On Affirmative ActionI was hoping that I would not have to write this letter. For the last three months, I spent so much time and effort on the No!200 campaign to try and defeat initiative 200. All along, I had a feeling we might lose, but I didn’t expect we would lose by such a wide margin. I must admit I am surprised and discouraged by the large percentage of voters in Washington State who voted against affirmative action program for women and minorities.
But we must continue the struggle for equality. It has been over thirty years, but Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream is still but a dream. We all hope for a color-blind society, but that hope is not based on reality. The evidence is conclusive in that as a society, we still judge people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
As citizens in a democracy, each one of us has a duty and obligation to demand for a just society. Therefore, we must identify the areas of injustice, then stand up and speak out against it. If we don’t take a stand against an injustice, then we are accomplices to that act of injustice. I understand that one can become overly emotional when confronted by an act of injustice, such as the systematic discrimination against the people of color in this society. I had to examine myself objectively to see whether I have a chip on my shoulder, as a friend of mine bluntly put it. Well, perhaps my friend is correct. I wish more people had a chip on their shoulder and protested when Nazi Germany exterminated over two million Jews. I wish more people had a chip on their shoulder and protested when the United States of America forcefully put all Americans of Japanese decent, but not Americans of German decent, in concentration camps.
Proponents of anti-affirmative action would like us to believe that the United States is now a color blind society. However, Amnesty International, a human rights organization which monitors human rights violation world wide, condemns the United States for human rights violations against people of color in selective policing, police brutality, imprisonment, and the death penalty. For instance, in April 1998, in New Jersey, two state troopers stopped a vehicle with 3 blacks and 1 Latino occupants on their way to a university basketball game. The car accidentally rolled backward, causing an officer to fall. The troopers opened fire and seriously wounded three occupants. In the McCleskey case in 1987, the Supreme Court of the United States conceded that race is a factor in who will receive the death penalty, when the court was confronted with a statistical study which points out that blacks are four times more likely to receive the death penalty than whites. In fact, since 1977, 82 percent of blacks received the death penalty when the victims are white, even though homicide victims are about equal between black and white in the United States. Blacks are 12 percent of the population, but 42 percent of the prisoners on death row. By accepting institutionalized racism, the Supreme Court at the present time is no different than the Supreme Court in 1856 when it ruled in Scott V. Sandford that blacks were not people but property. McCleskey was executed in 1991.
We must continue the struggle for equality. Organizations and individuals that opposed initiative 200 must work together and coordinate their effort to combat racism. The fight must go on. It is time to stop dreaming. Now is the time to make Dr. King’s dream a reality.
Tuan Tran