California state Assemblyman Corey A Jackson is not someone you would ordinarily think believed that non-white persons simply aren’t equal with whites, but darned if that isn’t exactly what he believed. Elected in 2022 to represent the 60^th Assembly District, his main concern seems to be race. He was aghast, appalled, and definitely clutching his pearls when the Supreme Court ruled that yes, discrimination on the basis of race was unconstitutional in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, as well as the 2020 rejection of the Pyrite State’s Proposition 16, by the huge margin of 57.2% to 42.8%, which sought to overturn the 1996 state constitutional amendment which banned discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin and ethnicity as a factor in public university admissions and other state programs.

Think about that: in the ‘bluest’ of our blue states, an attempt to reinstate racial preferences, in which the proponents outspent the opposition by roughly 14-to-1, the attempt was defeated by a landslide margin.

Mikhail Zinshteyn of Cal Matters wrote:

The latest effort, known as Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7, wouldn’t fully overturn Proposition 209, which created the country’s first ban on affirmative action 27 years ago. Instead, it would allow state agencies to send the governor a waiver request to avoid some of Proposition 209’s restrictions, as long as the exception is based on scholarly research.

Now what does that mean? “Scholarly research” can find just about any result, if the scholar is biased — which most seem to be — and much “scholarly research” winds up seeing subsequent “scholarly research” refuting the first and obtaining different results. After all, professors at research universities are under a “publish or perish” imperative, and refuting past results is often seen as better than confirming someone else’s results. It also means, since the decision would be up to the governor, that the governor could and would pick the research that fit his political preferences.

With a Governor like Gavin Newsom, who seems to have little respect for the parts of the Constitution he doesn’t like, the Second Amendment most notably, we already know how he would do things.

Equality under the law, it seems, is not good enough. Assemblyman Jackson stated that ACA-7 is an “acknowledgment that Proposition 209,” the 1996 measure which outlawed discrimination, “was a failed experiment.” Equality is an experiment? Equality is a failed experiment”?

Well, now we know: it isn’t equality that they want, but “equity”:

As with the 2020 ballot measure, the current effort is meant to compensate for the myriad effects historical prejudice has had on specific groups of people, such as housing discrimination or police profiling. It’s a concept known as equity: making up for past racial injustices by using race as a factor in programs that can help undo those injustices.

In other words, equity means equal of outcomes, not equal opportunity. He has admitted, though he would never admit it directly, that he does not believe that non-white people are equal to whites. Proposition 209 was passed in 1996; that was 27½ years ago.

(Mr Jackson) wants state law relaxed so that lawmakers and state agencies can directly support Black and other marginalized state residents — such as by deploying public funds to address the much higher death rates of Black women giving birth or the lower life expectancy rates of Black and Native American people — while still working within some of the confines of Proposition 209.

The amendment’s focus on identity groups is “making sure that there are interventions that are specifically made for them to help solve the problems that are unique to them,” Jackson said then.

The emphasis on using academic evidence is an attempt to persuade voters that state programs using race as a factor wouldn’t be subjective but would have to meet a high research bar to waive Proposition 209, Jackson said.

Let’s tell the truth here: Mr Jackson would love to throw out the equality specified in the state constitution, but the failure of Proposition 16 demonstrated that he can’t get that part done, so he’ll try to chip away at it, piece by piece.

The Supreme Court addressed this in the Students for Fair Admissions decision. The Chief Justice wrote:

The dissenting opinions resist these conclusions. They would instead uphold respondents’ admissions programs based on their view that the Fourteenth Amendment permits state actors to remedy the effects of societal discrimination through explicitly race-based measures. Although both opinions are thorough and thoughtful in many respects, this Court has long rejected their core thesis.^[1]Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, pages 34-35 of the Opinion of the Court, and 42-43 of the .pdf file.

The Chief Justice also noted that neither Harvard University nor the University of North Carolina, the two respondents in the suit, had either specified an ‘end date’ for their race-based admissions, or criteria on what would define a point at which an end date could be set.

Respondents point to language in Grutter that, they contend, permits “the durational requirement [to] be met” with “periodic reviews to determine whether racial preferences are still necessary to achieve student body diversity.” But Grutter never suggested that periodic review could make unconstitutional conduct constitutional. To the contrary, the Court made clear that race-based admissions programs eventually had to end — despite whatever periodic review universities conducted. Here, however, Harvard concedes that its race-based admissions program has no end point. (Harvard “has not set a sunset date” for its program (internal quotation marks omitted)). And it acknowledges that the way it thinks about the use of race in its admissions process “is the same now as it was” nearly 50 years ago. UNC’s race-based admissions program is likewise not set to expire any time soon—nor, indeed, any time at all. The University admits that it “has not set forth a proposed time period in which it believes it can end all race-conscious admissions practices.” And UNC suggests that it might soon use race to a greater extent than it currently does. In short, there is no reason to believe that respondents will — even acting in good faith — comply with the Equal Protection Clause any time soon.^[2]Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, page 34 of the Opinion of the Court, and 42 of the .pdf file. Internal references omitted.

Chief Justice John Roberts did not use the word ‘equity’ in the Opinion of the Court, but its meaning is clearly there. More, I see it all the time in the articles on the subject that are in the (supposedly) straight news sections of The Philadelphia Inquirer, blaming poverty in one of our nation’s most internally segregated cities on ‘redlining,’ a practice which reduced the ability of people to obtain mortgage loans based upon the neighborhood rather than the credit-worthiness of the applicants, a practice made illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

That was 55½ years, two generations, ago. But ‘equity’ demands an equality of outcomes, not a legal equality of persons. That is what the Assemblyman wants, but that is precisely what the Constitution of the United States forbids.

Why does Mr Jackson want that? My conclusion is a simple one: deep down, he does not believe that non-white Americans are equal to white people, and that they must have a leg up given to them by the state to succeed. He would almost certainly dispute my conclusion concerning his beliefs, but what other logical reason could there be?

William McGurn addressed this in The Wall Street Journal, in which Mr Jackson’s beliefs were made clear:

“Racial preferences are never legally justified because some specious ‘research’ report concludes it would be beneficial to a certain race,” says (Edward) Blum, (founder of Students for Fair Admissions). “This exemption will trigger endless litigation that will polarize California citizens by race.”

But sowing discord is a feature, not a bug. As the bill was making its way through the Assembly, Mr. Jackson got in a spat with Bill Essayli—a Republican who is also the first Muslim elected to the Assembly. Mr. Essayli pointed out that the majority of Californian voters disagree with state-sanctioned discrimination. “I fundamentally disagree with this backwards policy,” he later tweeted.

Mr. Jackson responded in his own tweet: “This is a perfect example how a minority can become a white supremacist by doing everything possible to win white supremacist and fascist affection.”

Equality is, to Mr Jackson, “white supremacist” and “fascist”. Draw your own conclusions.