exonerate himself from doing that which is morally right. So he also took the path of least resistance. TAE: When do you think we’ll have our first black President? CONNERLY: The conditions are already there. It’s a question of whether somebody is willing to go out and put forth the effort to bring it about. The American people are ready to accept a black President. TAE: Will the first black President be a Democrat or a Republican? CONNERLY: A Republican. There’s an institutional problem for a black Democrat. First of all, a black Democrat is going to have to be blessed by the Democratic Party, and the message a black person would have to send to win the Democratic endorsement would be one of supporting the agenda articulated by the Congressional Black Caucus. That can’t win nationally. A Republican would be free from race, and would be able to say, “I’m running as an American. I want all of your votes, and if I’m elected I’m gonna be a President for all America.” If I ran for governor of California, I’d win. I’m not cocky, I’m just telling you I know my state, I know the politics, I’ve seen the polls. And no matter how much I’m despised by blacks in California and those of Mexican descent (because they are now pursuing the same path as the blacks of the ’70s and ’80s), no matter how much I’m despised by them and hung in effigy on campuses, I’d win. TAE: From where would your largest support come? CONNERLY: I’d get 70 percent of whites. I would get 50 percent of Asians, or more. I would get 30 to 40 percent of blacks. And it wouldn’t even be close. It would happen. TAE: What do you think about Al Sharpton’s Presidential candidacy? Is that going to matter, or is it going to be irrelevant? CONNERLY: I think it matters. I think that certainly he won’t get more than a token amount of support, but Sharpton is not the buffoon that people think. Sharpton is a far better politician than Jesse Jackson. Sharpton is personally charming. The media will like him because off-camera he has a humor and a charm that Jesse Jackson doesn’t have. Jackson you don’t like, he’s preachy. He is really rather crude. Sharpton’s underrated. TAE: Could he do any real damage? CONNERLY: No. People will not take him seriously. He has no credibility in that respect. He will draw votes from the Democrats. People will see the hypocrisy of his message. I was on a debate with him on TV, and Wolf Blitzer of CNN puts up on the screen the number of points that black kids get in college admissions simply for their skin color, and Blitzer asks Sharpton, “Don’t you think that’s discrimination?” Well, Sharpton says, “No, no . . . we need diversity and whites have never had the oppression that blacks have had.” And I said “Mr. Sharpton, I’m outraged that you have no sense of shame about this.” TAE: After your enormous success with Proposition 209 in California, the effort to ban racial preferences seemed to fizzle in a lot of the country. Why do you think this happened? CONNERLY: It didn’t fizzle. The press portrays it as fizzling, but we just took a different tack. It was never our intent to go state by state into all of the 23 states that have initiative provisions in their constitutions. It was our intention to change the paradigm, and to change how people saw affirmative action. It was our objective to tell the truth about affirmative action and to get people to understand that it is a system of race preferences. We wanted the language to change–from “affirmative action,” which sounds very positive, to “preferences,” which sounds negative. And pick up just about any newspaper in the nation right now and you see the term “race preferences.” We have strategically picked places to wage a fight, never losing sight of the fact that our mission is to change the way the country thinks. So we’re very much on track with what we’re trying to do. TAE: What do you think of other types of preferences in college admissions, like those granted to athletes, musicians, or children of alumni–preferences not based on race. CONNERLY: Athletic ability is a talent. Musical ability is a talent. Being the child of an alum, that’s not a talent. So I think those of us who say “the system ought to be based on merit” now need to take the leadership and say that “alumni offspring admissions need to go.” That gives us the moral standing to be true to ourselves and to be true to the public. TAE: Do you consider yourself black? CONNERLY: It is a testimony to my endurance that I’ve sat through this interview, with nearly every question being about color, and I’m still civil at the end of it. My origin is of African descent, Choctaw Indian, French, and Irish. Two of my grandkids are all of that plus their grandmother, who is Irish, and their father, who is of German descent. And two other grandkids are all of those ingredients plus their mother, who is half Vietnamese. So you see, for me, checking these racial identification boxes is rather personal. I don’t like it. I don’t buy into it. I say I’m black for the sake of not spending the whole interview quarreling about classification. But I don’t like it. I’m brown in color. What is black? It’s a term we use because we’re lazy. It’s easier to put somebody into a box and use that as a shortcut for something. But it’s not useful. |
