Customer Reviews

Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

From the first chapter--describing Connerly's visit to the White House to discuss race relations with Bill Clinton and Al Gore--to the last, Creating Equal is a thoroughly captivating memoir. Connerly provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes history of the battles to eliminate racial preferences in California, Houston, Tex., Washington, and Florida. Connerly's steadfastness in the face of vicious personal attacks is inspiring-a real testament to his commitment to racial progress. This commitment, we learn, is nothing new. For example, as a student at Sacramento State, Connerly learned that local landlords were refusing to rent out their apartments to minority students. In response, Connerly--despite a threat from the college president--led a massive investigation and helped bring about California's fair housing law. Politics aside, the stories from Connerly's hardscrabble childhood are poignant without being sappy--readers will love getting to know Connerly's hardworking, country-music loving Uncle James and his tough-as-nails grandmother. For people who care about the future of race relations, this cogently argued, beautifully written book is a must-read.

Over my life course, I have read many books on race relations, social justice, and social inequality. Ward Connerly book's CREATING EQUAL: MY FIGHT AGAINST RACE PREFERENCES will be one of the most memorable. Why? Ward Connerly does not take the popular position.

Readers do not have to like him or his ideas to realize that Connerly is a man a great courage. He is well known and even hated for his position on affirmative action. However, reading his elegant words within CREATING EQUAL creates second thoughts among those who are strongly opposed to his ideology. Connerly lays out how his upbringing drove him to believe that Affirmative Action does more damage than good. Most of his logical positions are solid well thought out and have a great deal of merit. Nevertheless, we can find flaws in his position.

I have actually required CREATING EQUAL to be read by social work majors who are strongly in favor of affirmative action. After reading this book, ALL of them changed their position. This is not to say that all of them started to oppose affirmative action, but clearly, their positions in favor of affirmative action were softened. Reading CREATING EQUAL creates second thoughts.

To induce students to use their critical thinking skills, I often require them to read A HOPE IN THE UNSEEN immediately after reading CREATING EQUAL. Suskind, the author of A HOPE IN THE UNSEEN, chronicles the life of an African American young man's struggle to gain an education. Cedric Jennings' life provides the strongest argument for affirmative action. It is utterly fascinating to witness students synthesizing the content of these two well-written books. So, I recommend that everyone read both books - one immediately following the other.

There was a time when public figures with significant views on the great issues of the day would write pamphlets or treatises, even short books, detailing their positions. One thinks, for instance, of such writers as Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton at the time of the Founding, or in recent decades of Barry Goldwater's great book The Conscience of a Conservative, or William Simon's A Time for Truth. These are all polemical works, meant to argue for political positions, which, though intensely personal, are uncluttered by personality. They served an essential public service by addressing vital questions in a brief and readable form. As a result, they were widely read and quite influential.

Today, at a time when even White House pets have bestselling memoirs, these kinds of arguments are now grafted on to autobiographical texts for no discernible reason other than to exploit the current trend in publishing. It was with some trepidation then that I approached Ward Connerly's book, Creating Equal. I admire him and the battle he has waged over the past decade, but I honestly expected to skim through the typically pro forma story of his life to get to the meatier sections where he would present the intellectual case against racial preference programs. But an unexpected thing happened on the way through the boring bits; it turns out that, though much of his tale is familiar, Ward Connerly's own life experience is one of his best arguments.

As is common in American society, and only getting more so, Connerly comes of mixed racial stock : Black, White, and Native American. He is "Black" only by the terms of the ancient and racist "one drop rule" and by family tradition; in reality his race defies categorization. He did not meet his father until very late in life and, his mother having died, was raised first by an aunt and uncle, then by his grandmother. His grandmother and uncle were the real formative influences on his character, both of them strict and demanding that he make something of himself. His Uncle James in particular was a role model, asking only one thing of life : that people treat him like a man; in exchange always carrying himself like one. Together they instilled in Connerly a burning desire to be judged on his own merit.

It thus seems natural that when, as a member of the University of California Board of Regents, Connerly was approached by a couple who had statistical evidence of the use of quotas by the UC colleges, he turned their cause into his cause. His account of the battle for Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, and then subsequent contests in Washington, Texas and Florida, make for interesting reading, though they are perhaps not as viscerally powerful as the story of his early life.

Throughout the book, Connerly is animated by a simple timeless creed which gives the book its title :

I celebrated July 4 1995 with a heightened awareness of the personal freedom at the core of nationhood. When the Founding Fathers said that we were all created equal, they were proposing an audacious theory that ultimately inflamed the rest of the world. By fits and starts, Americans had tried to make that theory into a reality, with abolitionism, the Emancipation Proclamation, and, of course, the civil rights movement, which instituted sweeping revisions of the law that have brought us ever closer to the fulfillment of the promise of our national life. I felt in my heart that race preferences--by whatever name--were not a continuation of that progress, but an obstacle in the road to freedom and equality. At best a diversion, and at worst a giant step backward, affirmative action preferences caused us to lose sight of the task we inherited from the Founders--creating equal as the only category that counts in America.

There's a deep irony in the fact that these beliefs, traceable to Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, should now make Ward Connerly anathema to the Democratic Party and to the institutionalized civil rights movement. We have reached a sad point in our nation's history where to the inheritors of the legacy of Jefferson and King the idea of a color blind society has been transmuted into a weird kind of racism itself. It should not have required courage to, as Connerly boldly does, advocate that race be ignored in awarding government jobs and contracts, but it did, and this demonstration of courage makes Connerly into a heroic figure, willing to brave epithets, threats and hatreds to vindicate his convictions. This memoir, harkening back to The Autobiography of Ben Franklin and Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, partakes of the great American tradition of self-reliance and the demand that each of us be judged individually; this gives it an impact all out of proportion to what I expected.

GRADE : A

For any student of public policy, Creating Equal should be required reading. For anyone interested in learning how decisions are made on governing boards of higher education, this book is a must read. For anyone interested in exploring how America can make race a thing of the past, Creating Equal is insightful and highly informative. For anyone who believes that all black families are dysfunctional and incapable of surviving absent affirmative action, this book will dispel that myth. For anyone who believes that white racism is alive and flourishing or that all discrimination is gone, this book represents a hopeful, realistic and optimistic assessment. I give it a five star rating. One of the most interesting books I have ever read, even if I had disagreed with Connerly on some of his beliefs. As one reviewer said, "this is one of the best political books of the year," and perhaps of our time. I could not agree more.

Ward Connerly has led the fight for equal opportunity in California. This volume is his story, and it deserves to be read by all who are seriously interested in understanding the vital contrast between real equality and the racial preference system known as affirmative action. Connerly's vision points the way to a sound resolution of America's racial problems, and indicates how to achieve good will and tolerance between American men and women of all races and creeds. This is an outstanding book by an exceptional and courageous man.

"Creating Equal" is about creating a better America. While some may disagree with Connerly's approach, those who either blindly hate or love him owe it to themselves to know the man behind the caricature....

Connerly's prose and storytelling bring the reader an insight that will challenge pre-conceived notions about the man and the policy he seeks to change.

We get encounters with politicians big and small [in] easy-to-read but hard-to-forget experiences laid out page after page in striking detail.

Connerly's experience is in many ways the American experience. We all have hurdles to overcome, to kick down, to go around. But America is not about self-pitying, not about being eat up by hate and distrust. America is about each individual, apart from any "group" they may belong to, finding the abundant opportunity so many newcomers to our shores -- fleeing war, genocide and persecution -- see so readily.

Connerly's lesson to us all is we "create equal" by starting to get our government to see us as equals. Only then can we truly get back on the long but necessary journey towards seeing one another as equals.

Highly recommended.

...As a civil rights activist in the 50s & 60s I found this book inspiring, hopeful and a testament of integrity. In addition it perspicaciously describes the way politicians...are willing to sacrifice principle to pander to reverse discrimination.... I only wish more people had the interity and courage of a Ward Connerly to assert the priniple of equal justice for all, rather than special privilege and preference for some. I plan to use this book in my philosophy courses at the college where I teach. A must read!

A powerful portrayal of the violent, hate-based, anti-white underbelly of the civil rights industry in Amreica, woven neatly into the autobiography of a black man struggling for true racial equality.

Here is clear and convincing evidence of the trials and tribulations a man of color is forced to confront, when he seeks "justice for all" in the one-sided, Europhobic world of "race norming" and "Affirmative Discrimination" in America.

Ward Connerly, tells how he was successful in eliminating institutionalized racial preferences in some cases -- but at great cost. Connerly is reviled by the gimme-gimme crowd headed by the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who view racial controversy as an opportunity to accumulate enormous personal wealth. Connerly writes that Jackson has called him "strange fruit," among other things. It seems many so-called civil rights leaders take advantage of every opportunity to thwart Connerly's steady march toward racial justice.

In the Spring of 2001, Justice Clarence Thomas warned: "By yielding to a false civility, we sometimes allow our critics to intimidate us. Active citizens are often subjected to truly vile attacks."

So it was for Ward Connerly, but his courage overcame the fascists' attacks. This book takes the reader along on a journey to justice with Ward Connerly -- a brave and honorable man.

This book is very entertaining and despite your political views, I think it's impossible not to appreciate what the author has gone through, and be inspired by the courage he has shown in the face of constant attacks by his enemies. It's a great read both as a biography of an "ordinary" man who believes strongly in doing the right thing, and as an introduction to the debate over racial preferences.

Ward Connerly, a University of California Regent, forced the school to become 'color blind' in its admissions policies, promoting both praise and condemnation for his actions. Here he tells of his commitment to racial justice and his family background, from his interracial marriage to his proud back family's struggles. Creating Equal is a fine account of his beliefs and struggles against race preferences.