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By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

LOS ANGELES —
most people assume that California's anti-affirmative action measure, Proposition 209, which was pushed by California governor Pete Wilson and Bob Dole in a campaign bankrolled by the state's Republican Party, passed because angry white males voted for it.

What this ignores is the fact that slightly more than one out of four blacks who cast a ballot voted for the initiative — slightly higher than the percentage of Hispanics who supported it, but less than the 39 percent of Asian-American voters who voted for it, according to exit polls reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Opponents of 209 insist that blacks who supported it were "racial traitors," confused by its deceptive language or misled by Republican trickery. These explanations overlook the deeply conservative strain in the black community. Many blacks agree with those who argue that affirmative action, like welfare, discourages incentive and unfairly stigmatizes blacks. They are convinced that they achieved their success in business and the professions through hard work and ability, and are particularly insulted when whites claim they got ahead because of color, not competence.

Such sentiments have been fueled by a new wave of black radio commentators, writers, academics and politicians. They oppose not only affirmative action, but welfare, abortion and government spending in general and advocate school prayer, more police and prisons, and "personal responsibility."

Early warning signs that more blacks were joining the growing conservative sea change emerged during the debate over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991. A USA Today poll found that nearly half of the blacks surveyed at the time supported self-help and not government quotas. Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National Committee, claimed that 25 to 45 percent of blacks called themselves "conservative" — a fair prediction of the anti-affirmative action vote by blacks in California.

One key reason for the shift is rising black prosperity. Since the 1970s the number of black managers, professionals, technicians and government officials has increased by 52 percent. A sizable percentage of them now claim they are pro-life, pro-school prayer and anti-gun control. As more than one analyst has argued, middle-class blacks are more likely to be solid patriots than protesters.

There's another reason that more blacks define themselves as conservatives: African-Americans may vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic party, but they have always — through their churches, social organizations, political and economic associations — embraced programs of self-help, business development, law and order, and religious and family values. The NAACP, the Urban League and other mainstream civil rights organizations always waged their fight for jobs, education, civil rights legislation and political representation within the tradition of American reform. Their recent national conventions have emphasized self-help programs, personal responsibility and family values.

Many blacks will continue to vilify other blacks who think that affirmative action — and indeed all government programs — are lose-lose propositions whose time has long since past. But if the black vote against affirmative action in California is any indication, their ranks are likely to grow.

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a Los Angeles-based writer and scholar whose books include "The Assassination of the Black Male Image" (Middle Passage Press), "Beyond O.J.: Race, Sex and Class Lessons for America" (Middle Passage) and "Betrayed: A History of Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives" (Westview).

© Pacific News Service

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Quote of the day

Death chat

"Want to talk about torturing to death? I have a kind of fascination with torturing till death ... I want to surrender completely. I want to die."

— a message posted by Sharon Lopatka in a bondage and discipline chat room. Lopatka's asphyxiated corpse was later found buried in the front yard of Robert Glass, a computer analyst "with a good work record." (From "A fatal step into twilight" by Daphne Merkin, U.S. News & World Report, November 25 1996.