Conservative spotlight: Linda Chavez

Race and sex quotas are on their way out or so says the conventional wisdom among large numbers of conservatives.

Nonetheless, preferences persist almost everywhere--in the federal government, in even moderately small businesses, and at virtually every public institution of higher learning in the country

I don't see much movement in the legislatures, either at the national level or the state level," says Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO). -What has changed is court rulings in the past 10, 15 years. We've had movements like Proposition 209 in California, Washington State, the battle in Florida." But far more must be done, she says.

"Public opinion has been consistently in favor of equal opportunity for the 30 years I've been following this," Chavez says. "We had high hopes with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. But the Republicans have run for the hills. They haven't been any more willing than the Democrats to abolish preferences."

She does believe that a change of administrations might yield fruit-assuming the change is to a Bush and not a Gore Administration. "The Clinton Administration has taken the Supreme Court's Adarand decision, which should have been a lethal blow to preferences at the national level, and they haven't abolished a single program," she says, even though Adarand requires the government to show "a compelling government interest" before maintaining a preferences program.

CEO has focused in the past couple of years on two issues: documenting with real numbers the level of preference given to racial minorities at public universities, and bilingual education.

On the question of preferences for women in admissions, "what we found is that there wasn't anything to report," Chavez says. As far as test scores and the like went, women scored just about the same as the men also admitted to any particular institution. But whites suffer discrimination, with blacks given significant preferences in the studies CEO has done so far and Hispanics given about half as much preference in the 12 states CEO has looked at, says Chavez.

"What we are doing is show that what conservatives have been claiming for years but couldn't prove is true, with empirical evidence," former Reagan Administration official Chavez says.

"If you look at test scores, there's a huge gap between blacks and whites and Asians. Whites and Asians are very simi lar." There were some schools that bucked the trend: "At the University of North Carolina," she says, "Hispanics seemed to have a slight disadvantage."

Virginia, a conservative state that borders Washington, D.C., has proved to be a bit of a problem. Though CEO completed a study about race and ethnic preferences in undergraduate admissions for the years 1996 and 1999 at the University-of Virginia, the group wants more information that it cannot get. CEO is now engaged in documenting preferences in law and medical school admissions.

Chavez wrote a February 24 letter to UVA saying, "Are we to understand that it is the University of Virginia's view that the public has no right to know to what extent its flagship university is discriminating on the basis of race and ethnicity?"

When Chavez tried to meet with Virginia Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore about preferences, "he refused," she says.

CEO is preparing to do battle against a decision by the Democratic attorney general of California to keep bilingual education alive in that state, despite the voter-passed Proposition 227 that generally forbids it. The AG's opinion insisted that every school district provide bilingual education to every child whose parents signed a waiver.

"We need immigrants," says Chavez. "But immigrants also need to become American." She points to Canada's ongoing troubles with its French-speaking province of Quebec, which has refused to assimilate or even make concessions to the country's generally Anglo-Canadian culture. 'This is a disaster," she said. And it would be an equal disaster, she says, if the Southwestern United States ended up the same way.

Privately funded, CEO bills itself as "the only think tank devoted exclusively to the promotion of colorblind equal opportunity and racial harmony." Its full-time staff of eight works on studies, lawsuits and op-ed articles as it battles against racist and Balkanizing government policies.

After the Mexican-American War, Chavez says, "my family had a choice to make in 1848. They could be Mexican or American. They chose to become American. Immigrants come here to leave Mexico. They don't want the Southwest to be a suburb of Mexico."

CEO may be reached at 815 l5th St., N. W., Suite 928, Washington, D.C 20005 (202-639-0803,-fax.- 202639-0827, e-mail.- comment@ceousa. org; website: www.ceousa.org).

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Mar 17, 2000
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