A Backward Step We Shouldn’t Take Myth Debunked Under The State’s Plus Three Program, Most Of Those Hired Are Whites.

Opponents of affirmative action want to you to believe that by passing Initiative 200, workplace and educational opportunities will suddenly be equal for all. They won’t be.

Initiative 200, patterned after the measure that passed in California in 1996, would abolish affirmative action in state and local government employment, contracting and college admission.

Lawmakers can let it go to the November ballot, pass it outright or place it and an alternative before the voters.

Initiative 200 is frighteningly premature. Thirty years of affirmative action do not compensate for 300 years of affirmative action for whites. Creating opportunities and ending oppression is not reverse discrimination.

“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and minorities are suffering disproportionately,” says a follow-up study to the Kerner Commission’s groundbreaking 1968 report on race and poverty. Until all Americans get equal educations from their public schools, affirmative action is needed. It has been our best attempt at remedying discrimination. Its mission is not yet accomplished.

While initiative backers wrongly assume discrimination is a thing of the past, the initiative itself is discriminatory: It doesn’t end all affirmative action, only for some. If Initiative 200 becomes law, preferences based on race, ethnicity and gender will be barred but those for veterans and disabled people will not.

A Seattle Times report found that under the state’s Plus Three affirmative action program, the government hired more white men than African Americans, or people of any other group, between 1993 and 1997. White men qualify because the state’s policies cover not only minorities and women but also Vietnam veterans and people with disabilities. The vast majority of veterans are white men, as are nearly half of the disabled.

In Spokane, it would be hard to argue that women, minorities, veterans or disabled people are overrepresented in state or private sector jobs.

Gov. Gary Locke, the country’s first Chinese-American governor and an affirmative action admission to Yale years ago, has it exactly right: “We need open minds, rather than closed doors. … I don’t want our state moving backwards.”

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view see headline: Education, not quotas, advances fairness fairly

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = EDITORIAL, COLUMN - From both sides CREDIT = Carol MacPherson/For the editorial board