Ward Connerly: A Black Man Leads the Fight Against Anti-white Bias

Not only will it dictate what his future will be, it will determine how he and others look at his past.

Connerly, who is black, has made the fight against racial quotas his mission over the last eight years. If he doesn't like the court's ruling, he will continue on. If he likes it, his mission will be complete.

Yet when the controversial University of California regent is asked what he thinks is going to happen, he answers the same way just about everyone else does. "Not a clue," he said in a telephone interview.

Connerly said that if the court rules that there are no grounds for favoring anybody in any way that involves race, "that would be my dream of the century. I would fold my tent and go back to my office [a land-development consulting firm] and do what I love to do most."

But he said if the court upholds the Allan Bakke decision of 1978 that outlaws quotas but allows other methods of racial set-asides, "we continue to fight."

"If either of those two things happen, nothing has changed for me. We still have to go out and fight this because it has not received the definitive decision it begs for," Connerly said.

"We will fight one state at a time, but we certainly don't think we'll get through all the states."

The author of "Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences" has plenty of enemies. Leftist publications and Web sites have called him a "huckster," "a shameless self-promoter" and "a houseboy."

Jesse Jackson has accused him of "ethnic cleansing."

The New York Times once reported Connerly was raised by a grandmother of Irish and American Indian descent who was known to some relatives as a bigot. Connerly called the report "odd and unwarranted."

When Connerly brought his campaign to Florida, Rep. Corrinne Brown, D-Fla., complained: "Who made him God? We in Florida don't need any paid carpetbaggers." (She failed to make the same complaint about Al Gore's army of lawyers and union thugs in the failed coup attempt of 2000.)

But he remains undeterred in his crusade to end any consideration of race in America.

Connerly, who serves on the board of the California Chamber of Commerce and is chairman of the California Governor's Foundation, began his quest against racism in January 1995. He said he was sitting in a regents meeting the previous year when "it became abundantly clear to me that we were presenting radically different standards."

"We operated on the presumption that if you were black or Hispanic, you would never be able to compete. To even raise that question was sort of being like the skunk at the picnic," he said.

He pushed legislation through the regents eliminating racial discrimination in the university system. Then a move began to expand that into California's workplace, a measure that later became known as Proposition 209.

He said he sat out of the Proposition 209 campaign until he decided it was in trouble. He assumed the leadership, and the organization managed to collect 1 million signatures to get it on the ballot.

He doesn't claim sole credit for the triumph of his views in California, but he points with pride to the Golden State, "where you have the largest state in the union that completely changed its policies."

Connerly tried again in Florida. GOP Gov. Jeb Bush "headed us off, but to a degree adopted the principle we are fighting for."

Rather than see a divisive battle develop over a proposed constitutional amendment, Bush banned racial discrimination in state universities and substituted a program under which the top 20 students in every high school class must be admitted to a college or universities.

However, he said, "In Washington they joined the ranks of California and you have cities and counties rolling back those policies."

His current project is a vote in California in March 2004 to stop the government from gathering information on race.

The initiative is getting flak for having problems with loopholes and unintended interpretations. It allows the Legislature to add to its exemptions with a two-thirds vote and it prevents the state from banning so-called "racial profiling" by law enforcement agencies.

The proposition is doing all right in comparative polls, but a lot of voters are not aware the vote is coming because all of the attention being paid to Iraq, terrorism and, in California, the state budget and efforts to recall Gov. Gray Davis.

Connerly's creed that nothing should be based on race - that there should be no advantages of any kind for blacks, Hispanics, Orientals or whites - might not be gaining much ground. He is not confident that battle is being won.

"I just wish we could resolve the issue on whether we should have a color-blind or color-coded government," he said. "I'm almost of a view that we are losing that battle."

He said the American public is not, as a whole, seeing the flaws in the policies endorsed "in the halls of the elite - government, education and the media - that you can categorize people on the basis of notions about race."

"That's a source of great frustration for me," he said. "Although I'm speaking out, I'm not pleased with the progress."