My Fight against Race Preferences
Author: Ward Connerly
Publisher: Encounter Books - February 2000

Ward Connerly's book "Creating Equal: My fight against race preferences" is a truth-telling, thought-provoking account of affirmative action fraud. Connerly has become a national figure in the civil rights movement. While serving on the University of California's Board of Regents in 1984, he proved that racial preferences were being widely employed, and helped force the school to change its policies and admit and hire on merit only. After a newsworthy battle, Connerly promoted Proposition 209, which overturned affirmative action policies in California's state government. He did the same for Washington state.

Connerly feels that affirmative action keeps the country "color conscious rather than color blind," fanning the resentment of nonblacks and perpetuating a crippling black dependency. He got help from wrong-minority ethnic groups and 58 percent of women, who voted for Proposition 209 because feminists whipped up hysteria against it but "didn't speak soccer mom."

The worst attacks against Connerly came from fellow blacks like Jesse Jackson who consider him a traitorous Uncle Tom and a "David Duke in blackface" out to restore segregation. Whether confronting campus hecklers or President Clinton, Connerly responds that all Americans deserve equal treatment, and that entitlements are bones tossed to blacks by guilty whites in the "liberal plantation."

The cultural division of hyphenated Americans is attributed to Jesse Jackson who coined the term "African-American." Connerly indicates that people like Jesse Jackson are "civil rights professionals" who maintain their power by keeping minorities dependent and victimized. Civil rights are for all Americans. Connerly is a truer successor of Martin Luther King and Booker T. Washington. Indeed, he has the courage to pursue solutions to a real American crisis.

Most political figures can't produce anything worth reading. Connerly really did write "Creating Equal" himself. From his impoverished childhood in segregated pre-war Louisiana to his audience with Bill Clinton at the White House, his panoramic book spans a civil rights story that's making headlines from coast to coast. Clinton's commission on race was a one-sided failure until Connerly and others like him were included.

If you happened to watch and listen to him on C-Span's Booknotes, or if you read his book, you will find him to be an engaging purveyor of common sense.