No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The Revolution Against Affirmative Action in California: Politics, Economics, and Proposition 209
Abstract
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, which banned the use of affirmative action in state hiring, contracting, and public university admissions. We know that white voters favored Proposition 209 more than nonwhite voters--the question is, why? Did they feel that the racial preferences given to growing numbers of members of racial and ethnic groups threatened them economically, or were they just motivated by old-fashioned racism? We test these two possible explanations--economic anxiety and racial division--for the appeal of Proposition 209 to California voters using exit poll data. We find little support for the economic anxiety explanation. Instead, racial division seems to be the best way to understand white voting on Proposition 209.
... Upaya resistensi inilah yang diupayakan Cole agar mahasiswa kulit hitam tidak terjebak dalam situasi "the silent floating"(senyap mengambang). The silet floating maksudnya ada pengalaman diskriminasi bagi mahasiswa pendatang, yang berasal dari luar daerah, namun amat jarang menjadi diskursus, dipercakapkan dalam diskusi-diskusi akademis, dan kemudian dilakukan affirmative action (Alvarez & Bedolla, 2004). Keadaan "senyap mengambang" ini memicu terjadinya pembedaan-pembedaan dan adanya privelese bagi relasi yang terbentuk dalam kelompok-kelompok tertentu. ...
Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengungkap bahasa rasis dalam lingkup akademis. Bahasa rasis ditemukan dalam ungkapan atau ujaran dari para pemimpin perguruan tinggi untuk mendiskriminasi ras kulit hitam. Penelitian menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan paradigma historis resistensi di kampus-kampus di Amerika Serikat. Beberapa metode yang digunakan: verstehen atau pembacaan teks dengan memahami terlebih dahulu data primer. deksripsi komparatif pada isu rasisme dalam konteks Indonesia. Untuk itu, penulis juga melakukan interpretasi yakni menafsirkan problem bahasa rasis dengan memahami situasi akademis di Indonesia dan memberi solusi. Temuan penelitian yaitu pertama, pemimpin perguruan tinggi adalah administrator pengambil kebijakan penting yang diharapkan untuk berbicara kepada publik ketika rasisme terjadi di kampus-kampus, namun sebagian dari mereka menyampaikan ujaran rasis. Kedua, bahasa rasis terungkap secara implisit dan eksplisit di universitas dalam beragam kebijakan, mulai dari saat pendaftaran, diskriminasi perumahan mahasiswa kulit hitam, sistem birokrasi perguruan tinggi yang berubah, konflik administrasi kampus, segregrasi, kekerasan di kampus dan problem hak-hak sipil. Rekomendasi penelitian bahwa affirmative action perlu dijalankan dalam bentuk komunikasi dan transformasi di perguruan tinggi.
... Selecting California is not a random choice. California is a big player in respect with direct legislation (Tolbert, 1998) and the published literature has abundantly commented on the cultivating of ballot measures by candidates and political parties alike in the Golden State (Alvarez and Bedolla, 2004;Bowler and Donovan, 2006;Chandler and Kousser, 2008;Dempsey, 2007;Garrett, 2005;Hasen, 2000;Jacobson and Wolfinger, 1989;Nicholson, 2005b;Smith andTolbert, 2004, 2001). Data are from the lower chamber in 2 I look for the official public Facebook page. ...
... Moreover, the cue argued to be missing in ballot issue campaigns-political party-is often present in other forms. Roh and Haider-Markel (2003) and Alvarez and Bedolla (2004), focusing on abortion and affirmative action, respectively, find that the positions of presidential candidates also serve as cues for voters in ballot issue campaigns, bringing party back as a cue. Hasen (2000) shows that in the 1990s, the parties were extensively involved in the California initiative process, taking very public stances. ...
All 24 states that permit their citizens to cast ballots directly on policy issues also require that contributions and expenditures on ballot issue campaigns be disclosed publicly. Scholars argue that information about the financial involvement of interest groups in ballot issue campaigns provides voters with valuable cues about how to vote on potentially complex and confusing issues. In this paper, I argue that the proper way to assess the informational benefits of disclosure is to assess whether the information gleaned from disclosure reports is beneficial to voters at the margin, once all other information available to voters is taken into account. Using a survey experiment, I show that disclosure information provides few marginal benefits for voters, calling into question the informational rationale for disclosure laws.
... At a general level, groupbased discrimination can be understood as being motivated by either economic or psychological forces. That is, it can follow from self-interest and competition among groups in the face of economic scarcity or from prejudices and affects based on group identities (Sniderman et al. 2000;Oliver and Mendelberg 2000;Alvarez and Bedolla 2004). An analysis of California's anti-Japanese laws may help us distinguish between these two bases of discriminitory public policy. ...
Scholars have recently highlighted a critical, but previously neglected, facet of racially discriminatory public policies—such policies may be motivated by either economic or psychological forces. That is, racially discriminatory policy may be the result of self-interest and competition in the face of scarcity or prejudices and affects based on group identities. We test if these motivations were behind the passage of an im- portant, openly discriminatory public policy: California's Alien Land Law of 1920. We find that neither motivation alone accounts for the initiative vote that passed this law; both played a role. Our analysis also illustrates how racially discriminatory pol- icies in the early 20th century fit into the ordinary politics of the day. Early in the 20th century, the state of California enacted several pol- icies that overtly discriminated against Japanese resident aliens. Supporters of these measures openly hoped that these measures would both discourage further immigration and prevent those Japanese already living in the state from thriving (Hichborn 1913; Ichihashi 1915). This was not the first anti- Asian movement in the United States, as it followed, by several decades, the passage of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act. Recently, Gyory (1998) has provoked a lively scholarly debate over whether the anti-Chinese measures of the mid-19th century, usually understood as originating in blue-collar lobbying based on economic self-interest, should instead be seen as the ex- ploitation of racial prejudice by politicians seeking electoral advantage (Ly- man 2000a; Gyory 2000; Lyman 2000b; Yu 2002). We analyze California's anti-Japanese policies to help adjudicate further between top-down and bottom-up explanations of the adoption of racially discriminatory laws. For most of its history, the United States has had serious internal con-
... Tolbert and Grummel found that the white vote for ending affirmative action in California (in the 1996 vote on Proposition 209) steadily increased as the minority population in the census tract increased (also see Alvarez and Bedolla (2004) on Proposition 209, who find that racial divisions better explained the voting patterns than did any economic anxieties among whites). Tolbert and Hero (2001) found that in California whites living in either black/white "bifurcated" counties or homogeneous counties were more likely to support ballot initiatives that restricted minority and immigrant rights than were whites living in counties with moderate levels of blacks but ethnic diversity among whites, echoing Blalock's (1967) finding that a "moderate" level of minority-group presence is associated with higher white support for progressive policy. ...
We investigate the impact of racial diversity and segregation on white voter support for a comprehensive, progressive tax reform. We focus on a 2003 referendum held in Alabama, which if approved would have raised substantial additional revenues for public education and at the same time greatly increased the progressivity of the tax system. We use King's 1997) method of ecological inference to obtain estimates of white and black support for the referendum proposal, and we then attempt to explain the variance across counties in white voter support. We find that the degree of racial segregation, rather than the proportion of blacks in a given county, is most critical in predicting support for the referendum among whites at the county level.
This qualitative study explored the systemic barriers to hiring faculty of color in the community college. A phenomenological design was used to examine the community college full-time faculty search process from the perspective of 10 full-time faculty of color who actively participate in racial justice advocacy. The participants represented five community college districts throughout California and have participated on multiple full-time faculty search committees. This study utilized critical race theory as a guiding framework. An analysis of the participants’ interviews identified that color-blind ideology is pervasive, despite institutional commitment to diversity and nondiscriminatory laws. The leadership and agency of faculty of color strategically challenged the dominant ideology to advocate the hiring faculty of color. Actionable recommendations are presented to combat color-blind ideology in hiring policies and practices at the national, state, and local levels.
At 40.4 million strong (14% of the U.S. population; U.S. Bureau of the Census 2005), Latinas/os are the largest and fastest growing U.S. ethnic minority group. In the last 15 years, since the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Anglo perceptions that the Latina/o population is too large, growing too fast, and too illegal have both continued and perpetuated anti-Latina/o educational policy and criminal law that influence Latina/o perceptions of U.S. education, law, society, justice, and equity. The central question of the article is, What have been the effects of the last 15 years of educational and criminal justice policy on present-day urban Latina/o injustice and inequality? A Latino Critical Theory framework is used to interpret and understand the nexus of Anglo reaction (through educational policy and criminal law) to a perceived U.S. Latina/o-ization, and Latina/o counterreaction through resistance, agency, and protest. We focus on the ways in which education and criminal justice policies at the federal and state levels are related and have led to a barrio-ization of urban Latinas/os since the Los Angeles Riots. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for policy and practice aimed at improving of the Latina/o condition from its present “undereducated” and “overcriminalized” state.
The institutionalization of race-conscious inclusion policies in employment, education, and contracting has largely endured in post-civil rights America despite predictions of their demise. However, scholarship has continued to mislabel many of the specific policies in these organizations and governments as “affirmative action” policies, even though many such policies lack the civil rights roots necessary to warrant this label. In this article, I explain how many organizations have recast, supplemented, or replaced their rights-based affirmative action policies with utilitarian diversity policies. While the conventional, civil rights framework for analyzing affirmative action obscures the rise of such organizational diversity policies, an alternative body of scholarship that employs a diversity framework has shed light on the causes, content, and consequences of this policy and political realignment. The Supreme Court's 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision and the political activism surrounding Michigan's Proposal 2 in 2006 both exemplify the trademark signs of this shift from rights-based affirmative action to organizational diversity policies. The article concludes by assessing the promise and dangers of this trend of rooting racial inclusion policies in a utilitarian diversity logic rather than a civil rights logic.
Research shows that minority children enter the labor market with lower levels of acquired skill than their white counterparts. The causes of this skill gap, however, are not entirely understood. This paper analyzes one possible cause: the impact of a perceived lack of future opportunities on the human capital investment decisions of minority children and parents. Using NLSY79 data, I take advantage of changes in affirmative action laws regarding university admissions as a natural experiment. I test for changes in a variety of child and parental human capital investment variables such as time spent studying and parental involvement for children below the age of 15. The results show that time spent studying among 7th and 8th grade blacks in the affected states is significantly lower. The results for parental input variables show a fairly consistent negative trend among black parents of younger children. Additionally, cognitive achievement tests are examined and show significant results among the same age groups.
Les AA. s'interessent aux politiques anti-discriminatoires conduites aux Etats-Unis entre 1970 et 1995 et leur impact sur l'opinion publique americaine. Ils rappellent que ces politiques visent a instaurer des quotas raciaux, a encourager l'embauche d'individus appartenant aux minorites ethniques, a promouvoir les groupes sous-representes, etc.. Ils montrent que les americains ne semblent pas approuver certaines mesures decidees en cette affaire, comme la preference ethnique sur le marche du travail. Ils analysent, en ce domaine, l'influence des facteurs ethniques sur le plan des attitudes et celle du type de population censee beneficier de ce type de politique. Ils distinguent, sur ce dernier point, les opinions des individus pour ce qui est des politiques en faveur des afro-americain et celles menees au benefice des femmes