FOR GRANT RiGHJS

Photos by Scott Braky

The Dilemmas of Anti-Racism

Lessons from the California Ballot

By DANIEL MARTINEZ HOSANG

On a July day in 1994, organizers working at the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NCCIRR) in San Francisco gathered nervously around the fax machine. It was an uncertain time for them and others in the emerging immigrant-rights movement. A few weeks earlier, the California Secretary of State had announced that immigration-restriction activists based in Orange County had successfully gualified an initiative for the November ballot dubbed, "Save Our State."
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nprecedented in its scope and severity, the ballot measure, known eventually as Proposition 187, sought to vanquish undocumented immigrants from the political and civic life of the state. It made citizenship or lawful-immigration status a condition to receive virtually any state benefit K-12 and college education; health, welfare, and social services; even prenatal care. It required hundreds of thousands of state and local employees, including teachers, social workers, and police, to serve as de facto federal immigration agents by mandating the reporting of any students, parents, patients, or clients whose immigration status might be "reasonably suspicious." Backers of Proposition 187, including Republican Governor Pete Wilson, ran inflammatory ads showing teams of shadowy figures streaming across the border from Mexico. Proponents insisted the measure would be "the first giant stride in ultimately ending the ILLEGAL ALIEN invasion." Increasingly, media representations of Latino itnmigrants incorporated metaphors and imagery of disease, invasion, and savagery. As one Proposition 187 supporter proclaimed, "I have no intention of being the object of 'conquest,' peaceful or otherwise, by Latinos, Asians, blacks, Arabs or any other group of individuals who have claimed my country." In response to the measure's qualification, a hastily formed coalition of Democratic elected officials and labor leaders assembled a statewide campaign committee to defeat the measure. The committee soon retained a prominent political consulting firm. Woodward and McDowell, headed by two Republican strategists. With the measure garnering sixty percent support from registered voters in some polls, and championed by a growing number of Republican leaders, the committee believed that the firm could develop a campaign strategy necessary to win the votes of white, suburban, and moderate voters who dominated the California electorate. Woodward and McDowell immediately began organizing focus groups among these voters to craft the campaign's message and to produce the official ballot argument against the measure that would be read by millions of voters before Election Day. Grassroots organizers working at NCCIRR and other immigrant-rights groups were largely excluded from these strategy discussions; they had fewfinancialresources to contribute to a multi-million dollar campaign, and little direct experience in statewide electoral organizing. Now the immigrant-rights leaders anxiously awaited the memo from the consultants containing the anti-187 ballot

The argument concluded with an unambiguous declaration: "Illegal immigration is illegal. Isn't it time we enforce the law?"

arguments and the larger campaign strategy. The memo that eventually crawled through the fax machine at the NCCIRR office was met with shock and dismay. ' The ballot argument began, "Something must be done to stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming across the border.... Illegal Immigration is a real problem, but Proposition 187 is not a real solution." The argument warned that the measure would "kick 400,000 kids out of school and onto the streets" but "won't result in their deportation" and would certainly create more "crime and graffiti." It declared, "every day, hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers handle our food supply in the fields and restaurants. Denying them basic health care would only spread communicable diseases throughout our communities and place us all at risk." The argument concluded with an unambiguous declaration: "Illegal immigration is illegal. Isn't it time we enforce the law?" It called for more enforcement at the border and the punishment of "employers who continue to hire illegal immigrants." The argument was signed by Los Angeles County sheriff Sherman Block and the heads of the California Medical Association and California Teachers Association. In the accompanying memo, the consultants contended that "without a doubt, voters are eager to do something (anything) to address what they perceive to be an illegal immigration problem" and would vote yes on any measure that seemed to represent a solution. Anticipating what would become a major cleavage in the campaign, the consultants acknowledged that while "diverse groups and individuals opposing Proposition 187 differ in their views on illegal immigration," the imperative was to "make the most salient arguments necessary to move public opinion" and there was "no time to undertake any 'general education' on the issue." The consultants argued that it was fruitless to challenge voters' beliefs that "'our illegal immigration problem' [is caused by]. .. the flow of people coming across our southern border." "You can't change that," the memo insisted. "Don't try." The good news, the consultants contended, was that the measure could be defeated if the campaign obeyed a basic imperative: "recognize there is a problem and point out how proposition 187 does nothing to fix the problem ... [and] would cause a host of new PROBLEMS." As Scott Macdonald, a Woodward and McDowell staff member who became the campaign's communications director, later explained, the campaign was "trying to talk to white middleclass voters with messages that resonated with them, because they are the people who vote." Macdonald conceded that
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while it would certainly be better if the electorate were more diverse and broad-minded, "When you're trying to win an election campaign, you have to deal with the realities of it." The consultants named the campaign committee "Taxpayers Against 187." Immigrant-rights activists were indignant. Ignatius Bau, an immigrant-rights attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Erancisco, saw in the argument "all the 'racial specters' of undocumented kids running around causing crime, imdocumented immigrants spreading disease, [and] all the fear" that the Taxpayers campaign hoped to use to motivate voters. "All of us said there's absolutely no way we're going to sign off on this," Bau said in an interview. It was inconceivable to try to defeat a measure attacking immigrants by joining the attacks. The split that followed would divide immigrant advocates in the state for years to come. The Taxpayers Against 187 campaign advised by Woodward and McDowell insisted that the campaign's sole goal should be to win a majority of votes on Election Day. Any other objectives educating voters about immigration issues and rights, building capacity within advocacy and organizing groups, mobilizing new voters had to be subordinated to this "50% + 1 " imperative. While immigrants and people of color would soon become a majority of the state's overall population, the electorate was still more than seventy-percent white, and the campaign had to focus solely on persuading these voters. Erom the consultants' perspective, the campaign could only rely on focus-group tested messages delivered by the law enforcement, education, and health care officials that white moderate voters would find credible. Important decisions should be left to the political consultants who understood electoral campaigns best. Most importantly, in order to establish credibility with the white electorate, the campaign had to affirm the basic notion that immigrants indeed posed a problem to California, but that Proposition 187 only made the problem worse. In this account, elections were not the time for lofty ethical rhetoric or romantic visions of movement building. Pragmatism won elections, not ideology. A wide range of organizations joined and funded the Taxpayers campaign, including nearly all Democratic elected officials, the state's leading labor unions (including SEIU), health care and social service groups, and even some civil rights groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Eund (MALDEE). By contrast, most immigrant-rights groups, ranging from coalitions like NCCIRR to local grassroots parent and student activists, rejected this strategy. Organizing broadly
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Though the courts would eventually overturn most of Proposition 187, for many years organizers aligned with the two campaigns refused to speak to one another.

as Californians United Against Proposition 187, they insisted that the strident racism and xenophobia that animated Proposition 187 could not be ignored. Eocus-group tested messages that did not confront these racialized currents often reproduced the problem. The campaign also had to tap into the enormous political energy within immigrant communities, even if many in those communities were not eligible to vote. Eor them, the stakes were not just what happened on Election Day; the need to build the power and capacity of immigrants and their allies within the state, and to shape the broader discourse of the debate in the future, was also primary. In the three months leading up to the election, the two campaigns against Proposition 187 almost never collaborated; they instead exchanged sharpelbowed, sometimes public attacks over tactics, strategy, and political commitment. When the measure passed in a landslide, garnering fifty-nine percent of the vote statewide, each side blamed the other. The Taxpayers campaign accused immigrantrights activists of undermining its disciplined messaging strategy, especially during numerous school walkouts and mass marches that preceded the election. Organizers affiliated with the Californians United campaign charged that the Taxpayers' effort effectively pandered to white racism, silenced immigrant voices, and failed to understand the ideological dimensions fueling the Proposition 187 campaign. Though the courts would eventually overturn most of Proposition 187, for many years organizers aligned with the two campaigns refused to speak to one another. Indeed, similar splits would torment efforts to defeat other racially charged ballot measures in California. The campaign to defeat Proposition 209, the anti-affirmativeaction measure in 1996, similarly splintered into two competing factions only months before the election, in part over disputes about the emphasis that should be placed on race versus gender. In a 1998 drive to defeat an anti-bilingualeducation initiative, a wide schism emerged between the mainstream campaign advised by political consultants and the grassroots effort fueled by the activism of immigrants and youth of color. The process was repeated two years later in the campaign against Proposition 22, which promised increased prison sentences for juvenile offenders. All of these measures also passed, and predictable finger pointing followed. These debates in fact continued a much broader pattern of California political history. Across the post-World War II era, California's system of direct democracy has proven to be a reliable bulwark against many leading civil rights and antidiscrimination issues: California voters rejected fair-

employment protections in 1946, repealed antidiscrimination work, rather than being the exclusive provenance of political legislation in housing in 1964, overturned schoolconsultants. desegregation mandates in 1972 and 1979, and adopted To be sure, the landscape of California politics has also "English Only" policies in 1984 and 1986. changed dramatically since Proposition 187 passed more than fifteen years ago. In part because of that measure, Again, internal conflicts marred many of the failed more than one million new Latino voters have entered the campaigns to defeat these measures, as organizers struggled California electorate during this time, and Democratic as with the same challenge of how to address issues of racial discrimination and injustice before an overwhelmingly white well as Republican elected officials have come to understand electorate. that support for the cheap racial scapegoating represented by measures like Proposition 187 will Perhaps the most important lesson that can be come at a price. learned from these experiences At the same time, race At the same time, race continues is that the lines between continues to play a profound role in to play a profound role in strategies emphasizing structuring life in the state. Today, pragmatism and those centered structuring life in the state. for every Black student enrolled in on ideological imperatives the University of California system, Today, for every Black student around racial justice are never including graduate, undergraduate, enrolled in the University of neat. In nearly all of these and professional schools, there campaigns, hired consultants California system, including are more than six Black inmates and mainstream political in the state prison system. Latinos graduate, undergraduate, and leaders argued that pragmatic represent approximately ten professional schools, there are discipline and the mandate percent of the UC Berkeley student to win on Election Day body and forty percent of the state more than six Black inmates in necessitated a strategy that prison population. the state prison system. eschewed deliberate mentions Many of the crises marking of race. The message to the Golden State today over grassroots activists was nearly tax policy, foreclosures, public always the same: "We're with you in spirit, but if you want education, infrastructure, prisons, and the environment to win the election, you need to drop your high-minded have racialized dimensions and implications. idealism and focus on what works." These conditions require organizing strategies that are Yet in every one of these cases, this "pragmatic" strategy tactically effective and ideologically expansive. failed on its own terms. No evidence suggests that it No more waiting by the fax machine. influenced the white moderate voters it targeted. In truth, the consultants, whose evidence of "what works" was limited to Daniel Martinez HoSang is the author o/Racial Propositions: their narrow experience in focus groups and surveys, had no Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California special competencies in connecting with this portion of the (University of California Press, 2010) and an assistant professor electorate. There was nothing pragmatic about it. of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon. Prior to his academic career HoSang was an organizer with the At the same time, as immigrant-rights activists in Center for Third World Organizing in the Bay Area. California soon learned, electoral organizing does present a set of unique challenges. It requires specialized competencies in areas like voter targeting and mobilization, fundraising and J reporting, direct mail and phone banking, attention to both paid and earned media strategies, and particular structures for decision-making and campaign management. Developing these capacities is not inherently at odds with contesting the ideological stakes of electoral issues, or understanding the role ballot measures such as Proposition 187 can play in framing long-term debates about racial justice. Be sure Indeed, out of the ashes of the initiative struggles of the to visit our 1990s, several organizations have developed new models of electoral organizing that refuse the pragmatism versus website at ideology divide. Statewide efforts including Californians for Justice, California Calls, and Mobilize the Immigrant Vote now incorporate sophisticated electoral tools and strategies within a long-term political vision centered on racial justice and equity. And they understand electoral organizing as a particular domain within the larger sphere of social-justice
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