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Title: Creating Equal : My Fight Against Race Preferences by Ward Connerly ISBN: 1-893554-04-X Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: 15 February, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (30 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Fighting the Injustices of the Civil Rights Industry
Comment: A powerful portrayal of the violent, hate-based, anti-white underbelly of the civil rights industry in Amreica, woven neatly into the autobiography of a black man struggling for true racial equality.
Here is clear and convincing evidence of the trials and tribulations a man of color is forced to confront, when he seeks "justice for all" in the one-sided, Europhobic world of "race norming" and "Affirmative Discrimination" in America.
Ward Connerly, tells how he was successful in eliminating institutionalized racial preferences in some cases -- but at great cost. Connerly is reviled by the gimme-gimme crowd headed by the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who view racial controversy as an opportunity to accumulate enormous personal wealth. Connerly writes that Jackson has called him "strange fruit," among other things. It seems many so-called civil rights leaders take advantage of every opportunity to thwart Connerly's steady march toward racial justice.
In the Spring of 2001, Justice Clarence Thomas warned: "By yielding to a false civility, we sometimes allow our critics to intimidate us. Active citizens are often subjected to truly vile attacks."
So it was for Ward Connerly, but his courage overcame the fascists' attacks. This book takes the reader along on a journey to justice with Ward Connerly -- a brave and honorable man.
Rating: 5
Summary: Autobiography in the great American tradition
Comment: There was a time when public figures with significant views on the great issues of the day would write pamphlets or treatises, even short books, detailing their positions. One thinks, for instance, of such writers as Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton at the time of the Founding, or in recent decades of Barry Goldwater's great book The Conscience of a Conservative, or William Simon's A Time for Truth. These are all polemical works, meant to argue for political positions, which, though intensely personal, are uncluttered by personality. They served an essential public service by addressing vital questions in a brief and readable form. As a result, they were widely read and quite influential.
Today, at a time when even White House pets have bestselling memoirs, these kinds of arguments are now grafted on to autobiographical texts for no discernible reason other than to exploit the current trend in publishing. It was with some trepidation then that I approached Ward Connerly's book, Creating Equal. I admire him and the battle he has waged over the past decade, but I honestly expected to skim through the typically pro forma story of his life to get to the meatier sections where he would present the intellectual case against racial preference programs. But an unexpected thing happened on the way through the boring bits; it turns out that, though much of his tale is familiar, Ward Connerly's own life experience is one of his best arguments.
As is common in American society, and only getting more so, Connerly comes of mixed racial stock : Black, White, and Native American. He is "Black" only by the terms of the ancient and racist "one drop rule" and by family tradition; in reality his race defies categorization. He did not meet his father until very late in life and, his mother having died, was raised first by an aunt and uncle, then by his grandmother. His grandmother and uncle were the real formative influences on his character, both of them strict and demanding that he make something of himself. His Uncle James in particular was a role model, asking only one thing of life : that people treat him like a man; in exchange always carrying himself like one. Together they instilled in Connerly a burning desire to be judged on his own merit.
It thus seems natural that when, as a member of the University of California Board of Regents, Connerly was approached by a couple who had statistical evidence of the use of quotas by the UC colleges, he turned their cause into his cause. His account of the battle for Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, and then subsequent contests in Washington, Texas and Florida, make for interesting reading, though they are perhaps not as viscerally powerful as the story of his early life.
Throughout the book, Connerly is animated by a simple timeless creed which gives the book its title :
I celebrated July 4 1995 with a heightened awareness of the personal freedom at the core of nationhood. When the Founding Fathers said that we were all created equal, they were proposing an audacious theory that ultimately inflamed the rest of the world. By fits and starts, Americans had tried to make that theory into a reality, with abolitionism, the Emancipation Proclamation, and, of course, the civil rights movement, which instituted sweeping revisions of the law that have brought us ever closer to the fulfillment of the promise of our national life. I felt in my heart that race preferences--by whatever name--were not a continuation of that progress, but an obstacle in the road to freedom and equality. At best a diversion, and at worst a giant step backward, affirmative action preferences caused us to lose sight of the task we inherited from the Founders--creating equal as the only category that counts in America.
There's a deep irony in the fact that these beliefs, traceable to Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, should now make Ward Connerly anathema to the Democratic Party and to the institutionalized civil rights movement. We have reached a sad point in our nation's history where to the inheritors of the legacy of Jefferson and King the idea of a color blind society has been transmuted into a weird kind of racism itself. It should not have required courage to, as Connerly boldly does, advocate that race be ignored in awarding government jobs and contracts, but it did, and this demonstration of courage makes Connerly into a heroic figure, willing to brave epithets, threats and hatreds to vindicate his convictions. This memoir, harkening back to The Autobiography of Ben Franklin and Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, partakes of the great American tradition of self-reliance and the demand that each of us be judged individually; this gives it an impact all out of proportion to what I expected.
GRADE : A
Rating: 2
Summary: Idealism reads nicely...
Comment: There's no denying that "Creating Equal" is a well written, easy read. I have enjoyed reading about Connerly's life as well as his opinions on affirmative action, even though i disagree with them. "Creating Equal" has given me a different perspective on the affirmative action issue, but has failed to change my opinion that affirmative action is a necessary policy at this moment in time.
Connerly basis his argument on America's goal of becoming a "color blind" society. Unfortunately, Connerly's ideal is far from a reality even as far away as we are from the Civil Rights Movement. While he describes beautiful images of racial differences being nonexistant, the reality of this is not the society that we live in today. There HAVE been significant advances for racial minorities since the Civil Rights Movement, but race is still a key divider in American society. One cannot look at the economic divide in the United States without noting that the general trends show a significant difference in household income between blacks and Latinos, and whites and Asians. Even looking at the "middle class" income bracket, one can see that middle class blacks and Latinos make significantly less than middle class whites and Asians. With more wealth comes a greater access to better education, which in turn creates greater opportunity for advanced education and better jobs, etc. The problem that should be attacked to create equality is the public school system.
Thankfully, Connerly acknowledges that the real problem is the public educational system, however, he offers no solution. Erasing affirmative action without simultaneously pushing for reforms in the distribution of funding in public education as well as other improvements offers no solution to those who are truly underserved.
I recommend "Creating Equal" to proponents and opponents of affirmative action. While I feel that Connerly is striving to achieve his goal of a color blind society in backwards manner, he does bring into question some important flaws in the affirmative action system as it exists, which can perhaps lead us to a better model to use while we still need it.
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Title: The Content of Our Character : A New Vision of Race In America by Shelby Steele ISBN: 006097415X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America by John McWhorter ISBN: 0060935936 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority by John H. McWhorter ISBN: 1592400019 Publisher: Gotham Books Pub. Date: 27 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: A Dream Deferred : The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America by Shelby Steele ISBN: 0060931043 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: What Color is a Conservative? by J. C. Watts, Chriss Winston ISBN: 0060194367 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 22 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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