Maggie writes: >1. I think that this vote will serve as a legitimizing symbol to a growing >backlash against affirmative action, particularly against women in >nontraditional careers (whatever the hell nontraditional means). > >2. I believe that the business community will increasingly not comply with >affirmative action laws on the books, and complainants will find beleaguered >public agencies less and less able to deal with monitoring compliance. We've clearly got our work cut out for us. The real question, it seems to me, is whether our side will go on the offensive. Although many of us in Sunny CA fought like hell to stop CCRI from passing, Affirmative Action was never the place we wanted to fight; who wants to defend Nixon's compromise? I wish we'd won, but now that we've lost, I hope we'll use this as an opportunity to fight for real racial justice (personally, I hope we turn discrimination into a felony covered by 3 Strikes). As for the businesses, all I can say is, this is one of those times when I really, really like lawyers... >p.s. one reason pomoism is important is because it at least attempts to >combat real world problems like this one, Say what? Although I like making fun of pomo, I have learned some useful things from reading it. But pomo didn't have 'nuthin to do with fighting this one. We did better than I expected (ie we lost by 8 instead of 20-30 points) because for once, a lot of campus folks got their butts off--or had their butts dragged off--campus. Pomo didn't teach them to do that; if anything, in the past 8 years pomo gave people on campuses like Berkeley an excuse to avoid seriously working in the community (not that "Marxism" was doing much better). The difference this time was that this time, other forces were pulling folks off campus. Partly it's the new social conditions in CA, and mostly it's that folks from the Applied Research Center, the Center for Third World Organizing, and others created Californians for Justice, the first grassroots statewide campaign in CA in a very, very long time. Incidentally, when it came to discourse, the other side did pretty damn well. I coordinated the phone banks at CfJ's headquarters on election day, and it was amazing the number of people our folks talked to who didn't understand that a vote for yes on 209 was a vote against outreach programs, etc. Like I've said in previous posts, I think the Left has a lot to learn from the Right. Anders Schneiderman Progressive Communications
