Why was the Vote NO on Proposal 2 campaign defeated by 70% to 80% of white working class & middle class Michigan voters?

More importantly, why were so many in the progressive community surprised at the result? Polls prior to the election led us all to believe that this would be a close contest, not the 58% to 42% defeat that resulted from the final count.

As many of us try to understand what went wrong, a number of reasons have emerged for the defeat of affirmative action. Some are:
• the deliberately confused wording of the proposal
• the illegal way in which the signatures were gathered
• the lukewarm support of white Democratic & Republican politicians
• the economic insecurity that growing numbers of workers and middle class European Americans now face, such as massive lay-offs at GM, Ford, Delphi and Visteon, and the outsourcing of jobs

We believe that the main reason we failed to win majority support for continuing affirmative action is that the campaign to Vote NO evaded the fundamental question raised by James Boggs in Uprooting Racism and Racists (Racism and the Class Struggle, 1969). James Boggs was an African American Revolutionist who was a theoretician and community activist in Detroit.

In a scathing rejection of the premise of the 1968 report of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders, Boggs wrote: “The obvious contradiction of the Kerner report is that after diagnosing whites as responsible for racist oppression of blacks, the report goes on to make recommendations for the treatment not of whites but of blacks.”

Affirmative action was a policy developed in the wake of the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s to give people of color and woman access to schools, jobs and programs that had been denied them by racism and sexism. It helped to provide access to important areas of public life, but it did not address the need for the dominant culture to change. It let whites off the hook. Over the next 4 decades, whites have been able to evade looking seriously at racism and at what we all have to gain by its eventual eradication.

The Vote NO coalition did what most folks think they have to do in an election campaign. Based on focus groups, they created a strategy aimed at winning on November 7. It focused on the fact that rolling back affirmative action would primarily affect girls and women, title IX programs, science and sports access. But this strategy did not address the 21st century reality that to white workers affirmative action means race and the belief that affirmative action causes them to lose jobs to black workers. In this period of economic insecurity it is easier for white workers to scapegoat people of color than to struggle to free ourselves from the multinational corporations responsible for this insecurity.

In confronting the deep fears and insecurities that fuel racism, we need to draw our lessons not from the defeat of affirmative action, but from the success of the movement that produced it. The limited affirmative action that has existed was a byproduct of a powerful social movement to end racism. It was won because it became part of a larger vision of the kind of country we wanted to become and the kind of relationships we believed we could create together. This defeat is a wake up call for the need for progressives to engage in an expansive struggle to transform consciousness and culture.

This kind of transformation cannot occur within a short term electoral strategy. Rather, we need the kind of long term commitment that is based upon Martin Luther King’s call for a struggle against racism, militarism and materialism, i.e., the radical revolution in values which he projected in his April 1967 “Time to End the Silence” speech.

Instead of trying to convince Euro Americans that it is in their narrow, short term economic interest to support Affirmative Action, or warning them of losses of opportunities for their daughters if affirmative action is abolished, we need to offer them a choice between two roads, two cultures.

Road 1: Continuing to foster individual advancement and to blame people of color for their insecurities, declining economic power and opportunity.

Road 2: Accepting the awesome challenge of creating new self-sustaining communities based upon compassion, inclusion and a new sense of responsibility for one another and our earth. We have an opportunity to replace the American Dream based on Empire, which has become a nightmare for most of our people and people across the globe. It is a dream that has encouraged all of us to sell our souls for the dollar, to aspire to nothing more than being consumers, shopping until we drop. In the process we have justified the misuse of our military in a war against Iraq, we have unleashed destruction on the planet—from global warming to the pollution of the air and water—and we have accepted the growing inequality between the Global North and the Global South and between rich and poor inside the U.S.

This defeat is an opportunity for us to face squarely the danger of continuing to evade the challenge Martin Luther King posed in a time equally as dangerous when he called upon us to challenge the triple terrors of racism, militarism and materialism by creating a revolution in values so that we might join with the people around the globe who were beginning to create new ways of living and being.

As organizers and progressive activists we need to dedicate ourselves to transforming our culture of capitalism and racism through our commitment to new values and a new vision for a self-governing America. It is time to move beyond the question of access into a dying and destructive system to transformation, recognizing that the world has changed and therefore our vision, our theories and our practice to change the world must also evolve.

Affirmative action, created at a time of an expanding economy and mushrooming educational system, cannot help us address the deeper questions we face. It is not a solution to today’s crisis. It does not affect the millions who have become outsiders to America in the last 40 years, the 130,000 unemployed in Detroit, the 2.2 million in prisons in the US, the 5-7 million on probation or in the criminal justice system, or the 30%-50% who drop out of high school.

Affirmative action provides access into what Malcolm X called “the burning house.” Over the decades, in spite of the gains of some individuals through affirmative action, we have seen growing class inequality and polarization in the U.S.
Our challenge is to transform our values and our institutions by creating new forms of community, based on new principles and values that can constitute the grassroots foundation for a new America governed by participatory instead of representative democracy.

Many of the generation of aging liberals and 60’s radicals have not learned enough from the rise of the New Right and of global capitalism in the last 25 years. They still hope that we can return to the 30’s when an expanding labor movement forced FDR to respond with the New Deal (and then with WWII) or the movement days of the 60’s when LBJ created anti-poverty programs to defuse civil rights marches and ghetto rebellions.

In 1981 James Boggs wrote From Racism to Counter-Revolution (available at www.boggscenter.org). In it, Boggs exposes “those blacks and liberals who have the illusion that we must go back to struggling only against racism when the only solution to our deepening problems has become a total struggle against capitalism.” This does not mean separating race from class but recognizing the limits of anti-racist struggles at this time in history.

The year 2007 marks the 40th Anniversary of King’s “Time to Break the Silence” speech challenging Americans to a radical transformation of values. Realizing that the Vietnam War was but “a symptom of a far deeper malady of the American spirit,” he challenged us to recapture the revolutionary spirit and “go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

Let us take this message to all Detroiters and suburbanites as we commemorate Martin Luther King’s birthday in January and the 40th anniversary of this historic speech. Instead of waiting for elections or depending on ballot proposals, let us give European Americans an opportunity to transform themselves, talking with them door to door, organizing actions and events which inform them and the world of what individuals and groups are already doing to create a new American Dream.

Rich Feldman and Shea Howell are board members of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.